School supplies!

Sunday, October 5 "Armada Mall"
This is the day we were supposed to have cleaners come to the house. So we got everything put away and counters cleared off, etc. No cleaners. But Lacey, Maren, and I went shopping in the afternoon with Asli (OZ-luh) and her daughter (11 years old).

We went to Armada, another modern gigantic mall with about 6 floors. This trip was not quite as successful, but it went smoothly, as it was Lacey and Maren's first trip out of our neighborhood (they were completely asleep on the drive in from the airport, so they had not even seen anything on that drive).

When we arrived at the mall, we were greeted with movie advertisements outside for Camp Rock (a Disney Channel movie from earlier this summer) and Wall-E. Except it is not Wall-E here, but Vall-E, because the Turkish language has no "W". So we had fun saying it that way instead. Wall-E had come out the day before we left on the Disney Cruise in theaters, and then on that Thursday while we were at sea it came out in the theater onboard (yes, Disney limits even themselves on new movie distribution). Brian and the girls watched it a few times in the theater onboard, but I still haven't seen it!

We had McDonald's for dinner--good old chicken nuggets for the girls. They were beaming. I tried a "McTurco" sandwich, which was tasty even if the bread was too dry. It was not quite a gyro, but some other type of sandwich...probably just a plain old McTurco and nothing else. I laughed when I thought about eating a McLobster only 2 months ago in Nova Scotia!

By the way, we flew almost directly over Halifax and the girls saw Nova Scotia on the map and got all excited. That's where you went, mommy! In between movies, they showed our flight path and current statistics, and we just happened to get a glimpse of it while over N.S. It was kind of neat to see them recognize it. Then last night I was looking up world flags online with Maren, and she wanted to find "that one you went to". I reminded her it was Canada, and she immediately said, "Oh, C." and clicked on the C to find the flags for the countries that start with C.

The girls starting getting tired and we were having no luck finding plain school uniform type clothes at all the designer stores. They did a great job not whining about getting other things though. We went to Armada because it has an OfficeFirst on the first floor, analogous to Office Depot or Staples. We were able to get the rest of the supplies items there, and then found same plain pants and collared shirts for them at Benetton. I haven't been in a Benetton since Ruth worked at the one at the Tacoma Mall in high school. Anyway, way too much money later, they each had an outfit to start school in on Monday.

Lacey refuses to give up on wearing seatbelts so far, so she jammed herself and Maren into one seatbelt in the back of Asli's car. They were pretty cute back there. We got home and packed up their backpacks for the first day of school. Designated which "bathroom bags" each would use for their lunchbox, filled up water bottles, and went to bed exhausted.