Christmas shopping

Before we begin, may I say I am very glad to be off for Christmas.

I decided on Thursday that I'd try to get the hubby his gift. He actually asked for something - that's pretty significant, right there - so I was taking that request and running with it.

The kiddos and I piled into "mommy's blue ride" and headed to breakfast (IHOP), then to Hastings (a local book/CD store that also sells and rents DVDs). I didn't expect to find his gift there - he asked for some additional memory for his computer - but he did ask me to pick up something for the person he drew for the office gift exchange, so I looked around there (with kiddos in cart) and talked back and forth on the cell phone with him until we figured out what he wanted to get him.

After that, off to Target. Didn't reeeeally expect to find memory there, but I thought I'd try, anyhow. I had a couple of other things to pick up, so it wasn't a wasted trip.

From there, his office. I called Office Depot from there and found out that I needed a whole lot more info about the computer than the last time we bought memory for one - which was quite a while ago (one of the Win 95 comps, likely). All I remembered doing back then was getting the amount I wanted, not needing to know much of anything else. So I drove home, ran in, scribbled down computer info, and then called the store back from the car.

After a few minutes, I decided I'd just go ahead and start driving there (since if they didn't have it, I was going to try a small local computer store). I was almost to Office Depot by the time I got off the phone with them (they finally put someone on the phone who knew exactly what to ask me so that I knew what THEY needed to know - that we had SD RAM). At that point, the man I was talking to said he thought they had what I needed.

Soooo, into Office Depot. After finding someone to help, I found the memory, and he had concerns whether or not the memory they carried would be backwards-compatible with the hubby's comp's speed. After looking up his computer model, we discovered that indeed, they did not have the type he needed. This Office Depot Guy was quite helpful though - he wrote down exactly which type we would need, and advised we take a peek inside the computer first to know its configuration (it would affect how much we might buy, depending on how the memory already there was split up, or if it was all on one card, etc.). He also told us what the max was that the computer could take.

So, after all that, I had no memory (hee!), and the kiddos and I had all about reached our limit. I needed to get home for Patrick's speech therapy, and was in no mood to try to cook, so I went through the McDonald's drive-through while calling the hubby to tell him what the guy told me about the memory (so that he'd know what he might be looking at). Had to tell him to wait a moment while I ordered, and when he heard me order Happy Meals...

"Are you feeding my children McDonalds?"

Yeppers. And I must say, the chicken nuggets look far more appetizing now than they did back when they first came out. Like real chicken breast pieces, not processed chicken parts.

At any rate, by the time we got home and ate, the speech therapist was due to be there - or so I thought until I checked the calendar she gave me, and realized that I still had old default times on my computer. She wasn't due to see Patrick again until after Christmas.

So the kiddos played a little bit, but started showing their exhaustion, thus prompting me to declare naptime for all three of us.

At least I did find something at one of the above locations for the hubby (no, not at McDonalds), so our decision to wait until after Christmas for the memory, instead of as a gift for Christmas, does not leave me with nothing to give him.

On Friday, I finished the shopping for the kiddos. I decided I wanted to give them something in their stockings, so I found some things while killing time at Wal-Mart waiting for Christmas luncheon party thinger for hubby's office.