This is the second part of the epic saga relating how we bought Dan a suit yesterday evening. Part One is here, in case you just can't keep up with all the action.

Yesterday did not go as planned. My plan for Kate and I was to spend a pretty quiet morning and afternoon at home in anticipation of the fact that later we were going to meet some friends for the Special Shapes Glow, an evening event at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. The glows are events where the pilots don't fly the balloons, but inflate them so spectators can look at the designs. When it gets dark, they light up from inside and it's like looking at giant Christmas tree ornaments.

While we are big fans of the Fiesta, the one frustrating thing about it is that it is very weather dependent. If there is too much wind, it's dangerous for the pilots to take off in the mornings, so it's possible to get yourself down to the field at the crack of dawn only to witness a field full of disappointed spectators. In the evening, too much wind during a glow means the pilots won't inflate the balloons for fear of scorching the canopy. The fiesta's policy on canceled events is that your ticket can be used for another event later on in the week, but I think that's kind of lame, since it assumes you can make it to another event. Which brings us to yesterday.

The glows are a fun event to go to with friends, since it isn't as hard to muster your conversational skills at 6 in the evening as it can be at 6 in the morning. So we had emailed a bunch of friends to say we'd like to go and anyone else who was interested could meet us at the Park and Ride. In retrospect, I don't know what I was thinking. I don't organize things. It is not my spiritual gift. Almost every year we've gone to a Fiesta event with friends, and never once have I been in charge of the logistical planning. This is because if plans proceed without a hitch, I'm fine. But if there is any hiccup along the way that requires someone to make a decision about how to proceed, I am useless.

Now when people talk about the weather in New Mexico, they go on and on about how nice it is, and this is true. We have sun for a ridiculous number of days a year. It gets warm in the summer, but there is no humidity, which makes up for a multitude of ills. We get enough snow to be fun, but not enough that you start to hate the sight of your own driveway. And when it does rain, it usually doesn't last for long. But "predictable" is certainly not a word I would use to describe our climate. You can wake up in the morning to a thunderstorm that convinces you that you'll need your umbrella and galoshes all day, and by the time you get to work, the sun will be shining again. It's very disconcerting.

Yesterday morning started off lovely. Sunny, no wind, and all around perfect for a balloon event in the evening. I got all our stuff ready and loaded as much of it in the car as I could so I wouldn't forget. Then it got cloudy. Then sunny again. Then windy. Then rainy. Then sunny and still, but with deep dark clouds off in the distance. Then more wind and another smattering of rain and colder by the minute. By this time I had had three conversations with the friends we were hoping to meet about whether or not we should proceed. Basically, I told them, beats me. As I said, executive decisions are not my best skill. So I did what I usually do in these situations and called Dan, who does not lack for certainty in many things. We agreed that we'd talk again around 3:30 and make a decision then, since that would be around when he'd need to know whether or not we were going so he could wrap things up at work.

I put Kate down for her nap and kept looking outside every ten seconds, to see the following array of conditions at any given moment: Sun, no wind, wind, no rain, rain, windy, cold cold cold, sun out again, warming up but windy now. Accordingly, I bounced back and forth between optimism and deciding to cancel. None of this was cleared up by 3:30, when Dan called. After a long talk, we agreed that we'd just call off our plans. So I called our friends and told them that we wouldn't be going, although they were certainly welcomed to do so.

And I think that if you live in New Mexico, or have a sense of humor, you know what happened next: Pretty much from the moment we made that decision, the weather consistently improved. By the time I was driving down the Interstate on my way to meet Dan for dinner, those being the alternate plans we had made for the evening, there was not a cloud in the sky and the wind had stopped blowing. We were tempted to just head on out to the field, but that's a bit easier said than done since you need to start the Park and Ride process a good bit before the event starts. So we went ahead and got dinner and I continued kicking myself for not just going ahead with our original plans.

We ate at McAllister's, one of the only places in town where I can get sweet tea, and that made me feel a bit better about life. And then we had some time to kill, so Dan suggested that we step over to Jos. A. Banks to look for a new tie for him. We had gone through his tie collection the night before and concluded that he could really use a new one. So into the store we walked. It wasn't until we were already in the door that it occurred to me that this might be a bad idea. Kate was with us, in all her two-year-old glory, and while I have seen the outside of this particular men's dress clothing store before, I have never had any reason to go inside. It turns out that it is a rather expensive store with lots of fine fabrics stacked in giant piles quite near the eye-level of a sippy-cup wielding toddler. I gather that they don't get a lot of kids in there to start with, because the saleslady's eyes (and her raised eyebrows) went straight to Kate as she asked us if she could help us. We said no, we were just going to look at some ties really quickly, and we headed over there.

We browsed for a few minutes, taking turns keeping an eye on Kate, who was behaving as if we were in a nightclub. There were a lot of mirrors in the store and piped-in music, so naturally in Kate's mind this meant that was time to dance. Really enthusiastically. But she was being good and staying occupied, so that was fine. We had picked out a few ties we thought would be good matches for the shirt in question when we did what we should have done from the start and flipped one of the ties over to check out the price tag. And as soon as we did that, we put them right back, because holy cow, I do not have any business touching a four-foot piece of fabric that costs $85. This may have been the other message the saleslady was conveying to us when we first walked in, but far be it from me to accuse her of wallet profiling us.

