Resoluting in Disneyland! :)

The inside of the book that I made. You can see that Corban added his own autograph too.
The autograph book that I made for the kids.

Yeah, you are reading that right. We went to Disneyland and worked VERY hard at not buying anything new! As a matter of fact, we worked hard at spending little to no money! Here is what we did :)

First of all, we jumped on the opportunity that Disneyland offered: Give a Day, Get a Day. I think its over now... but basically they gave 1 million people the opportunity to volunteer for an approved day of service and in return they gave a free ticket to the park! Jeremy and I and our two oldest children were blessed to help friends with a fundraiser for the domestic adoption. We made greeting cards for two hours and got tickets! (Just a note: we would have helped them regardless. The fact that Disney supported them was such a blessing!).

We were able to get ALL SIX of us into the park FREE. Do you know how much money that saved? Almost $300. Amazing. Liz had never been to Disneyland (Hannah either) so it was especially neat to take them!

We paid for gas with a Visa Rebate I had received for $90. Money already spent that we used to fuel our vehicle. I made lunch and dinner for the road. We stayed with a dear friend in Costa Mesa so our housing was FREE (along with a breakfast the next morning!). We slept and then headed to the park on Mother's Day. We paid $14 for parking. Then as we entered the park we were each given a number of buttons... Celebration buttons (for mother's day), Volunt-ear buttons (for earning our tickets) and my other two got First Visit buttons for being newbies. Then, they gave mothers a carnation for Mother's Day! There were all of our free souveniers (not to mention the plethora of pictures we took!)

We bought ONE meal in the park... which totaled about $50 (ridiculous, I know :) but used our saved up yard sale money from a couple months back. Then we bought sandwiches as we drove home that night.

Sounds easy, maybe. But really... I have had a tradition my WHOLE LIFE LONG of buying a stuffed animal (big or small) with every visit to Disneyland. I DIDN'T! And Im okay with that. I grew up in San Diego so you can imagine how many of these "traditions" I've collected over the years. The kids were content with their autograph books that I had made them, filled with signatures to pair with the photos we took. Our great friend Allison made all of the kids tie-dyed disney shirts (See above photo :). (the books cost $5 to make as opposed to the $10-15 for the ones at the park).

It was such a fun day and so inexpensive! I felt really good about our decision to stick to the "buy nothing new" plan. I think, in the end, we didn't have to use any of our month's income on the trip because we used my rebate card and our yardsale money... with some to spare! Its possible!