Free! Free! Free!

The best event by far for the acquisition of free items comes only once a year. Our local county history center begins their huge garage sale in a warehouse on a Friday. 

On Saturday, everything is half off. 

On Monday, at 9:00 am, everything is free. FREE!!! 

We were there on Saturday to buy a couple of things and case the joint, and this morning there we were, bright and early due to my kid's 7:30 dentist appointment, ready to join the line with the other free stuff-seekers. I had the baby in the stroller both to keep her contained and to utilize our under-stroller storage, but Will was the hit of the sale due to the fact that she owns her very own child-sized real metal shopping cart. Can you imagine anything more fun than having your very own shopping cart and permission to put anything you wanted into it? 

When we trooped inside at the crack of 9:00, I expected Will to excitedly race around and put just anything she saw into her cart, fill it up in a couple of minutes, then follow me around for half an hour and whine that it was heavy to push. What she did, however, was walk around the entire sale, carefully inspecting everything, putting only the really most awesome things in her cart. Between the two of us, here's our haul:

The orange flag represents the huge thing I hauled around for the entire sale, which was a genuine bicycle trailer Matt spied on Saturday and asked me to get for him if it was still there. I made a beeline for it, and then dragged it around behind me the whole time, while also pushing the stroller in front of me. 

But let's see...on the floor, there are some of the My Little Ponies Will chose; a weird little wooden plaque with a vase on it that she chose and loves and wants to hang in her room; a toy car; some gift bags I found to put my logo on and use at craft fairs; a crazy instruction manual for making fruits and vegetables out of "twisted" paper that I might sell on etsy; some china plates I'm going to smash and make pendants out of; Will's choice of one of those can things that goes "moooo" when you turn it upside down; some letter/number blocks that she also chose; and a book about the human body and some rattles, also her choices.

On the couch there is some scrapbook paper, a couple of really old composition books with crazy illustrations and readers' marks--

I like in this one how the guy looks like Dick Van Dyke, and how a reader has named each figure.

In this one I really like how the author actually drew in that axe the standing Native American is holding--

--a ton of records, including a 1950s one of songs for the brothers of Pi Kappa Alpha to sing (Matt thinks his brother was a Pi Kap, so... Christmas present!); a stuffed football and whale and chipmunk and bunny and kangaroo, Will's choices (Syd wanted a doll, but this old lady seriously saw us making for it and snatched it up right before I reached it. Then she spoke to it); a bag half-full of the polyester stuffing I use for stuffed animals, and inside the bag the instructions I have been wanting for making the red-heeled sock monkey!; some green felt fabric and some burgundy brocade-y fabric; a pair of orange telephones with rainbows on them for the girls; a huge tennis ball, Will's choice; and a beaten aluminum heart-shaped mold that is the perfect size for a batch of banana bread to be shared by two small children.