It's that time of year again.....

to start shopping for our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes!!!

Boy oh boy did I score at Target today!! All their Valentine stuff was 75% off and they had whole packs of silly bands for $0.49. And cute little tins with card games and bouncy balls and all sorts of cute things.

I love shopping the after holiday sales for items for our shoeboxes. I can always get a better deal at after holiday sales than I do at the Dollar Store.

So we have started to once again fill our "poor box." Not a name that I would pick but the name Christian came up with for the box that holds all of our special things that we buy for the kids who will receive our Operation Christmas Child shoeboxes. I guess it's an appropriate name, just seems a little harsh and slightly embarrassing when we're standing in the store and McKenna exclaims "Oh mommy, this is cute. Let's get it for the poor box, for the kids with no toys." Yeah, that sort of makes me cringe. I tried to change the name to the "giving box" but it didn't stick, so the "poor box" it is!

It's so fun to work on it all year long. I know one family that fills a shoebox every month of the year, so that by the time November rolls around they have 12 boxes already ready to go! What a fabulous idea. I think the tough part is the shipping. It costs $7.00 to ship each box and if you wait until November to save that money up, it's really quite a chunk, so I'm trying to think through that a little and maybe make it our goal to have a yard sale and use that money to ship our shoeboxes or something like that. I think the shipping sometimes holds me back from packing as many boxes as I could and this year I've decided not to let that stop us from filling as many boxes as possible.

Okay, so I hope I got you thinking!!! Start shopping now!! It will be so much more meaningful to your kids if they are constantly on the look out for fun little deals for their own "poor box."