The highlight of every summer break for my two sons are the vacation bible schools that nearly every church in are area conducts. The crafts, the skits, the water days, the games, oh my! They just can't get enough. And for our family, we live in Arizona, the summer months are definitely not fun in the sun days. How much fun can you have when it's 110 degrees outside?

So our summers are measured in time outside of the pool. My wife and I try to keep the kids occupied as best we can. We could just put on a Pixar movie and let them zone out. But our kids just aren't like that... they want to play with other kids. So we enroll them in all the neighborhood VBSs, even some that are a little ways away. In VBS the kids not only get to do fun things, but they learn too.

As summer approaches, my wife and I spend several hours contacting the churches and JCC (Jewish Community Center) near our house to see about the summer activities. Not only does this take a lot of time, some organization don't know their summer schedule until nearly the beginning of summer.

That's where my job comes into play. I work out of my house as a contract programmer, building websites. It's cool. I get to be the house Dad when the kids are around, and my commute is short and sweet. So I tell my wife, "I can do something about this!" So we started talking about how a website could make it easy for other parents like us to find vacation bible schools, and make it easy on the churches and groups to get the word out. Sorry 'bout that pun ;)

So we designed and tested VBSfinder.com in early 2008. We hope you find it as helpful as much as we enjoyed creating it for you.

The Smith Family