Have you ever been asked to donate or support a charitable cause only to realize you don’t have the resources available to do so? I have and so have my children. When this dilemma occurred recently, I loved my son’s resourceful solution to helping others.
At the beginning of April, our family received a letter from my son’s next-year’s teacher. This letter informed us that she would be leaving on a mission’s trip this summer to help other teachers. She asked for prayer and financial support for her trip. Upon hearing this news, our kind-hearted son asked if we could sell lemonade and cookies again to raise money for her trip. When I recovered from the emotion of the moment, I fully embraced this idea, and encouraged him with help and support. The support came as Using Time Wisely sponsored the lemonade stand.
Waiting for customers
THE PRELIMINARIES
With a plan of preparing lemonade and chocolate chip cookies, we needed a great place with lots of people and a date for our event. Having a jammed-packed schedule, I wasn’t sure when we could fit it in. I kept the idea in the back of my mind and proceeded with our planned activities. While checking my e-mail one afternoon in May, I discovered that our HOA Board had scheduled a community-wide garage sale on a Saturday morning. My immediate response was “perfect!”
Two years ago we had a community-wide garage sale. Our family sold lots of items as we decluttered our home, and my son had a lemonade stand. He did really well that morning making over $40 selling lemonade, tea, M&M cookies, and chocolate chip cookies. This year I was not quite that ambitious as we planned our lemonade stand.
THE INGREDIENTS
The next week, I found the Nestle’ Toll House refrigerated cookie dough on sale at Publix which I paired with coupons. I purchased 4 packages of the mini cookies which make 40 cookies each. Yeah, I saved myself money (sale with coupons), energy (stirring the batter), and time (mixing the ingredients for a homemade batch).
On my next trip to Aldi, I picked up 4 containers of the instant lemonade mix, lemons, and napkins.
Then the week of the event, I purchased the craft materials to make our signs. I then visited my neighbor, who allowed me to use her Cricut (pronounced: cricket). This neat machine looks like a small printer, and it cuts out the letters. Having a number of cartridges for her machine, my neighbor helped me choose a font, then graciously spent her time creating the letters for our signs. This was time well spent. I was able to visit with her and accomplish a task quickly (about 30 minutes) that would have taken at least 2 hours to cut out each letter with scissors.
After deciding on the lemonade stand, setting our home as the location, choosing the date of the sale, and purchasing the ingredients (supplied by Using Time Wisely), we were ready to prepare for our event. Come back next week for details of our preparations, event, and the results of our creative way to raise money for a teacher’s mission trip.