Marleewood Almost Lost A Customer

The Costume Shop was restocked after their wonderful sales yesterday. They sold so many costumes that the shelves and racks had to be restocked with things that Grandma B had purchased. It seemed that all was well, except that one of the volunteers had not come to work. When you have a job, even if it is as a volunteer if you can't come to work, you need to call in so that people don't worry about you. Laila was not alone according to this picture. She was not only with her daddy, but she was at her Grandma Carolyn's house eating cookies and drinking milk.

The Red Hat Society had furnished snacks for the opening day of Marleewood, but they were all gone. It's just amazing how many people that were at the opening of the Costume Shop.
Laila was not the only guilty party of eating snacks and not working. There were a couple of more people that were also. You can see in the picture, Marlee got caught eating a snack instead of getting to work.
Sawyer got tired of working so hard and not having any snacks so he thought he just would try out that stove in Marlee's new kitchen. It worked just great. They now had pizza and milk and dessert and all kinds of things. He was a good boy and was going to share with the others.
But the kids just were not paying attention to business I'm afraid. They had a customer that had money in his hands; but there was no one to wait on him. If it hadn't have been for Grandma B and Grandpa Fran talking about Grandma Lu just then, Charlie would have lost a customer! There was a little boy waiting and waiting to buy a costume, but there was no one to wait on him. Oh dear!

Everyone had so much to learn about running a business didn't they? Well Nick bought a costume and it was just perfect for Trick Or Treating. At least that worked out okay, didn't it?
There was something else that Grandpa Fran told "B". He said that since Grandma Lu had worked so hard lately he had sent her on a vacation to visit some of his cousins. She had told him that she wanted to go to Washington D.C. also to the Smithsonian Institute. Whew! That's a really big word. That Institute has lots of big buildings called museums.  Museums are places where they put very important things on display like the Costume Shop, but none of the things are for sale. They are just to look at. We can't even touch things at a museum because a lot of things are very old and might break. Each thing that is on a shelf or a wall has a piece of paper that tells everything about it. Sometimes museums have videos that also tell people about the display.  Some big museums have tour guides that tell people all of the important facts about special things. Museums are so interesting. They keep pieces of history for people to enjoy, just like this story will be someday.
 We are going to learn just why Grandma Lu wanted to go there. I think it will have something to do with those big kitchens that were delivered to Marleewood yesterday.