$100 Well Spent

Clear back last January, I told you about the present that Marquis's parents gave us for Christmas. You can read about that here, but in short, we were given $100 and asked to use it to help other people. We thought long and hard about what we could do. How could we get the kids to understand what we were trying to do? 

During our Grand Weekend, Marquis and I gave $1 to a man who needed to buy a train ticket. Woohoo! That's a start! Just $99 more to go! We kept thinking about ways we could really get the kids involved. 

And then we realized, these girls understand toys. Sweetheart has been in the emergency room at Primary Children's Hospital a couple of times, and each time she has been given a cute toy. They were always so great to her and made her feel so comfortable despite whatever ickiness took us there. So, we decided to donate a bunch of toys to the hospital. We talked to her about the toys she had received and how she could help other kids to feel better, too. And then we were off for some fun shopping!

An armful of toys is apparently enough to give you a case of the crazy eyes. 

These pictures are from way back in April, and I can't believe how short Princess's hair was and how much she has grown since then!

Here is our booty all laid out. It was pretty hard to understand why we couldn't open the packages and play with the toys, of course. We spent around $80 on these toys, and then we took them to Primary Children's to drop them off. 

For some reason Sweetheart really didn't want her picture taken that day.

We then had $19 left to spend, and we kind of forgot about it for a long time. We would occasionally talk about what we should do with the rest of the money, but never really did anything until one day just a couple of weeks ago we heard about another need for toys. You see, the church just a block from our house, the one that I went to most of my growing up years, had a fire a few years ago. Happily, the church has now been rebuilt and the nursery needed some toys. 

We headed back to the store and picked up another $20 or so of toys, plus the girls found some gently used ones they could part with, and we took them to the church and donated them. 

As we left, Princess got pretty mad at us. I guess she thought that we were taking the toys to the church and then we were going to stay and play with them, but after some explaining I think she understood. 

Back in my original post, I invited people to join us, to put in their own $100 and use it to help other people. Would any of you like to share your story? What did you do?