Found! 200 Bucks! (and more...)

Isn't it funny how much change you can accumulate over time? Josh and I have had jars upon jars of change that have sat around for probably a couple of years. The change has slowly taken over a portion of our home as it is transferred from jar (uh, vase) to plastic bags. The change hasn't been sorted because we figured that well, the bank could do that for us (we're dreaming as they will just give us change holders and make us do it ourselves) or that we can take it to one of those change vending machines at the grocery store that will sort it and count it for us. There are two downsides to that last one - 1) The damn grocery store will take about 25 - 30% of your precious change for its own personal profit and 2) the damn vending machines are ALWAYS broken. And, well, maybe that's a good thing...

Last night Josh was on a change mission. We threw all of the change on the floor. And started sorting. And sorting. And sorting. Bea helped us, too. Well, it did keep her occupied in spite of her attempts to put some in her mouth, but she also did a good job picking up the change and putting it in her own personal plastic bag (which we then later had to sort). This process seemed to take a long time, but I'm guessing that it didn't take more than an hour to an hour and a half. Yes, we had a lot of change.

When all was said and done, the sorting job was pretty impressive in seeing all the shiny quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies among their correct group of friends. The bag of quarters was amazingly large, so Josh and I looked at each other and our eyes expressed in unison "Let's count that (explicative)!"

On and on we went counting quarters in $10 increments, putting them into their own plastic bags. Our living room was filled with plastic bags. We finished and I counted them up. There were 20 bags of quarters...each bag with 10 bucks in it. Yeah, baby, that's 200 bucks! And that was only the quarters!!!

I smiled and said "Looks like Olivia is getting her 'Olivia' Britax Marathon car seat! All with money we didn't know we had!"

For those who don't know, the Britax family of car seats are the bomb. They can be used for children from birth up until they can sit in the car on their very own, thus you don't have to purchase multiple seats while getting to that point - this is true of the Marathon style. They aren't cheap, but they are so well worth the money. We have one for Bea. Josh purchased Bea's Britax last Christmas, but I wanted one kind, and he ended up getting the one that was the race car driver style. The one I wanted looked like this:


At the time, I didn't know what the name of the seat was called, nor did I care. Little did I know that it's called the "Olivia". And Olivia is going to get her "Olivia" car seat with money that we didn't even realize we had. So, do ya think that Babies 'R Us would mind if we just dumped all our change on the counter to pay for it?