I mentioned that on Thursday we were preparing for clothes shopping. At the time, I’d hoped that we’d spend the morning sorting clothes and the afternoon shopping. Alas, the sorting took longer than expected, and we ended up too exhausted for a big shopping trip. We ended up taking one trip to Justice and JC Penney in Clifton Park last week, partly because we needed to get a birthday present, too. Today, the girls and I made our annual back-to-school mall pilgrimage.

—-Update:  Okay, since posting this there’s been a hullabaloo about JC Penney’s crappy misogynist shirts like “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me” (which has been pulled) and “My Best Subjects: Boys, Shopping, Music, Dancing” (still available as of this update). I tried to send an email, but the email wouldn’t go through (hoping that tons of people are complaining, too!). So I called customer service and spoke to a nice lady named Becky who told me that they’d all received a memo so that they could apologize to callers about the pretty homework t-shirt. I said something like, please tell me that you’re pulling all of this stuff, because otherwise I’m going to have to make my daughter return her new favorite. When I told her about the “My Favorite Subjects” tee, I could swear that she made a little gasp of her own when she pulled it up on her computer. She gave me the phone number for the corporate office, which is 972-431-8200. There I spoke with Christine, who was not particularly helpful, but politely told me that everything was being reviewed. Let’s hope so.—–

After taking stock, the “to buy” items were jeans and casual shoes for both girls (they wear jeans constantly), a dressy outfit for M, and something cute for the first day of school. The girls always want to go to Justice, but we rarely find much except their beloved smelly shirts. We often have good luck at The Children’s Place, and today was no exception: $10 Jeans! Yes, please!

Here are some of the highlights:

M begs for a long sweater every year, and then she wears it. A lot. This is in contrast to the sweater dress that she begs for every year, then wears, like, once. This year I made a pre-emptive strike and told her that I would not buy a sweater dress as her dressy think. Pants and a nice shirt instead, because she’ll actually wear that. I hope. Anyway, this sweater’s from Crazy 8.

Here’s M’s dressy shirt, from JC Penney.

Among the ten dollar jeans, J managed to ferret out $22 jeans. But they were so cute that I couldn’t resist. Ditto the shirt.

And then, of course, since the jeans were (mostly) cheap, I bought an adorable scarf for each of them. This is partly because I just love that they can pull off scarf-wearing with such panache. And these are J’s shoes from Payless. We ended up ordering shoes for M from Land’s End. She’d admired them weeks ago, but I’d put her off until today, when I noticed that they’re now half price! Yay!

I linked to a couple of places for hurricane relief, and here are a few more.

A reader wrote me with this:

I am a teacher in the Schalmont School District and many of our families in the Rotterdam Junction area lost everything in the flooding after Irene.  The district has set up a donation center at Jefferson Elementary School (100 Princetown Road, Schenectady, NY 12306).  For more information you can follow this link to the district homepage.

Many of these families have small children and lost everything so we are really hoping the community support will turn this tragedy into something positive.

Here’s a Facebook page for helping Schoharie County with hurricane relief.

Here are a bunch of links that the Downtown Schenectady Improvement Corp. sent out via email:

• The Chamber of Schenectady County will be accepting donations of non-perishable food items, canned goods, diapers and more. Call 518-372-5656 for information.
• The Galesi Group is offering short term warehouse provisions to local businesses for temporary real estate and warehousing needs. Call 518-356-4445.
• 1st National Bank of Scotia is offering special loans for those in our area affected by Tropical Storm Irene. Call 518-370-7200. More…