A large family, homeschooling, adoption, special needs, whatever strikes my fancy, sort of blog.

A large family, homeschooling, adoption, special needs, whatever strikes my fancy, sort of blog.

Friday, June 25, 2021

They Did It!


I know last week I wasn't sure if we'd be able to manage 20 miles in a week, but thanks to Paul for walking with them after dinner a couple of times, and all the other walking they did, we made it!    


What on earth are you doing?  I'm sure the neighbors wondered the same thing as I told the girls to walk through the puddle, and marked their footprints with chalk, quickly, before the water evaporated.  

I was measuring their stride.  I found a chart online that calculated how many steps per mile, depending on stride length.  I wanted to make sure they did their 20 miles so I could... 


Pass out their medals!  


They wore pedometers, and we wrote their number down before they went to bed each night.  Katie had problems with hers.  The first day, she kept resetting it.  Then she said it wasn't working right.  

One of the nice things was that the girls got into the habit of walking at the school.  So now when we go, I can tell them, "Go do your mile," and they can get some exercise while I'm working on the books.  


Speaking of books, some of these have layer after layer of faded spine labels.  I've been trying to remove the ones I can before applying my new ones, but sometimes it's not possible, so a few books are getting kind of lumpy in that region.  


This is Grumman helping me put barcodes in the books.  Currently, I have 696 books with barcodes in them, despite his assistance.  We also hit the 2,000 books entered milestone this week!  You can see the scrolling marque of titles here:  WCS Library


And this is Grumman helping Jack look at a map.  Such a helpful cat.  

He's finally forgiven me for the kittens, and has started hanging out in my room again.  


 A handful of library and Little Free Library books.  One of these days, I'm going to have to take the girls inside the library again.  I'm sure they'd bring home a bunch of books if they could browse.  Hannah has been bringing books home from the school, too.  She's working her way through the Elsie Dinsmore series right now.  


This is a roughly stitched together picture of the bookcases at this point.  I'm seeing progress, but it's slow going.  Everything that can be scanned has been, so I'm entering books manually now, and trying to weed out undesirables as I go.  I'm also starting to group by author and series a bit.  All 48 Gilbert Morris books together, for example.  And 38 Janette Oke books together, and 17 duplicates of hers in the rummage sale pile.  I've got 2 shelves of biographies, too.  


I occasionally run across "treasures" while I'm processing books.  I picked this one up and thought, "Oh, this ought to be good."


Published in 1965, so a few things have changed since then.



B/w map is from the book, color map taken from internet.  I thought about culling it, but instead I decided to put some current South Africa books on the library wishlist, and if we get one, do a lesson on checking your sources, and changes in publishing, etc.  Might be fun for the students to really see and touch the difference between two books 50 years apart.  

I'm expecting an order of books, and I'm thinking I might do an unboxing video and talk about how I process new books.  

Friday, June 18, 2021

More Goodbyes


The house feels quiet and empty with only 4 kids left.  I realize that sounds weird to small families.  


I forgot to get a picture of last week's pile of books, but we picked up two piles this week.  


We went to the drive through swag bag pick up at Shriners.  Tomorrow is the last day of our week long Walk For Love event.  The goal was 20 miles in 8 days.  The last couple days have been triple digit temps, though, so I'm not sure they're going to make it.  We shall see.  


My mom came up for a visit while Annaliese was here.  I didn't manage to get any pics of or with my mom, which I'm kicking myself for.  But we went out to eat, and I took pictures of the kids, totally engrossed in screens.  


Not sure I like this trend.  Oh, and that's Annaliese's elbow, on the left, by Hannah.  


Sam was supposed to be packing, so I went to check and see how it was going.  Zzzzzzzzz!


Forgive the million piles of books in the school room.  Sam was intentional about soaking up the last couple days of brother time, by watching Disney + with the girls.


Katie could have stowed away in one of his bags.  


On his last day here, he got the girls milkshakes.  And yes, all the rules about eating upstairs went out the window when he said, "C'mon Mom, it's my last day."  


Annaliese travels light, which is good, because pretty much all Sam's worldly goods are in that little car.  


Ese and Sam's Excellent Adventure is about to commence.  


They're off!  It was a race to the end of the block.


Proof of life photo from Arizona.


They spent time in Flagstaff before heading to the Grand Canyon.  


Picture of Matilda in the Kaiser parking lot.  I meant to take a picture of something in the building, but nerves.  I did some heavy duty adulting today and went in for my first "well woman" exam in 9 years.  
I'm not great about taking care of myself.  


