Why I Oughta...

We went to the new Menards in Melrose Park to check out the Halloween section.  This is the new two-story store and I wasn't sure where the 'seasonal' items would be set up.  They had a bunch of space for the Halloween stuff and even took over some of the outdoor patio section for the blowups, but...one thing that they didn't have was the Halloween Village that the Glendale Heights store has up usually. Wonder if they'll do a Christmas Village at the new Melrose Park store? Here's a post from three years ago when I took the girls to check out the Halloween stuff at Menards back in the day.

Over the weekend, we picked up this "North Pole Communicator" for the girls. Add another 'activity' to the list of daily Christmas-related things during the month of December.  And...I'm not unhappy about that. The story with this thing is: you set the internal clock to the date/time.  Then...each day the girls can try to tune into the right frequency and 'communicate' with the elves each day.  There's a cartridge in the bottom that contains little sound snippets.  The trick is that it only plays ONCE each day (when you tune in that day) and doesn't go back or forward.  Think of it as kind of an advent calendar of sorts. The 'stay tuned' message that gets played right now (until December 1st) is cute (but loud) so I'm hopeful that the full month of messages will be interesting and worth waiting for...