Why Haven't We Done This Earlier?

On Friday, Benjamin had a meeting with his scout leaders to further his eagle scout project.  The discussion concerned fund raising and how he was going to get the money to buy his needed supplies.  One leader suggested a bottle/can drive.  A great idea considering that the bottle returns have been closed for months and just opened this week.  People have months worth of cans sitting around and the only way to get rid of them is to stand in crazy long lines.  We got on that right away.  We made a flyer on Friday night saying basically, "Don't want to stand in the long bottle return lines?  Give them to me and I'll use the funds for a great cause."  We distributed them to 250 houses in our neighborhood on Saturday morning.  Mostly Christian and I did, but Benjamin joined in when he woke up.  Today we went around to collect the donations.  By we, this time is was me, Christian, Bella.  Benjamin hasn't left his bed since Saturday when he cut up his foot.  We carry him to the toilet and that's it.  He eats his meals in bed and never gets up for anything.  Bella and Christian weren't happy about having to do his work but it's not like he was doing it out of laziness.  Christian was a hard worker and despite getting tired, he pushed on and collected for the full 2 hours, hopping out of the car and running bag after bag from porches to the trunk.  Bella let her social anxiety get the best of her and spent a lot of time complaining and refusing to get out of the car if she saw anyone.  She'd hide on the floor of the car and say, "I hate people!" or "There's people out there!"  "Mom, why do you have to be so mean!?!"   I just calmly reminded her that this time could count for scout service hours, oh and that her screen time depended on it, and amazingly, she complied.  Before we started, I expected maybe $100 worth of cans/bottles.  A van full, basically.  Wow, I was wrong.  We filled the van to capacity 4 times.  Each time we had to go home, empty it out and go out again.  It was incredible.  One house had a note on their bag of cans that said, "Please knock, we have more."  So we did and when they opened their garage, my jaw dropped.  They had about $75 worth of cans in there!  In the end, we collected enough cans and bottles to fill our garage.  We had to sort it all and repack the van so we could take as many as possible to the store, but it'll still take 3 van loads.  We spent 2 hours at the store returning what we could but there are limits on how much you can do at a time right now.  After you hit the limit, you have to get back in line, and wait again.  So we could only do three grocery carts full, But just that made $100 so far today.  Not even a dent in our supply.  My van looked as full when I left as when I came.  I'm guessing we have about $600-$700 worth of cans and bottles, maybe more.  I'm curious to see when it's all gone what we'll have.  It's going to take about a week to get it all returned.  Benjamin was so excited.  Now he'll have plenty for supplies and enough to make a donation to the school in addition!  It'll be great.  I am so thankful for the generosity of our neighbors.  I was blown away.  Our neighbor, Jackie, across the street even came over and offered to store stuff in her garage or let us use her truck to take everything to the store. We had a lot of fun today doing this project and even the bottle return was fun.  Lots of nice people in line and seeing that money rack up was awesome.  Only bummer - forgot to take a single picture!!  So like me.  So I'll just include this cute one Christian took yesterday.