WOW!

We got a hundred dollar donation yesterday! Thank you so much! I will personally be writing the donor a thank you note. I will now be able to give my brother and his family an additional $100 the next weekend! This is so exciting!

I have decided to expand my cause. I talked it over with my husband yesterday and he thought it was a great idea. The details still have to be worked out but here's the basics of it:

Once I have reached my goal with helping my brother and his family, I want to extend the cause to other families. The general idea will be that I will get the word out on various networks, e.g. twitter, facebook, etc. about what I am doing. Then if someone knows a family whom they feel is in real need of and deserving of assistance they will be able to get me all the details about the family with a picture of the family, including why they feel the family should be helped. I will then start fund raising for one family at a time. The fund raising will go for a certain amount of time and at the end of it the family will be mailed a check.

I've never done anything like this or even imagined doing anything like this, so any feedback is very welcome. I will be researching how to set up a non-profit organization to be able to make it more official and any help on how to do this (web sites, etc.) is also very welcome.

Happy New Years!!!

Christmas came and went

Christmas was great. My husband and I showed up at my brother's house with bags of food and filled their fridge and freezer up. They will be stocked up for at least a couple weeks now. I also helped my sister-in-law clean their house, which I'm sure was much appreciated. It's very hard to have a clean house with 4 young children.

My sister-in-law did end up getting a job. Luckily it is a fairly well paying one since she will now have to pay for additional gas and for daycare. My brother still hasn't been able to get his truck back and is currently driving a very old rusty truck he got from somewhere.

I am still hoping to raise some more money for them. It may be a bit unrealistic to get his truck back at this point, but I'd like to try. Or at least I would like to just raise more money for them to be able to breath easier for a while, without all the stress of having no money and many expenses.

So my quest continues...

It's Christmas Eve!

You know what I love about the holidays? That I get to spend them with my family. I can think of nothing I would love to do more. Regardless of what we are celebrating, spending time with family is what keeps me going.

We have a Christmas Eve dinner planned for tonight at my sister's house. Then we open the stockings first thing in the morning. Then breakfast, then the rest of the presents. With about 40 people (more at times) around the house all day, it's packed and festive! The kids will be playing with their Christmas gifts, the adults will be eating and catching up with each other.

This will be my daughter's first Christmas. Honestly, I didn't get her much. She has all the love in the world. But, I did get her a stocking and a few toys I know she will love to chew on (and which the cat will steal within a couple days).

We got the 5th donation towards my cause today. At the time of this writing, the Chip-in widget hasn't updated but it's actually up to $14. I am hoping to get some more last minute donations to be able to give my brother, his wife and kids an awesome Christmas!

Happy holidays to everyone and thanks for supporting my cause.

Here's the link again

In case anyone needs it:

It's 2 days before Christmas

It's now 2 days before Christmas. With the money I have put in myself I have only raised $64 ($55 of that was from me). This is better than nothing but not nearly the amount I wanted to have for them for Christmas. I'm going to add another $36 and do $100 even, but if anyone else can make any other donation it would be much appreciated!

My husband and I also went to the Navy Commissary and bought them a bunch of meat (steak, chicken, etc) and we will be going tomorrow to stock up on perishables (veggies, etc.) to stock up their refridgerator when we go see them tomorrow for Christmas. With 4 kids they definitely go through a lot of food and it gets very expensive, so I know they will appreciate the help with groceries.

Once again, thanks for any help so far and if anyone can donate any more it would be much appreciated! Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

There are a lot of good people out there

When working towards a cause you tend to either meet some really good people or find out how good your friends really are. This is not to say that if anyone doesn't help me in my cause they are not a good friend, I'm not saying that in the least. I am saying that you realize your friends are really good people.

I have found support on my cause from unexpected places and not gotten as much support from the places I expected. This is both alright and quite interesting. It just proves that you never know what to expect really. People often surprise you.

My twitter following, my blog following and my facebook fans are slowly growing. If anyone has any ideas on how to speed up growth, any advice or feed back is welcome.

Twitter is working!

I am actually getting some great people on twitter! People who really care and are willing to help out where they can.

I got my second donation :) It may not seem like much but truly, everything helps. The fact that I'm getting any help and support at all means so much to me. Thank you guys. You're the best!

Finally seem to be getting a little movement

I now have people I don't even know promoting me on twitter. How cool is that? My husband also talked to one of his military buddies about helping, and he said he would talk to his friends as well. I really hope this goes well.

I'm up to over 100 followers on twitter, but still only 3 followers on my blog and on my facebook page. I need to work on increasing these followers, because they're usually the ones who really care, though I'm meeting some cool people on twitter.

Any feedback is welcome! Thanks guys!

Set up a new account

I donated $30 myself towards my own cause (which is totally cool with me, I'm going to donate as much as possible). I opened an electric orange checking account with it and got a $25 bonus for opening the account, so I am now at $56 total towards my cause. Still trying to work out the bake sale idea, my supervisor hasn't gotten back to me yet (I'm trying to do it at work).

I am still hoping to get more support from others but we'll see. I can't do it all myself but I'll do my best.

This twitter thing is crazy

I joined twitter for the first time I think 2 days ago. I now have over 30 followers and I'm following over 700 people (not sure how that happened but my dad did it for me). There are so many "tweets" how can anyone possibly read them all?

It's pretty neat but I wonder if anyone is actually reading my tweets or are there just too many and mine get lost in the generality? So far I have not gotten any activity from twitter, facebook has been much more effective (though still not very effective). Maybe it's because you actually know the people on facebook and they generally care about what you say? Curious.

Got the first donation!

Yay! First donation!!! Who will be the second? :)