The eBay Café

The cost of discipling your growing children can be staggering especially if you have six! Breakfast with your teenage son - $18 - remember how much he eats! Even if you drop down to McDonalds, doing that once a month will cost you $120 a year. Multiply that by four, (I have four older children) and you are spending $480 on breakfast discipleship meetings. Add in four “getaways” with your daughters per year. With four daughters, that adds another $320. Then, with mom spending some time with the boys, again that will likely involve food and before you know it your breaching $1000 a year!

About a year ago Lois and I decided to increase the amount of time we spent training our children one on one. As we talked about all the different meetings we thought would be helpful my budget calculator began to churn out the above numbers. I knew the cost of going out was too high yet the privacy and atmosphere of a restaurant table seemed to aid us in our discussions and take us away from the day to day distractions of our home.

What we needed, I thought, was a restaurant table in our home! Yes, that was it, we would put a restaurant table in our house! But the location would need to be private, quiet, and special. After some discussion Lois and I decided to put a table in our bedroom. How’s that work?


First, I had to say goodbye to my big wooden desk. Then, to make this whole project affordable, I searched eBay and found a used kitchen table and chairs for about $100 dollars. I repainted the corner of the room and, instantly, our in-house restaurant booth was born.

Since our children are not normally in our room, meeting there seems different and special to them. We chose a western theme for the area and began taking turns with the children on dates, looking for items to decorate our special place. Since we got our decorations and the table from eBay, we decided to name our in home restaurant the eBay Café. Lois and I have breakfasts with the children there. We have special evening dates with them.

We still have the option of taking our children out. But the pursuit of regular discipleship of our kids is no longer hindered by the cost of the restaurant tab.