Yard Sale

As you all might have noticed, there hasn't been a lot of blog activity going on the last few days.

We have been preparing for and holding a yard sale to help raise the last funds we'll need to travel back to pick up The Princess. On Tuesday, I was truly feeling despondent after going to the storage building and going through what was in there. In our minds, we wanted to raise $500 from the yard sale and the items we had in there just didn't seem like quite enough to get us to there. Remember, we've had a yard sale every year for the past three years, so I can kind of judge how it's going to work, how much we might raise and so forth.

Then on Thursday, we had so many people give us things for the yard sale. Jamma and Larry gave us tons of their daughter's name brand shirts and jeans that all the teens wanted. Our neighbor gave us a treadmill, tons of shoes, boots, purses, clothes, toys, coffee maker and VCR, media stand. Our friends Jennifer and Jason absolutely loaded us up on so much good stuff that I'm not sure where they were storing it. Their boys went through their toys and gave us so much good stuff, including about 20 video games which fetched a good bit. They gave us an elliptical machine, a glider/exercise machine, lots of household items, purses, camera and on and on. Kevin's mother had given us all of her yard sale items and his aunt and cousin gave us several loads of things as well. My friend Iris brought us by a Power Wheels jeep and a rocking horse. My mom let me have all her things left over from our last yard sale. We still had several things that folks had donated from that sale as well that sold this time.

And special thanks to my parents who allowed us to have our yard sale at their house where there is lots of traffic and who prayed we made more than we expected.

As I sorted through all the items, putting prices on them, I thought of all the love that was shared with us from each of these people. Each toy given up by Jennifer's boys was bit of love shared with us for our daughter. It's the truest example of Jesus's love I can imagine.

By the time it was all said and done we made right at $1300. What a blessing!!! I would have never thought we could have made anywhere near that amount of money.

Poor Kevin walked away with a sinus infection for all his efforts. He thinks it's from stirring up dust and such from all the boxes. He moved so much stuff this weekend, I'm surprised he's still walking around. And, kudos to Joshua and his friend Braiden who helped us move boxes of stuff on Friday night, Saturday morning and to break down on Saturday afternoon. I've never seen two ten-year-old boys work so hard. I was so proud of both of them.

Fifty-four days until we return. Hang on little bit, mama is coming. Soon.