First of all apologies to those of you I’ve already told this story.  But yes, I fear I may have been mistaken for a homeless person yesterday.  I was out at the mall last night with my 2 older children.  I had gone there to walk around because I was in a pedometer challenge (who could take the most steps from the 23rd to the 30th) and it was the last day and I wanted to do my best to help my team to win.  And also to look for coins of course, as the mall is a great place for coins.

So we were walking around the food court and we had spotted a few coins.  We had stopped to get a drink at the water fountain in the corner of the food court when this girl (maybe 10-12 years old) says “Excuse me” to my son.  We stop and turn, and she gives him $1.17 in coins and then leaves.
Now originally I just thought that her mom or whoever had seen him looking for coins and just wanted to make his day by giving him a bunch of coins.  And I still think that’s a reasonable possibility.  But then this morning Carolyn came up with the homeless hypothesis: that the mom or whoever saw us scrounging for coins and thought we were trying to come up with enough for a meal for the kids and thought she would help out.

In any case, I have decided not to count that money in my change quest.  I actually feel kind of bad about it, especially if she really was intending for it to help us out.  So I am going to donate it at church on Sunday and that way it can go for some good.

The weird thing is that we had just come from a (rare!) dinner out at Larosas. We had dressed all the kids up in the hopes that it would cause them to behave better than a typical kid at a restaurant scene. It worked, but that is neither here nor there. I bring it up because I was dressed in my work clothes. The son was dressed similarly in khakis and a button down shirt, and the daughter was in a nice dress. So it wasn’t like we were all lookin scruffy.

But in other news, we did find $1.45 in just run of the mill coins (1 quarter, 9 dimes, 1 nickel and 25 pennies) and also found 3 of the racecar strollers that were not returned to their bases, which we returned for 4 quarters each.  Total is now up to $32.44 found, with an estimated $100 date of Jan. 24, 2010.

In other other news, we got killed in our challenge.  One of the other teams both did 25,000 steps both yesterday and the day before and wasted us.