yard sale! and budding entrepreneurs

Yard sale Saturday dawned sunny and hot which was heaven after a seriously excessive amount of May rainfall.  (Each time you would check the extended forecast all you would see is gray, dripping gray.)

I had offered to host our Gold's Gym Trek Across Maine team yard sale.  The idea behind the yard sale was to help team members who hadn't met their fundraising goal get there and for those that had to raise money for the (rather excessive) associated travel expenses. 

For reasons not entirely understood by me, my friends Katie and Alex REALLY love yard sales.   They came Friday afternoon to help me transform my front yard into a shopping paradise with a few plastic tables, some plywood and some saw horses.  Their daughter Mikayla and her friend came over to entertain the girls which was helpful in every way, including keeping Ella out of previewing the merchandise.

(Ella refused to donate even one single item to the yard sale from her room.  I fear she is a hoarder in the making.)

Here is Katie giving me the thumbs up indicating we are good to go:

For the uninitiated, those who "yard sale" (verb) peruse the paper for listed sales and arrive to shop long before the appointed time.  Our sale was to be 8-12 and I had made almost a quarter of my total sales (a completely made up calculation) before 8 a.m. 

Here is Alex, back to, scoping out the items:

Two fellow Trek team members, Rachel and Robert, who look (and are) so seriously buff I am glad to be on the same team as them if for no other reason than they look so fierce. (They also happen to be really great people.  Buff and kind- what could be better?)

I asked the girls if they wanted to run a lemonade stand and my question was met with rousing enthusiasm.   We made a batch of giant pumpkin chocolate chip cookies the morning before the sale (and before school if you can believe it- we're early risers) and they offered both sugar and sugar-free lemonade.  What can I say their mom is a Type I diabetic.

The cookies sold out by 9 a.m. Yes, I am unclear how many were consumed by my children.  The girls also made a ton of money and we cannot determine if this is partially by accident.  I was supervising the girls, naturally, but was busy making money in $.25 increments so I was only watching for their continued presence on the front lawn rather than their compliance with the conventional standards of change disbursement. 

For instance, Sandi saw a man give Ella a dollar bill for a glass of lemonade.  She took it, said thank you and put it in her container.  It was only when Sandi prompted her that she gave him his 3 quarters.   We are unclear how many people may have been scammed on our front lawn on Saturday morning.

All that selling is hard work, though, and sometimes you've got to take a break.

In the end, I made $377 to go to my Trek travel expenses (a little less since someone made a donation that will go directly to the American Lung Association) and the girls made somewhere around $25 selling lemonade and cookies. Not bad for a Saturday morning. But the best part? In preparation for the sale I cleaned out the basement, the eves, the top of the garage and two closets!