Marriage is full of surprises....

...like finding out you married this guy:

No this has nothing to do with a ruminant based bride price, or revelations of beauty, it has everything to do with garage sales though. Remember how shrewd a trader Johnny Lingo was purported to be? Well meet my husband, Mr Baker; the modern day Johnny Lingo:

Yes, I did actually catch him eating a french fry with chopsticks, more on that in another blog.

Mr Baker and I happened to go Garage Sale-ing this past Saturday to start stocking up on baby clothes for the Bubala. I see onesies going for $ 0.50 a pop and I'm like "that's half as much as the DI, SWEET and I start nabbing them up. Mr Baker had strongly encouraged me to haggle down prices. So I see a box with plenty of like new, plain, white, newborn onesies and offer the woman running the show $5 for the whole box (with 24 onesies in them that's about $.20 a onesie) She gladly accepted the deal and I beamed with pride as I made my way over to Mr. Baker to show what a good little haggler I was. At first he wasn't very impressed and thought I could have got much lower. However this changed after I counted out all the onesies for him. Apparently he thought I had purchased only a handful but when he saw I got more than half off the original asking price he was well pleased. At another garage sale I picked out about five baby clothes items. Mr. Baker then prodded me to start my bid at $.25 which I did expecting I'd later be forking out at least two more quarters, but to my astonishment the woman took the deal. Mr Baker's secret is simply get a group of items in some miscellaneous container and then offer lower than asking price--and it works! At first I was squeamish and embarrassed to be so petty but once I got the hang of it I realized it's kind of like flirty with a cute guy--what have you got to lose?, if he's not interested move on to another guy no big deal and if he is well then you've got a date (or in my case, a husband who doubles as Johnny Lingo Saturday mornings in the Summer). In the end we came home after spending $12.25 at sales and our treasures included
1 infant bath
1 high chair
1 baby carrier cover
1 baby bunting wrap
39 pairs of baby socks
24 pairs of newborn white onesies
1 baby blanket
1 bib
12 cloth diapers with covers
2 pairs of baby stockings
4 pairs of little bloomers
4 baby hats
4 dresses
10 sleepers ranging in sizes from 0-9 mos
8 pairs of baby pant 0-9 mos
23 baby tops 0-9 mos

HELLO! That's including my wopping $5 for 24 onesies! Considering everything else I got for another $7.25, I was less impressed with my initial bargain as well--I'll know better next time