My mom watched Miss C after Vacation Bible School yesterday while Miss A was at daycare (she had a fine morning yesterday as opposed to Wednesday when I thought we’d both spontaneously combust from stress during the short drive to daycare). I needed to run to the grocery and I had something to return to TJ Maxx and a birthday gift to buy.

I walked in TJ Maxx and my retail radar honed in on some laptop bags in a cool Asian print fabric that had just been unboxed and weren’t even priced yet. I just went on a business trip and I carried my Sony laptop in the equivalent of a brown paper sack–a cumbersome (i.e. ugly) black utilitarian laptop bag–so I nearly tripped over myself to look at these pretty bags. I reeled myself back to reality, because I don’t travel that often for work or with my laptop, but I did file them away as pay day is Monday and I’m going to come up with some dire reason I need a fashionable laptop bag, so help me God, even if I use it to transport a turkey sandwich to my office.

Back when the hubby and I were DINKS (Dual Income, No Kids), I would hit our local TJ Maxx every Thursday after work when their weekly shipment of discount designer goodness was delivered. The hubby always knew where to find me if I didn’t come straight home from work. Either that or he may have suspected I was having an affair and I was just running up my debit card to buy yet another discount designer sweater to cover the whole sordid thing up.

I’ve definitely put my inner shopaholic on the backburner the last few years. If you have two children enrolled in full-time daycare (or private school for that matter), you can probably relate to the budget crunch. Frivolous “just because” shopping doesn’t happen much any more. There are diapers to buy and mortgage payments to make, refrigerators go belly up while you’re enjoying yourselves at the beach, and unexpected boob MRIs take precedent over those hot pink wedge sandals that you would have bought in a heartbeat pre-kids. Instead, you tend to run around in Target sandals you bought on clearance and a pair of $12.99 Old Navy capri jeans with some unidentified stain on the knee and a black t-shirt.

With only six more weeks of double daycare left, I find myself counting the days when our budget isn’t squeezed quite as tight and I can buy a new laptop case and not equate the money spent to the number of diapers I could have bought (in this case, about two cases of generic Publix size 4 diapers.) Ahem.