Surviving the yard sale and a weekly menu teaser

Over the past week, we've been getting ready for today's yard sale, and I swear I'm about worn out!  Most of what we planned to sell was kids' clothing, but a lot of it was stuff that I knew I'd get better money for on eBay.  That meant I had to go through every single bin of clothing we had (maybe 30 of them?) and separate out the stuff that I could sell here.  I did MASSIVE amounts of laundry to get everything ready, and it didn't help that we managed to pick one of the hottest weeks of the summer to do this.  Last night we finally got to bed at 1:00 am, but we had to get up at 5:00 to get everything ready for the sale.  Four hours of sleep wasn't much to go on with all we had to do, and what energy we did have was sucked away by the hot, humid weather.  Ugh.

Anyway...

Our sale ran from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm, and in that time we made about $1560.  I was thrilled!  All the big items sold right away, we got quite a few giveaway entries, and in the end we only had 4 bags of clothes left to take to St. Vincents.  Not too bad!  Several of our friends and my mom also made treats for us to sell, so those helped bring in a lot of money too.

I have my work cut out for me with getting the rest of the clothes sold on eBay.  I think it will probably take me about 2 weeks to get it all done, but I'm going to try to do just a bin per day so I don't get overwhelmed.  The bonus in all of this is that going through all the stored clothing at once allowed us to do quite a bit of school clothes "shopping."  Lily, Maizie, Sofie, Cora and Jackson need absolutely nothing else for school except some shoes.  And Beck has quite a few new things.  Pretty exciting!

The great thing about this whole yard sale experience has been how well my whole family has chipped in and helped.  We took the kids out for an early dinner at a Mexican restaurant as a reward for their hard work, and we had a lot of fun.  After dinner, we came home and collected the four bags of clothes, returned the borrowed tables to their rightful owners, and cleaned up the living room and hallway.  Only the dining room is still filled with stuff, and I can stand that a little longer.  It was a very productive day!

As for Bountiful Baskets and my menu, I haven't had any time to do any planning, but here's a list of what we got.  I'll post my menu as soon as I'm able.  :o)

green grapes

plums

raspberries 

nectarines

cantaloupe 

strawberries

Mt. Ranier cherries (15 lb case)

broccoli

radicchio

cilantro

corn

yellow squash

heirloom tomatoes

bagged carrots and funky carrots (I don't know what they're called, but they're purple and white and yellow)

collard greens

English cucumbers

cucumbers

spinach

butter lettuce

green beans

leaf lettuce

And here's what we have left from last week, or that I purchased:

mushrooms

plums

butternut squash

potatoes

bananas

garden cucumbers