As promised, more books.  Oh, and we got a cool package from the library in the mail, too.  I signed Katie up for a zoom science thing, and there's a book and some supplies that go along with it.  I'll have to remember to take pictures when she does the project/experiment.   

Speaking of books, we spent time at the school 3 days this week, and we're at 1,786 books scanned/entered, and 510 totally processed and ready to shelve.  Not much progress in terms of numbers, but I emptied a shelf by selling duplicate books, so there was a lot of listing, pulling orders, shipping, invoicing, going to the post office, etc.  I used part of the funds raised to place a sale order at Library and Educational Services.  We did a review for them 7 years ago.  It's always nice to support a vendor we reviewed for; and I got a great deal on some new books for the school library.  Win win!  I'm hoping to get more spine labels typed up over the weekend so that when we go in on Monday I can label the rest of what's scanned.  

I'm also hoping there's some good deals on items on my wish list during Prime Days this week!  I've been adding things as I think of them, which has been fun.  It's quite the rabbit hole to go down, because Amazon is good at suggesting other books in a series, so I tend to add in batches.  

Friday, June 11, 2021

Buried in Books


Embarrassing confession:  I realized when I uploaded this week's pictures, I don't have any shots of the girls to share.  


I feel like I'm learning a lot of new things with this library project.  This week, it was compu-surgery.  I bought a cue cat scanner and barcode labels.  


Only to get the cue cat to display the coded number instead of the coding, you have to disconnect a pin.  


Josiah assumed I'd need help with this, but I actually did it myself in the end.  


See the "big" square?  With the pins coming off the side?  I had to sever one of those pins--without destroying any of the others.  


Those suckers are tiny, and surprisingly durable.  But I managed in the end, and I've been applying and scanning barcodes amok.  


Right this minute, I have 1,642 books inventoried, and 325 of those are totally ready to shelve.  Which means I have piles and piles of books in various stages of processing.  Everywhere.  (The school, our school room, my bedroom.)  


In all my obsessing about running a library, I realized I'm going to have a bulletin board!  So I started thinking about various themes and I fired up Crikey to make one.  


You know that verse in the Bible that admonishes you not to start building a house without counting the cost?  I'm just sure there's a crafting corollary:  Don't start a project before checking to see if you have elephant gray cardstock.  


I'm grateful for next day prime delivery.  My letters spell out, "WILD ABOUT BOOKS."  


A friend of mine was road tripping up the coast and spent a night parked here.  She needed to make some modifications to the a/c setup in the camper, so Paul got to get the blowtorch out.  


It was fun to see her, as it's been several years.  


I picked up some "post garage sale" books from a homeschool family in town.  


A few of them will go to the homeschool sale next month, but most will go to the library.  


The girls haven't finished the current puzzle yet, and Grumman isn't helping.  We came down one morning and found pieces all over the floor.  


What I say:  "I need to do my lesson planning for tomorrow's tutoring session."  
What Grumman hears:  "Nap on tutoring books.  Look cute and immovable."


We spent 3 days at the school this week.  If you look close, you can see that 2 of the shelves are stickered, and the rest have a bookend in front of them.  


5 more stickered shelves.  We use the bookend in front to indicate a shelf that has been looked through and currently contains only unscannable books.  Our milestone this week is that all the shelves have now been gone through in a cursory check for barcodes on back covers.  Now all the books that can be scanned, have been scanned.  


There's a saying in the Air Force mom community, "Find a dime, your airman is fine."  I'm not superstitious, but in going through the new totes of books we picked up, I spotted a dime, and it made me smile.  


You know your cat is spoiled when you won't close a drawer because he's drinking, and you don't want to disturb him.  


Grumman has been "helping" with the library project quite a bit lately.  I'm pretty sure there's cat hair permanently adhered to at least a few books.  


Our collection of readers is growing!  I'm a little sad that I got rid of so many over the past few years.  I had 2 baskets and a plastic shoebox full of them at one point.  


Miss Quito, 


Miss Oslo, 


and Miss Cairo have all gone back to the shelter.  I'm sure they'll get scooped up as soon as they're altered.  It's not as hard to let go this year.  Either 3 kittens is more work than 2 kittens, or I'm really distracted by other things, or both, but I'm okay with them leaving.  Especially right before Annaliese comes for a visit, since she's allergic to cats.