We had parked nearer to the back of the store than the front, so we headed that way, herding Kate the whole way. But on the way out, we saw a sign advertising a suit sale event that was underway in the store. Since we've pretty much been on a suit hunt for weeks, we decided to just take a quick peek. Unfortunately, the shelving methods proved too difficult for us to navigate without the assistance of the saleslady, who showed us the general (pretty small) area where we'd find Dan's size, and then went to answer the phone. So we started digging. We found a couple of suits that seemed like a good fit based on the jackets, but because the lady had been really vague in her explanation of what suits fell under the sale and which didn't, I was basically having to squint in order to bring myself to look at the price tags on the suits, like you do when you're watching a scary movie and you know a bad guy is about to jump out of the closet and kill someone. Obviously, I don't have a lot of experience in suit-buying, but I would expect to pay the amount of money they want for one of these suits for, say, a new kitchen appliance. Not a piece of clothing.

In a few minutes, the saleslady came back over to see how we were getting along, and as it turned out, once of the suits Dan had really liked did fall under a sale of some sort. So we started having this really complicated conversation about pants. Apparently, the suit jacket we found was actually part of their separates line, which meant that the lady had to measure Dan for pants and then go find out if they had a matching pair in his size in the store. She did this without ever fully divulging what, exactly, the cost of these two items together would be, and then she randomly launched into trying to sell us a much more expensive suit by pointing out to us something about the collar being made out of horsehair so that it takes on the shape of your body over time. (What?) The whole time this was going on, I was basically trying to maintain eye contact with her and ask questions that would get me actual answers not related to horsehair, but every ten seconds I was having to whip my head around and go "KATE!" to try to get some kind of an idea where in the store my child was. At this point, she was in full Wander Mode and was just ambling all over the place, stopping occasionally to break it down some more when a song she liked would come on the radio.

Finally, the saleslady realized that we were so not in the market for the more expensive suit and went off to check into the pants situation. She came back and announced that they did not have Dan's pants size. They had a size above and one above, and the different in either direction was pretty extreme and most likely not going to be fixable through tailoring, especially since we need this suit this week. We talked over a few options, but the truth was that the suit we were looking at was really the only one we could afford to be interested in, so we started gathering Kate up to leave. The saleslady went to put back the pair of too-large pants she had pulled out in case Dan wanted to try them on, and then she said "Oh wait! We just got very lucky. The pants in your size were actually put in the wrong place and that's why I didn't find them!" So suddenly, with that minor retail miracle, we were back in business, and off Dan went to the dressing rooms.

Up until this point, I felt like our ill-advised jaunt into a high-end men's clothing store was going relatively well in the child department, because while Kate had run around a good bit, she hadn't gotten upset or damaged anything. I was maybe starting to pat myself on the back a little bit about that. And as you know, pride goeth before a giant smackdown. We got into the dressing room, and Kate started calling for Dan, who had disappeared into one of rooms. "Daddy! DaddyDaddyDaddy!" she was calling him. I didn't really try to stop her because I thought we were the only ones in the dressing room. I hadn't seen any other customers. Which is why I also didn't stop her when she started crawling halfway under the door of the dressing room that she had apparently decided Dan was in. She had most of her body in there backwards, and was happily chirping away in her usual conversational tone, when the door opened and a man who was NOT DAN came walking out, stepping over Kate to get out of his dressing room. Kate totally freaked out when she looked up expecting to see Dan and saw this dude instead, and she came running over to me with giant terrified eyes. I was mortified. Here I was, just chilling out on a bench, watching my kid invade a TOTAL STRANGER'S dressing room. Mother of the Year. The guy was really nice about it and said he had kids too, so he understood. But there is really just no recovery from that. Thankfully, he was done trying on stuff, or maybe Kate's little performance convinced him that it was time to wrap it up, and he left.

Dan emerged from the dressing room wearing the full suit, and suddenly we were joined by the store's tailor, who appeared out of nowhere and started talking very rapidly in near-undecipherable half-English about the minor adjustments that would need to be made to make the suit fit just right. The only problem was that we had never gotten a straight answer out of the saleslady about what, exactly, this suit would cost if we bought it. So she came back, we asked our question, she disappeared to do calculations, and we stood there with the tailor, who was not a very conversational guy in any language and was also not too happy about Kate trying to snag his tape measure by jumping around at knee-level like one of those excitable small dogs. At this point I was hoping that maybe they have a trap door in Joseph A. Banks that will just swallow you up if you prove to be completely out of your league. No such luck.

But it was worth the humiliation, because a few LONG minutes later, the saleslady returned and quoted us a price that was unbelievably good, not just for the store we were in, but for anywhere else we had looked before. So we said we'd take it, the tailor took his measurements, and we're picking up Dan's new suit on Saturday, a week before the wedding. I will put up some pictures when we pick it up. Kate pronounced the suit to be "Ooooh! Nice!" when she saw it. I agree. Dan looks very sharp in it.

All around, I think our evening was redeemed, even though we made a bad call about the balloon fiesta weather. I'm really thankful that we found such a good deal, because we had basically given up. And at this point, I'm just relieved that now we've successfully bought Dan a very nice suit and we won't have to do that again, hopefully ever. Or maybe at least until we no longer have a toddler with us. I can't handle the stress.