Motivating the Masses...

After delivering over 70,000 flyers, the kids' excitement has worn off and they really just don't want to be doing flyers anymore. We have done several things, sometimes they work, sometimes not so much. Here are some of our ideas.

1.   Race!  With 5 boys, this is generally a good, quick fix.  I give each kid 25 flyers and we race to see who can finish first.  The winner generally gets a mento, a tick tack, a piece of gum, whatever I have in my pocket.

2.   When racing doesn't work, we start stealing houses.  Sometimes this one backfires, but sometimes it makes the 'victim' of the theft is thrilled to have someone finishing the bottom of their street.

3.   When the whining starts before we've even left the house, I pull out the chocolate koalas and kangaroos.  I bought some chocolate molds and I try to keep some home made chocolates always on hand for moments just like this.  The bonus with this one is I've gotten REALLY good at making them and can whip up a batch quick!  Also, I've started experimenting with putting a nice caramel filling in the middle of them.  Nougat is next!

4.   When all else fails, I give the kids $1 if they deliver x number of flyers.  We stop at All-A-Dollar on the way home and they pick out a crappy toy that'll be broken before we get home and everybody's happy.

5.  Occasionally the littles will dress up on their way to bed--either in their star wars outfits, or their star trek shirts, or their ninja costumes or ... you get the idea.  They think it's fabulous to go out in character--it's almost like they're not working at all!

6.  The prize of all prizes--for the kid who did the best job over any two week period, taking into account how many flyers they ran, how good their attitude was, how easy they were to wake up and get ready etc; they would get to go to Artic Circle for an ice cream with Mama and Papi.  Over the course of the summer, I think everyone 'won' that prize at least once.

Now, you'd think these ideas would only work for the littles, but surprisingly most of them work on the bigs as well.  They're not big on dressing up, but they love the chocolates (so long as it's white for K), they even like the $1--although they usually buy chips or candy.

Ideas that only work for the bigs are math games--how many steps between houses, how many flyers can you do in 1, 5, 10 minutes, how much money did you make in the last 5 min, etc.  During the summer when the older boys were running 500-800 flyers a day, we'd offer a 'free meal' coupon to the kid who delivered the most flyers that week.

Chocolate Kangaroos are a great motivator to walk another 25 flyers!

Saturday flyers--2000 flyers = 2 hours of work for 10 people (lucky for us the teenage boys can do 100 flyers in 35-45 min so the fact that the 4 year old only does 50 flyers per hour doesn't slow us down)

Putting the kids to work....

A local pest control company was hiring flyer runners and we jumped at the chance!  It wasn't difficult work, unless you consider trying to motivate 8 kids to walk 2.5 miles for every 100 flyers--but at $10/hour/person we really couldn't walk away from the chance.

So I ripped countless layers of skin off my fingertips as I taped thousands of flyers together--just to make it easier for the little kids to deliver them.  We got up early in the morning so we'd have the rest of the day to play and do 'summer stuff'.  And every two weeks we'd deposit a nice check into our Australia account.

By the end of flyer season 2013, we'd collectively walked half way to Australia.  We're also within 2 months of reaching our $10,000 goal!

We started walking again last week and we'll keep walking up until 2 weeks before we leave.

X1 and X2 stopped at a yard sale and found these great costumes for .50 each.  They didn't have any money with them, but π2 did.  They thank him every time they wear them!  Running flyers with/as Darth Vader and a Storm Trooper is infinitely more exciting than running them as normal kids.

X1 handing the flyer to the owner of the house.

Even i got in on the action.  He LOVES running flyers.

To say flyers aren't X2's favorite things in the world would be grossly understating the facts.  This morning he was feeling particularly fragile so he told me he needed his 'car jedi' to help him run.

For me there's nothing cuter than watching 3 year old i earn money for his exciting trip.

Flyers are boring!  So to spruce it up, we had a competition to see what we could do to make it more fun.  X2's 'flyer beard' was a big hit!

How it all Began...

I was asked by several people to tell my story and realized that if I started a blog it would be here for all to see and I wouldn't be stuck repeating myself every other day.

When my cousins left our house in the summer of 2012 I was heart broken.  I missed out on getting to know them when we were kids but the longing I'd felt for that opportunity had never gone away.  When I was still talking about it weeks later, π said, "So why don't we go to Australia?"  We both laughed at the absurdity of the thought.  With our budget?  With our 8 kids?  Yeah right!

A few days later, I looked up prices of airfare.  A few days after that, I looked up prices of "holiday houses" that would sleep 10.  And a bit after that I started estimating how much we would need for a trip.  The number was staggering!  So I put the idea away as a dream that would never be.

In January when I sat down to do our taxes, I found we'd made a mistake...a very fortunate mistake!  We had A LOT of taxes taken out of our checks that didn't need to be.  No wonder things had been so tight financially over the year! Our return was substantial--and I again thought of our dream trip.  That night I mentioned to π that if we just put it in the bank, we'd have enough to go to Australia in just 3-4 years.  I expected him to laugh it off, but he didn't. As he seriously considered it, I did too, for the first time.  If we could save that much by having it withheld from our check each month, what could we save if we were trying?

Our dream started to look like a reality.  I pulled up the file I'd called, "Financial Freak Out" with all the numbers I'd looked up before and started crunching.  The astronomical figure that was the amount we needed didn't look so drastic if it was spread out over two years, and if we subtracted our tax returns from the next two years from the number.  It was still a LOT of money, don't get me wrong, but it was a number we could come up with--if we really REALLY wanted it.

So we talked to the kids about the possibility--it was a very short talk.  It went something like this:

"So, we were thinking if we worked really hard maybe we could save up enough money to go to Australia."
"Okay.  Let's go."
"Well, it's going to be hard."
"We don't care, we'll do anything.  Let's go!"  Their enthusiasm bolstered ours and we really started going for it.  Now here we are, 70 days from our departure date, still a little ways from our financial goal but if all goes according to plans, we should hit it right on.

In later posts I'll talk about what the kids have done to earn $10,000 of our trip.
I'll talk about finding deals in other countries.
I'll talk about travel planning for big families.
I'll talk about motivating kids when the excitement wears off.

Oh the fun we'll have!