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.