Dreams Really Do Come True

Our family has been dreaming of a trip to Disneyland for as long as we can remember and to make our dream come true we've been saving all of our change in a six gallon glass carboy jar in our family room.  The kids call it the Mickey Mouse House jar and any change we get, earn, find or sometimes sneak from others goes right into our jar.  On my birthday this year we finally filled the jar and started on really making that dream come true.

I got home from picking the kids up and was surprised with cake, balloons, streamers and party hats when we came home.  It was very exciting for all of us to have it be my birthday.  There was also a big pile of money for my gift and the jar had been getting closer and closer to the top.  These last few inches have been exciting for the kids since they think that each coin they put in may be the one that finally fills it up.

Here we are putting the money into the jar...

And it was finally full!  I opened my present and it was Mickey Mouse ears for the kids!  Very exciting moment but then came explaining that we weren't packing up right then to leave for Disneyland.  We still had a lot of work to do before we could go but the kids just wanted to go now.

The full jar - it was amazingly heavy, much too heavy to get onto the scale.  

We started this jar sometime in 2005 but we had a lot of change already around to get started with.

Dumping the money out little by little and trying to sort out different types of money as well as things that weren't money.  

Ben is helping to free the money from the mouth of the jar.  We were able to get it out without breaking the jar.

Playing Scrooge McDuck in his money bin.  It was amazing how much that jar held.

We kept the money on that blanket for a day and had the kids help to sort some of it but it was so dirty I became convinced we were all going to get some sort of sickness from touching it so we packed it up and headed to the Coinstar.  It took us forty five minutes with two machines to feed all the money into the machines.  In the end we had just over $3,000 from the jar - the perfect amount for a trip to Disneyland!

It was a very fun way to help the kids work to meet a goal that our family was working towards together.  We are already putting change in the jar again - we'll see what our next dream will be.