Cutting out cigarettes buys a family trip to Disneyland

EDMONTON - Shawn Peterson stopped smoking last Valentine’s Day. His wife Jodi stopped five weeks later.

Today, the Edmonton couple is planning a family trip to Disneyland with their two little girls using the money that would have otherwise gone up in smoke.

The Petersons say looking at the earnest little faces of their daughters McKenna, 6, and Taylor, 9, as they repeatedly asked their parents to butt out, and not wanting the girls to smoke when they grew up, were the main reasons they decided to quit. Then they did the math and found the pack of cigarettes they each smoked, each day, added up to about $660 every month.

“Essentially, we were spending money we really didn’t have,” says Jodi, 35. “We’d done the math before, but I think it’s like any addiction, you have to quit when you want to, not when somebody tells you to quit.”

Realizing that the first thing they did every day was smoke, was “sad and gross at the same time,” Jodi says.

Shawn, a 37-year-old electrician, quit coincidentally on Valentine’s Day, because he had just worked a 24-hour emergency shift without lighting up even once and decided he might as well keep going.

It took Jodi, who runs a day home, a few more weeks to get her head around quitting. They both started taking Champix, a prescribed nicotine replacement therapy, and by the time the prescription ran out, 12 weeks later, neither one was interested in smoking.

“I used to like the smell,” says Jodi, who smoked her first cigarette when she was 15. “If I walked past somebody having a cigarette, I would take a deep breath. Now, I can’t stand it.”

She admits taking a drag from a cigarette while camping with friends last summer because “I wanted to see for myself if I was really done and could handle being around people who smoked.” she explains. It caused her to throw up.

To anyone thinking of quitting, Jodi says you have to be ready and you have to really want to quit.

If you’re in a relationship and you both smoke, you’ll be more successful if you both quit together, she adds.

And if you plan to use a form of nicotine replacement therapy, Jodi suggest Champix. “It’s not the easiest to take, but it works really well,” much better than the patch that she used, unsuccessfully, several times.

After the trip to Disneyland, Jodi says she and Shawn are looking at taking their first tropical vacation — and without the kids.

“We have money now.”