McQuay Memories: {Christmas XIV

Let's just note how adorable this little baby hair is. Miriam has recently started to let me actually do her hair, which makes me extrememly happy. It's adorable.

For Rachel's Christmas present I forced her to spend an entire afternoon with me. It was awesome! We went to the Cheesecake factory for lunch and then we went boot shopping for her mission. We went to the woodlands mall and went into every place that carried boots. Well, if you know my sister, you know she has extremely long, model-like legs, which is awesome. What is not so awesome, is having difficulty finding shoes that feet your feet that are long to support those long legs. Basically, every shoe only goes up through size 10... and she needs an 11 or 11.5. That made our afternoon tricky. I thought about ordering her boots before hand for Christmas, but I didn't know which kind she would want, if they'd fit, etc... so I decided just to take her shopping. But NONE of the stores had any decent boots in her size. Ridiculous!!!

Anyways...we left the mall and hit a few different stores as well, around 10 stores in one afternoon, I think. We got to DSW and then had a pair of boots that she liked, ALMOST in her size, it was a miracle! They had an 11 and a 12, but no 11.5... and she needed an 11.5. So we went to the front to ask and the nice girl said that they didn't have in store, but that we could order them and have it shipped to the store. Great. Turns out, no shoe comes in a size 11.5!!! It goes from size 5-10.5 all in half sizes, then goes straight from 11 to 12 with no 11.5! What is that!? Anyways, I was ticked. Because this fun shopping day just turned out to be a wild goose chase and we weren't getting any goose!!!

The lady could tell by my less than happy demeanor that I was not thrilled at our options. So she said we could order a bunch of boots, ship them to the house, try them on, and return the ones that don't fit. So we decided that that was the best that we could do at that point. So we spent a good long while at the store on their ipad looking at shoes and writing down the ones we want. After we had 3 boots in 2 different sizes (11 AND 12.....no 11.5) we went to go check out and order them.

Well, it took a while to look up and order all those boots, but we eventually got it. Then it came time to pay for them. I confirmed that if I paid by credit card, that my sister could come and return them in a week and not need the credit card because I would be back in CA... and I really needed her to be able to return them because I don't want hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of boots that don't fit me. SO, that was confirmed and I swiped my card. Denied. Well, that's embarrassing. Try a different card. Denied. A different card, denied. By this point, I was sweating bullets. I have excellent credit. The banks and credit card companies LOVE me. For goodness sake, my husband's title at work is "Credit Card Expert" - we do credit cards, and we do them well. So well in fact, that our credit card providers love us so much that they are extra great at protecting us against fraud. That means that my big purchase out of state when I hadn't used my cards at all since arriving in Texas (husband always used his card) was not going to be approved.

There I was after hours and hours and hours not able to pay for the Christmas present I had promised Rachel. I was mortified. All this while, Sean was texting me and calling me asking why I was trying to spend exorbitant amounts of money at DSW (because he had be texted from the CC company about potential fraud..) while at the same time the manager of the store and the worker were throwing a million and a half ideas at me about how to split the payments and make it all work. It was a nightmare to be honest. I was sweating bullets and about to burst into tears. Poor Rachel just stood there petrified, unsure of what to do. Anyways, we were running late because Rachel and Mom had a dinner date with some friends... so we just left. I just explained that we had absolutely zero time left to sort this out and we walked out. I felt bad for the lady who had been so kind to help us, but oh well - gotta do what you gotta do!

Later that night I called the CC company, told them everything was fine, and went online at home and ordered them myself. SIGH. It was a long day!!!!!!!

But aside from the shoe fiasco, well, also probably thanks to the shoe fiasco, I will always remember the sister date I got to spend with my favorite sister before she left on her mission!!!

Thursday was New Years Eve! My girls had no idea what that was except for fireworks.... which was awesome. Evette was entranced and Miriam was terrified. She kept saying, "No more! All done!"

We had some good ones and only almost destroyed the neighbor's house once! Luckily they were not home, so they couldn't even get mad at us! Hooray!

We let the girls stay up a little bit so they felt like they were a part of the celebration and then put them to bed at 8. It was nice.

Sean and I left for a bit to run over to a party that his parents were at. A bunch of people that we love from our days of living at home were there so it was fun to be able to chat and visit with our previous teachers and mentors and now friends. We have good people in our lives.

Uncle Dan was jealous that I was always doing the girl's hair... so he made me do his, too.