Yesterday we held a family meeting to discuss how we could help Haiti.

We decided that we wanted to send some money to Compassion International and Free Methodist World Missions. But, with legal fees for Micah’s adoption due just a few months from now we really didn’t want to dip into what is left of our savings.

Here is what we decided to do:

1. Eat Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches for Sunday dinner instead of going out for fast food and donate what we would have spent to Free Methodist World Missions.

2. Create a frill-less menu for the next week thus cutting our grocery budget by two thirds. We will send what we save to Compassion International. I plan on picking up fruit, milk, and just a couple of other things. I plan on using items that I already have and scaling down some of our typical meals such as leaving out the turkey kielbasa out of our red beans and rice, making a simple soup, and having only one or two items per meal. I don’t feel like they are the most healthy of all meals or the most tasty, but I do think that they will be filling and will get us by for one week. By keeping it simple this week we will be enabled to send a little on to the relief efforts.

Our “frill-less menu” includes:
Ramen noodles
homemade waffles
red beans and rice
potato soup
hummus
breakfast burritos
spaghetti

3. This wasn’t brought up at our family meeting, but I have since learned that both Swagbucks and MyPoints will convert your points to dollars and donate them to the Red Cross or Doctor’s Without Borders. If you are not familiar with either of this sites they are worth checking out if you are interested in earning points by doing web searches and taking surveys that you can use to get gift cards, movies tickets and other items for free (like donating to Haiti)(please let me know if you are interested in MyPoints and I will send you a referral email about it, I get points if you sign-up through me). I find that very cool, since that doesn’t really cost us any money. We were saving our Swagbucks to purchase money tickets for the three of us but we agreed to donate all of the Swagbucks that we earn this week to Haiti.

I am looking forward to this week.  I hope that Jonah learns something about sacrifing this week, I think we will too.