Our 2013 Disney Goal

When my husband first moved out I was devastated.  I felt broken and so lost.  The children were sad and confused.  I already knew I was pregnant and at that time was keeping it a secret from my children, family, and friends.  One thing I understood is that I had to find happiness in some way so that I could be a good mother to my children.  I had to do things differently.  

As a mother I didn't want my children to remember 2013 as the bad year Daddy moved out so I had to figure out something.  I have always wanted to take my children to Disneyland.  Now at ages, 9, 8, 6, and 4, I knew I had to take them NOW before baby came.  How would I do that living on food stamps and getting random substituting jobs that just barely paid for rent?  I knew couldn't do it on my own. The only solution was that the children & I had to get serious and start fund raising.  

First I had to come up with a ball park figure of how much money we needed.  I looking into cost of airfare, staying a few nights at a Disney Hotel, passes to get into all the different parks we wanted to go to, food, and spending money.  Luckily my husband's uncle's family insists we stay with them for a bulk of the time and they will help with transportation as well.  So I came up with the estimate of $6000.

I then sat down with the children and came up with ideas of what kinds of things we could do to fund raise.  We came up with a pretty good starter list.  

I then made a visual chart for all of us to see how we were doing.  This is what it looks like.

We are currently almost to our halfway mark.  We have bought our tickets with the help of a friend & their miles for a huge bargain of a price.  We have also received many wonderful monetary gifts from kind friends.  Everything we earn or are given I make it a math lesson for my 4th and 5th grader.  I have them count the money, take out 10% for tithing because we are grateful for our blessings, then add the remainder to our total saved.  I hope and pray that this experience of making and setting goals, then achieving it will always be remembered through out my children's life.  This won't be the last big goal we will ever make as a family but a start of many more to come.  Watch as we work and achieve our 2013 Disneyland goal together.

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