Parents Night Out

After a long day at Ikea, we tackled Target and Bed, Bath, and Beyond the next day. Learning our lesson, we took our dads with us to Target (we decided to call them our "mules"). Busing up to east Harlem, our morning went a lot more smoothly with our dads.

Furnishing an apartment seems like a fun thing to do - except when it's your own money that you are spending. I think this has been one of the hardest parts of moving up here and "growing up" for me. I like to save money, not for anything special, just save to save. It's stressful to me to ever spend the money I've saved. One could call this hoarding, I like to think of it as saving for a rainy day - though I hardly have enough responsibility in my life to create a rainy day. My dad has gracefully imparted his financial wisdom of smart spending to me, and now he is slowly weaning me off onto my own - for me a painful, but necessary and good process. My first big purchase was an air conditioning unit for our apartment - only $300.00, but of course, I cried. It was an overwhelming feeling to purchase something so necessary, yet so not "fun", for myself without the help of my dad.

The girls tackled BB&B on our own, while our dads took charge of buying a TV and waiting for deliveries back at the apartment. The nice thing about NYC is that EVERY store delivers... for a fee, of course, but sometimes you just have to do what you've got to do. Collectively, we decided that no price was too high to not to have to drag buggies full of purchases up and down the subways and buses and then up 4 flights of stairs to our 5th floor apartment.

After 2 days of hard work, our parents decided that they deserved a "date night" - without us. Equipped with pizza and coke, our parents left Lindsay and me at the apartment to wait for our Ikea delivery while they went out for a romantic evening in the Upper East Side - as you can tell, Lindsay and I were a little bit bitter. However, we enjoyed our first night in, relishing in the typical "first night of a new apartment" experience.



By the time our parents got back, the Ikea furniture had still not been delivered. Scheduled for delivery between 6:00 and 10:00 PM, we were a little bit worried at 10:30 PM. 2 hours later... 12:30 PM, we were still worried...and exhausted.



Our furniture finally came at 1:00 AM, we felt extremely sympathetic for the 2 men who had to carry EVERYTHING up to our 5th floor apartment.