From behind the counter: Loosey's first retail experience

I took a small collection of clothes to this spring's Divine Consign sale in Urbana. Divine Consign is a sale that happens once every six months over the weekend, and being the fan of consignment that I am, I decied to check it out as a consignor and a shopper last fall and had some great success.

So this time, I picked up one 4-hour volunteer shift. Being a consignor gives you a pass to a 2-hour pre-sale where you get a first look at everything and a free pass to shop an hour before opening on the last day of the sale when most everything becomes 1/2 off. You earn 65 percent of what you price your items for, but for every 4-hour volunteer shift, you earn an extra 5 percent.

Last fall I made around $140 and sold a lot of my plus sized clothes. This spring, I sent over all of my 8s and mediums, which wasn't too many since I don't have a lot of clothes any more (another budgetary consideration to losing weight besides the expense of a gym, food, etc.).

I was glad I went to the pre-sale because at 5 p.m. when I started my shift a swarm of women showed up ready to shop and things were getting hairy. I was running around putting things on hangers that had fallen off, returning items to the floor and helping people with their hands full put things on hold at the door to purchase or at the try on area. From 5-6:30 p.m. it was a madhouse and by 8 p.m. I swear half of the items in the place were gone.

I also ran into Quigs, which is always a pleasant experience, Quigs' neighbor, a Next Gen parent and an old boss. The four hours were strangely comforting, like back in the day when my job at the non profit required me to put labels on envelopes for an hour. It wasn't at all mentally taxing, but it was highly organizational, which is one of my favorite skills.

The best part about the sale was when a woman I was taking clothes to the register for pulled my pair of Michael Kors jeans off the rack and exclaimed, "These are an awesome find and so cute." I didn't say, "Those were mine!" I just smiled and thought -- cha-ching!

Verklempt

I had this weird emotion today as I was driving away from the consignment store. It was suddenly hard to breathe, and I felt like someone had gone into my heart with a scalpel and cut out a piece. I hit the call button and dialed MacTroll.

My call made him walk out of his meeting. But I was thankful that he picked up.

"What's wrong?" he asked.
"I feel good and terrible about what I just did. So I'm just going to tell you."
"Okay."
"I took the baby jogger into consignment. The good news is that we have a big open space in the garage. The bad news is -- I'm sad that he's not a baby any more." And then my nose started to run and my eyebrows pushed together. I felt like some sort of terrible traitor.

This didn't happen when I got rid of the exersaucer or when we took down the crib or when I got rid of all of his infant clothes. All of that went off without a hitch. But today I got emotional. It's a sure sign that X-man's birthday is coming up. I busy myself with all the preparing and talking with him about what he'd like to do for his birthday (go to the Bloomington Children's Museum and then come home and go out to dinner and see Dora at the Assembly Hall). I think it's just a way for me not to have to think about the fact that my baby is definitely a big boy. It works -- because after our talk at bedtime last night X-man told me he doesn't want to think about it either.

Organizational Weirdo

I spent a quality 5 1/2 hours in my garage today. I swept the floors. I de-deadbugged the windows. I swept off the shelves. I threw things out, reorganized the shelves and labeled them. Then I set up some tables and started sorting through a couple dozen boxes of clothing, toys and books for the bi-annual CARE swap. 

Every spring and every fall, folks clean out their closets and we have a free-for-all exchange. I have to limit the number of people who come (and a few extras snuck in this time due to some RSVP errors) but we do a big potluck, I get some pizza, the kids play outside in the yard, and everyone goes through the well-sorted items and then we donate the leftovers. It's very green. And it's a crazy busy 3 hours. But I like doing it. Mostly because I get stuff out of my house, which, let's face it, is my sick obsession here. I love organizing things.

I've been visiting consignment sales a lot lately to drop off some of X-man's stuff and some of my stuff. I like to build up the sales and then go on a little shopping spree for our new sizes. But he's starting to get to the end of the sizes at All Things Kids, now that he's a 4T pants and a 5T shirt. But I seem to be fairing pretty well in the mediums (!) over at Karen's Kloset.

Now I have two new consignment events to explore. The new Frogs and Fairies in Urbana does kids stuff. And the Divine Consign event Oct. 1-3 in Urbana.