Thank You, Thank You, Thank You!

I always do this...I get a little behind on my blogging and then things I want to write about start piling up and I get overwhelmed with the thought of writing them all out and so I end up writing nothing! Calm down, vandi. Babysteps, child: )

But first and foremost I wanted to express a big Thank You! to everyone who helped with our Christmas Box House Project! Seriously....so many people were willing to give something and it was amazing to see. People are so awesome: ) I knew that before, but this just reiterated it for us.

We got around $850 worth of donations, maybe even more. There were shampoo and conditioners, board games, soaps, hand sanitizers, headphones, toys, mp3 players, dvd players, printer paper, diapers, wii games, books, clothes, lot's of craft stuff, a $300 craft basket (via Chad's mom with Stamp in Up!), food, toothbrush sanitizers, lotions, a nice winter coat, and more. I said I'd get lots of pictures, but due to the battery life span of our camera equaling about 30 seconds! and other interfering events I was only able to snap a couple pictures.

*Man looking at those pictures it doesn't do it justice! Seriously guys there was a lot of stuff. Literally the entire back half of our van was chuck full: )

The other bummer deal was that we weren't able to get a tour like I initially thought we would. In my emails with the volunteer staff they mentioned being able to have a tour, but I should have followed through with it. We never ended up being able to go in or see the kids which would have been really neat. So learn from my mistake and ask about a tour if you ever volunteer for these guys. I'm sure it would be awesome!

This was kind of a neat little thing that happened. My good friend Rochelle sent me $15.00 for us to buy some donations with. I decided that I'd try to buy some clothes with it since there weren't very many donated. I ran into Target and was looking around for some warm winter clothes. I really wanted to be able to get the most for my money and found some cute sweat shirts and sweat pants that were $3 each. I picked out two sweaters for a girl and a pair of sweat pants and ventured over to the boys section to see if they had anything that cheap too. The boys sweats and sweat shirts were closer to $5 (weird) so I'd only be able to get one sweater or one pair of pants. Now you might be asking yourself, "Vandi, why didn't you just buy more than $15.00?" I would have loved to. I would have loved to buy all the kids new clothes if I could, but at that moment, I literally had no extra money to spend, so I was mixing and matching and sorting through the clothes trying to get as close to $15 as I could I came across a little boys sweat shirt that had a small red clearance sticker on it that read $.99. What?! I looked through all the other boys sweaters, even ones that were exactly the same as that one and found no clearance sticker on them. "Hmm...this is probably not an accurate price, but if it is I can get an entire outfit shirt and pants for a boy." So I excitedly grabbed a pair of sweats to go with it and carried all of the clothes up to the front. I honestly was expecting them to say the clearance price was wrong. Especially when as the cashier had trouble ringing up the sweater. He hesitated after the first ring up, looked things over, punched in some number or code, and looked up at me and said, "Nice deal." I enthusiastically replied, "I know!" as he rang the remaining clothes. And upon the last beep of the register I anxiously awaited the total......$15.33! Sweet!

Who knows, maybe some little boy at the Christmas Box House really needed new pants and a sweat shirt this year. I'd like to think that little red price tag was God's simple way of making sure that happened: ) Thanks for the $15 Roch! You're awesome: )

Also, I'm sorry for anyone that I was never able to meet up with. You're awesome and you know who you are and thanks for the thought anyway.

I hope we were able to make a difference for those kids this year: ) Thanks again everyone!