As Ella gets older, she gets fewer and fewer toys for her birthday. If it isn’t a book, clothes or make believe, she just isn’t interested. This has been pretty typical of her growing up — she has never really been the kind of child who played with “things” unless they involved dressing up or using her extreme imagination. Since she was having a slumber party this year, we didn’t have a big family party like we normally would. Instead, they all tried to visit her at some point during her birthday week and she got tons of gift cards. Girl racked up and had been looking forward to spending it all — cue the shopping trip.
If you follow us on Instagram, you may have seen this post on a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago. They were pretty quick to pose for a selfie in our first dressing room of the day!
When we left the house, she was firmly in the camp of “I’m buying LOTS of books, SOME clothes and maybe a FEW toys”. True to her nature, we ended up with lots of books, lots of clothes and zero toys. When I asked her exactly what she was looking for, she said she wanted to buy clothes that looked like her cousin Kassidy (who’s a junior in college and has a great sense of style). She wanted wedges, rompers and harem pants. Oh, my.
Anchor hoodie & Joe’s Jeans via Nordstrom Rack
Our first stop was Macy’s since both girls had a gift card to spend from their Aunt Lane. Sophie was easy and picked out a dress and two outfits and of course, I had to loan her $24 to complete her purchase since she just couldn’t make a decision!
Ella had arm fulls of things to try on there and had a tough time narrowing down her selection, especially since it was our first stop. We ended up ranking the things she tried on from best to worst and let the cashier tell her the total after each piece. Once everything was totaled up, she elected to put a few things back and move on. The cashiers were so sweet with her and they just fawned all over both girls. I apologized to everyone around for how slow we were, but they all enjoyed the process so much. It was a great first stop.
distressed jeans, aztec print top, & dotted jeans via Nordstrom Rack | metallic cardigan via Justice
We might not have found a romper appropriate for fall, but Macy’s did have these super cute harem pants. The smallest size was a little big for her in the waist, but Gran remedied that pretty quickly. She said they were super comfy and loved how they looked with her Target gladiators from earlier in the summer.
She paired them with a layered, Aztec print top (again from Macy’s) that was on sale for less than $10.
This outfit was probably her biggest bargain of the day!
chevron harem pants and layered top via Macy’s
We spent some time in Books-a-Million and she got 5 new chapter books, two of which were books one and two of a new series she wanted to try. She is SUCH an advanced reader, so I have to help her pick out things that are going to hold her attention, but still be age appropriate. I think we got some good ones and I can’t wait to hear about how she likes them. She also picked a book up for her sister, to repay the favor, since Sophie spend some of her birthday money on her earlier in the year.
floral dress via Nordstrom Rack | chevron dress via Macy’s
Dresses are a huge bone of contention between us. Stylistically, I think we are drawn to the same things, but she gets bored with dresses and declares that she “never really liked them anyway”. I refuse to dress shop without her in tow because I’ve been burned too many times! She found several dresses that she loved, but being the thrifty shopper that I now know her to be, she opted to spend most of her cash on things she could wear to school. She did wear the chevron number for school pictures last week, though!
The adventure in the shoe store was probably my favorite. First, she picked out a pair of silver metallic flats for $15 that would have been great for church and school. Then she found an adorable pair of tribal print, wedge sandals on sale for $10 that we both adored!! She decided that $25 was okay for one store, but as we were walking out she spotted those suede wedge booties and wanted to try them on. They were $25, but she was in love with them before I could help her tie them. I assumed she meant to buy them all, but she put the first two back, refusing to spend fifty whole dollars in just one store! I think she did pretty well on the booties — I might need to track those down in my size.
She got all of these clothes, five chapter books for her and a story book for Sophie for just over $300. We discussed that she didn’t have to spend it all in one trip, but she knew what she was looking for and made very careful selections. It took us about three hours to try everything on and decide what to keep and what to put back. She knows that there will be very few times when we have this much money to spend it one day on herself, but it was a fun treat and I was so impressed with how she budgeted and made sure to stick to her list. It was such a fun way to spend the afternoon with my girls, even if I was a little jealous of her clothing budget.
