I may sound, to some people, as if I live in a fairy tale wonderland, in that I stress we have the best school system, I go to the most wonderful church, and our county is simply awesome. But this is how I feel. If I did not think all was wonderful, then I’d move somewhere else.

Others, driving through our county, might wonder what in the world do we do for entertainment? There are no movie theaters, only a couple of restaurants, and no malls. The next county over has all that, and I don’t have free time anyway. We have ball fields, soccer fields and two grocery stores.

Looking on the bright side, as I tend to do, has served me well with raising tough kids. They come to me full of fears and negative emotional baggage and for good reasons certainly. Their lives have been very hard.

I have not read The Secret yet, but I will do so, even if I think it may just be reinforcing what I already believe. That’s the point. That’s how I continually build myself up when circumstances threaten to overwhelm me.

I shop at garage sales literally; clothes, furniture, toys, books and everything else for pennies on the dollar. I have amassed a very large collection of motivational books, tapes and CDs. Our county is becoming rather uppity lately, huge houses being built, and we have wonderful garage sales every Saturday it seems, with very high quality stuff being sold.

I always take a bunch of my kids with me, it’s our treasure hunt, we replace bicycles, skateboards, and play equipment; sometimes I spend less than $20 and come home with tons of items, thrilling the entire family. We’ve been able to replace our disposable sofas with Broyhills, sometime at $10 a pop, enabling me to not detonate over constantly destroyed furniture, which is a fact of life when one lives with traumatized children.

I’ve known of adoption disruptions occurring over that one fact, thousands of dollars of destroyed furniture…in our house the damage totals are yard sale based.

I dress my children in Abercrombie, Gap and other name brands for one dollar apiece.

Hello, I am a retired school teacher on a pension trying to raise a very large family. I budget wisely, thank you Larry Burkett, and the other financial gurus, that I read about so often. Life is short, and I have so much more to learn.

I want to teach my children, former victims of the welfare mentality, how to budget, how to live beneath one’s means, to tithe and to give; and how to have a positive outlook on life.

I know life is hard, but life is also good and enjoyable; fun and challenging, find what you love to do and get paid to do it. Make mama proud of you, our main rule in life. I tell that to the kids each day and 99 times out of 100, I am proud of them that day.