Woo Hoo!!

Emmanuel's is celebrating their 290th anniversary this year.  In a previous post I told you how Alyssa and Sam's 7th & 8th grade Sunday School class was collecting empty water bottles to distribute to the congregation.  They asked members to fill the water bottles during the month of March with coins or cash and then return them by the end of March or beginning of April.

As March ended and April began, we just watched these bottles being returned...some of them stuffed full with coins, others 1/3-1/2 full with coins.  Some bottles had a single check in them....others had a $10 or $20 bill in them.  I myself kept my bottle in my car; I stop every morning on my way to work and get myself an iced tea at a drive through.  All my loose change from the drive through's went in my bottle.

They collected 107 water bottles and all the money collected will be given to the Easton Children's Home.  Won't they be surprised!?!?

Yesterday, Alyssa and I took the change (and believe me, there was a TON of it...or at least it FELT like there was a ton of it...LOL!!) to her bank.  There were:
12,643 pennies
2,593 nickels
3,675 dimes
2,945 quarters
12 fifty cent pieces
4 dollar pieces

1 silver dollar

several checks

many $1's, 5's, 10's and 20's!

about 30 foreign coins ;-)

 The start of the change going in:

 And more:

Wow!  And that's just all the loose change.  (I was curious how much $$ I had collected in my water bottle, thus we did mine separately.  I was pretty surprised to see that my water bottle, which was only 2/3 full, had $28.33 in it!!):

 These are all the foreign coins that the machine spit back out at us:

And this was this morning, when Sam and Alyssa brought the kids over to reveal the total amount collected.  Can you tell that one of the teachers is a Penn State graduate?  She copied Thon's manner of revealing their totals ;-)

(The 5th & 6th grade classes are currently in charge of the month of April and have decided to collect a minimum of 290 minutes to put towards calling cards for our men and women serving overseas.  As of this morning, even though we are only 1/2 way into the month of April, they had already reached their goal!!)