How to Save Up For Your Vacation

Alternatively titled: "How Can a Post About Money be So Graphic About Poop?" or "Who's the Idiot Taking All the Photos at the Bank?"

1. Create a Middle of the Night Fund. This is a box made up of money taken out of your pockets before you go to bed at night. You will use it on the occasion that you need to bail from your home like RIGHT NOW and it's helpful to have some cash with you.

Like when you find out your husband is actually a serial killer and has dismembered his prior families and left them strewn all over the Midwest, and this news comes to you in the form of an anonymous phone call at midnight just before you discover some corroborating evidence and so have to grab your kids, your keys, and your Middle of the Night Fund and run for your lives. That's what a Middle of the Night Fund is.

2. Put another box next to your Middle of the Night Fund in which to put your spare change at night. If When you have to flee your home, you can grab this too if you want. You know, in case you have to park at a meter.

3. Give your husband a giant piggy bank.

4. Commence to saving.

5. Shortly before vacation, dump all of your coins on the floor and watch your husband get up close and personal with his pig to dig his coins and bills out. Roll in the money.


6. Watch as your five-year-old swallows a coin. Demand advice from Twitter. Call (closed) pediatrician's office. Then call poison control. Please note the order of those steps. God forbid a real emergency ever occurred. Imagine that tweet: "Husband is serial killer. Is midnight. What to do?"

7. Learn that as long as your five-year-old is not exhibiting certain signs, that he will probably be okay. But you should watch his "stool" to wait for the coin to emerge. Parent Center recommends scooping up his poop with a strainer and running hot water over it. Torture your Twitter buddies (and later your blog readers) with that information. (Days later poison control will call back, looking for, I swear to God: "closure." Unfortunately, having not strained your child's poop, you will not have "closure.")

8. Take coins to the bank and make a scene because you and your three kids are so excited about the coin sorting machine.


9. Make more of a scene trying to keep three small children interested in standing in line. When standing at the counter, elicit laughs from onlookers by making up contest of "Who Can Keep Their Hands on the Counter the Longest?" Watch Quinn lose almost immediately.

10. Stop giving a crap what anyone thinks after the teller gives you $202.59 for your 601 quarters, 215 nickels, 109 pennies, 300 dimes, one fifty-cent piece, and four dollar coins.

11. Use fund to buy one tank of gas. And a Big Gulp.

12. Hope no Middle of the Night Emergency befalls you before you build up your fund again.