Vacation fund

If your family is like my family we LOVE vacation. However we do NOT love spending a ton of money for vacation. Our kids live at the beach so a beach vacation is not a big deal to them. We also have to schedule vacation around 2 other families schedules (my ex, his ex), baseball games, football practice, & only God knows what else comes up along the way in the summer months. We have 6 kids ranging from 15 years old to 4 years old. Do you know how hard it is to find something that a 15 year old and a 4 year old, and everyone in between, will like to do? Well we believe in PRAYER!! We prayed that something fun would present it's self this year, and that a way to pay for it would also appear out of the blue. And what happen?

We have friends that have RV's and for years we have been looking into getting one, but it has never felt right. We still feel like it might be for us in the future, but we don't know a lot about it. I remembered that someone told me a couple of years ago about a campground for RV's that also rented cabins and it was not far from Wilmington. Well I got on the computer and started looking for it. I was guided to the website for http://www.taborcityjellystone.com/ . Well it looks like fun and if we schedule it for Tuesday afternoon till Friday then everybody (all 6 kids) can go and Austin will only have to miss one football practice. So YAY we have booked our vacation!!!

Then came the paying for it part. Yep that's the hard part. Well we had a little money in the vacation fund so we had the cabin covered. If we eat in the whole time we are there it will be no different than eating at home, so no additional cost there. Now on to the hard part. Spending money. I know to most families this is not a big deal, but when you have 6 kids this can add up fast. So we have to get creative a little. So I prayed, God you have help us so far, so now where will I get this part of the vacation fund? David & sat down and decided that we are only going to be there for like 3 days because we can't check in until 4 on Tuesday and we have to check out on Friday at lunch so how much will they really need. We are going to be camping so a lot of money should not be needed. So we decided $20 each should be enough to give them pocket money to get ice cream and maybe go to the arcade (they have FREE wifi so we have netflix, and they have 3 lap tops... we should be able to keep them busy). So okay here is what we need $120. Where can we get an extra $120 from? Well I started looking around the house to see what I can sell on Ebay. A friend of mine makes her living on there and I am a believer that you can make money on there if you have the time. Right now in my life I don't have that time, but we are talking about vacation here, so I have to do something. I then hear Ashlee & Hayden making a lot of noise in Ashlee's room (nothing new). I open the door and they both have their piggy bank's poured on the floor. They said they had LOT'S of monies. Well in reality they had a small amount, but it got me thinking. We have change everywhere. Lets gather all of the loose change in the house, car, pocketbook, under the couch, anywhere and take it to the bank to run in the big machine that counts it for you. So off we went. They LOVED going on this treasure hunt. When we were done we had a box full of change. I took a look at it and said "It has to be at least $60 in there". I got excited, we could be half way there and we only spent 15 minutes looking for loose change around the house.

So above you can see our haul. Half a box of change. My smallest two always see people use those machine in the banks and grocery store and have BEGGED to use them. I never knew how they worked so I had to have to have the lady at the credit union help. Believe it or not all you have to do is push a button, feed the change in, and press the button again. It will print you a little slip of paper to tell you how much you have. Yeah I know I get excited about the simple things in life.

So anybody want to guess how much we had in the half a box of change??

Come on guess???

You won't believe it.....

$120.61!!!!!!!(plus a couple of pesos, a couple of euro, some Canadian money, a couple of tokens to Adventure Landing, And a token to a place that is not even open anymore)

God is Good All Time.....All The Time God Is Good!!!!