When Life Gives You Lemons...

Or, more accurately, when friends who you've just shared a play date with give you lemons (and give you more than you know what to do with)...make lemonade! 

On Friday we enjoyed getting to know some new friends when twin girls from Ella's class invited her, Delia and I over for a few hours after school.  When the twins' dad started pruning his fruit trees, the 4 little girls got right in on the action, helping collect hundreds of lemons and creating a pretend lemonade-making business.  So, Ella begged us to try the real thing this Saturday with the bulging bag of lemons they sent us home with.

First, our business started with production.  There is the hard work of squeezing the juice out of all the lemons.  Good thing this is such a fun job!  The mere drops of juice each lemon half yields sure makes it a time-consuming one!

Then we turned our cup and a half of fresh squeezed juice into a delicious jug of lemonade.  Those of us on quality control (Delia) thought this recipe was a pretty good one.  While making the lemonade, I kept thinking of something funny I recently read: "Unless life also gives you water and sugar, your lemonade is going to suck." 

The marketing end of the business (Ella) got busy making signs.  I was shocked how effective this was.  We actually sold lemonade to people who were just passing by! I figured all our sales would be from calling people and begging them to come.  Pastor Bruce, Mrs. P. and a friend working at church were kind enough to patronize the stand also.

We went for some product appeal when we set up the stand.  Ella thought it was important to bring the yellow chair, wear a yellow shirt and use yellow cups and paper.

We also took our stand to a more high-traffic area on the church lawn, which really worked to sell all of...8 glasses!  Yep, that's a whole two bucks we made today! 

This business endeavor was gallons of fun and actually kind of successful.  Everyone has to attempt a lemonade stand once in their life, right?  We had a great experience turning our lemons into lemonade this weekend!