Over half way and heading for home!

Tonight I had the pleasure of meeting a wonderful little girl from Amelia's school. She's in first grade. She'd been using her own hard earned money to buy paper dog bones at school for Amelia's fundraiser. If you have kids this age, you know they generally don't bring in a lot of income, so when I found out she had bought eleven bones, I was touched. As usual, I couldn't find anything more eloquent to say than "thank you". But I hope that she and all the other kids at school know what a wonderful thing they're doing.

You may have noticed the big jump in our fundraising total since the beginning of the month. We sure did! (And no, that total does not include the school fundraising money yet.)

This whole process has been surprising on a regular basis. In my mind at least, when I saw our fundraising goal of $13,000, I thought getting it done in a year would be pretty good. And here we are past the halfway point after two short months. And we know of some more donations that aren't included in that total yet, but that'll push us a good bit higher.

Even with the economy looking a little worse every day, people are still giving. Generosity is coming from all over. People giving money, giving time, sharing ideas, offering encouragement, spreading the word. We've gotten plenty of donations from friends and family, but also from organizations and groups and churches... from a Walmart store 30 miles away. From an office services business in another state. From people we don't know. In fact, in some cases, we don't even know where the donations came from at all.

What we thought would happen was that we'd send out letters and emails to family, friends, and co-workers, and we'd get an initial surge of donations. Then we'd contact local businesses and hope to get some more. Then donations would plateau, and we'd have to hope for some media coverage and start organizing fundraising events.

What's actually happened is the opposite. Word has spread. The idea has snowballed. More and more people are getting involved, and the number of donations has increased over time.

We're not really getting big chunks of money from corpoorations or grants or wealthy benefactors. Almost all of our money has come in increments of $20, $50, or $100 - or in paper dog bones by the hundreds.

I hope to get some pictures to share soon.

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