Okay, A little Excited

We went shopping last night for winter outerwear. I'll admit, that was fun and exciting. Especially since I've already budgeted money, so I wasn't stressing over every price tag. I've planned on $750 initially to outfit us for Montana winters. The girls will need more as they get bigger, but I figured if I shopped for ski clothes in Texas in the spring, I'd be able to find some really good deals and avoid scrambling at the last minute, and paying a lot more, once our first winter hits. I've been watching online sales, but things were selling out a lot sooner than I anticipated. So yesterday, I looked up the stores at our closest outlet mall and there's a Columbia there. I spent some time checking out Columbia prices on different websites (because outlet stores aren't always cheaper), and after dinner last night, we made the drive to the store. As a background, the cheapest I've been seeing kid's snowbibs (on clearance) was $20 and kid's jackets were typically $40 and up. I wasn't finding any adult jackets available for less than $100. So here's what we got:

Men's 3 in 1 jacket (fleece liner that zips in and out of a breathable, waterproof shell, with hood) $56
Women's long sleeve thermal (I just had to have it because it's cute and the sleeves are LONG and usually sleeves are too short for me) $20
Two Women's hats (for the girls, they have big heads) $7.50/each
Neck gaiter (I know, easy to make, but it was cheaper than my time) $5
Women's ski gloves with fleece liners $20
Men's ski gloves with fleece liners $20
Women's 3 in 1 jacket $45
Girl's ski jacket and snow-bib matching set $35
Toddler's ski jacket and snow-bib matching set $17.50

We ended up paying $233. The suggested retail price on the tags totaled $865 and the outlet price on the tags totaled $590. Even if you assume outlet prices are artificially jacked up (and yes they are, a lot of times) we saved several hundred dollars based on the prices I had been seeing while shopping online. Not to mention the fact that the act of going to the store and trying on new things and building a large pile of purchases (which we just don't do in this family) got all of us a little more excited about moving, and that's priceless.

I think this is a pretty good start on our outerwear. Josh and I already have down jackets and Sierra has another heavy Columbia jacket that was passed down from a cousin. Both girls have Montana-worthy gloves. Josh has some ski pants already and Sedona will be growing into some of Sierra's stuff while we're there. For outerwear, I think we need at least one more set of pants or bibs for each of the girls, snow boots for everyone (maybe? Josh and I both have gortex hiking boots already), and a pair of snow pants for me. We'll all definitely want a few sets of long underwear too.