Lemonade Stand

Today was the 24th Ottawa Beavers' Lemonade sale, to raise money for their camping trip next month. I and another leader each made up a 20 litre batch of our "secret recipe", and we headed off to the bike path near the river, where we knew there would be lots of traffic. This is the same place where we took the Beavers fishing a month or so ago, and the same place where I take the boys fishing a few times a week. In hindsight the bike path traffic was not as great as we'd anticipated, because as it turns out the path splits in two about 500 meters on one side of where we were, and joins back up about 500 meters on the other side, and most of the through traffic takes the other branch. But we still raised 90 bucks for our camping trip, and next time around we'll choose our location a bit more carefully and I bet we'll easily double that!

The kids had a really great time - we were there for just shy of two hours, and of course 5, 6 and 7 year old boys being what they are, they spent at least as much time chasing the geese and throwing rocks in the river, as they did peddling lemonade. Incidentally, here is the recipe I use.

• 4 x 1L can apple juice
• 2.5 cups lemon juice (or lemon/lime mixed if you like)
• fill to 20 litres with water

We originally started making sugar free lemonade a few years ago because friends of ours have a daughter who is hypoglycemic, so we would always make stuff that she could drink too since she cannot have drinks with sugar. But we liked it so much we kept making it that way. The other leader made a more traditional recipe which he got from his mom - made with sugar and lots of real lemons. Both of them were really great.

We got home about 15:45 and since our cooler still had about 10 litres of lemonade in it, the boys decided they wanted to set up a stand in the driveway to see how they could do for themselves. Oh, and just in case you are wondering, I'd donated all the ingredients for this batch out of my own pocket, so I'm not stealing from the Beavers :-) In any case, they spent another 2 hours out front of the house peddling lemonade, and made another 30 bucks to split between the two of them. We live literally a stone's throw from a very busy farmers' market on the outskirts of downtown Ottawa, so we get a steady stream of foot traffic in front of the house on the weekends.

When we first got back home I set the boys up in the driveway really quickly and then had to go into the house for 5 minutes or so. I then came back out to sit with the boys and almost immediately my youngest son (6 years old) told me very frankly that they really wanted to do this themselves, and he asked me to go back into the house. Lenore over at Free Range Kids would be proud of them, I thought! So I went back into the house and went about my business, from time-to-time sitting on the couch in front of the window watching what they were up to. Our youngest is a real grand-stander - he was standing on his chair calling out to the whole neighbourhood that he had lemonade for sale.

You'll notice from the pictures and video that we use reusable plastic cups for our lemonade stand, so that we are not creating waste. We keep a small cooler full of hot soapy water for washing the cups after each use, and another buckets of just plain water for rinsing them. We've found from doing lemonade stands last year that if you have just a bucket of hot soapy water, it does not stay hot very long, but the cooler really makes a world of difference.

At the end of the day the boys wanted to empty out their piggy banks and count up all their money. I was pretty proud of my oldest son (8) - as he was doing this he completely unprompted counted out a generous precentage and declared that he was sending it to Haiti because they really need it over there.