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.  

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.  

Our Week In Which We Jogged More

The weekend got away from me without me getting this posted.  I'm not even sure what I did over the weekend, but posting Our Week wasn't it.  

Last week we learned the difference between turtles (they live mainly in the water) and tortoises (they live mainly on land).  

Again with the trying to use up art supplies.  The girls drew self-portrait astronauts on black art paper in acrylic marker.  Basic idea from Art Projects For Kids site.

Library books.  We're still working on getting down to a more reasonable number of books checked out.  We're at 70 right now.  But we only have 24 books on hold, instead of our usual 60.  When all the books for Hannah's report go back, that should help.  Also, we're about to start our Last Week Of School, so I'm sure our interest-led, summer acquisitions will go back in a more timely manner.  

Attended the zoom baby shower for Zach & Heather's little boy.  Shower by zoom is a little weird, but it's exciting that his birthday is getting closer.  My plan is to go visit in September, but I'm trying to hold lightly to that plan.  

More books.  

I'm grateful for the push to get us exercising more.  The girls jog while I ride my bike.  

And we do some exercise in the garage, too, using Hannah's new equipment.

In fact, we've decided to participate in this year's virtual Walk For Love event.  We'll really be pushing ourselves, as it's 20 miles in 8 days.  We have until June to work our way up to the 3 miles a day goal.  The first time we went a whole mile, Hannah was really sore the next day.  

Sea creature drawings

This was a good book.  It was a quick read, which is good, because I didn't get to it until 3 days before it was due.  It's faith based, which is helpful, as it talked about how to handle a situation where an adult child is making choices you oppose for religious reasons.  It helped affirm my "nod and smile" (or "smile and wave" if you're a Madagascar fan) policy, and reinforced some things that I knew but struggle with putting into practice.  Perfect timing, since I facilitated one of the boys adulting at Urgent Care this week.  

Annaliese scored big sister points by sending the girls a package of goodies.  

Shamrock drawings to go with our study of IRELAND this week.  We learned why there's Ireland and Northern Ireland.  This year has really been eye opening, in terms of understanding the effects of colonialism.  How very weird that Europeans felt entitled to claim bits of land all over our globe.  

Bird drawings

Instead of our usual route around the block, we started varying our route a bit and ended up at the park a couple of times.  

Feels good to get out in the sunshine!  We got spoiled with weather in the 80*s and when it dipped down for a couple days, I went back to sitting in front of the space heater.  Fortunately, it's looking like 80* again tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future.  Whew!  

Strong girls!  

Oh Grumman.  He has a thing for freshly washed ankles, as Sam discovered after his shower recently.  

Since the girls have finished their English curricula, we've been doing Mad Libs to review parts of speech.  

Books, books, books

Katie's St. Brigid's Cross craft.  Grumman is so thrilled to have pipe cleaners all over the house again.  Sigh.  

He's probably exhausted from destroying pipe cleaner crafts.  

We're getting to the time of year where there are a lot of, "Choose any..." assignments.  The "make any origami animal from this book" is a good example.  Also, today's "Pick any Robert Frost poem for copywork."  Hannah's gotten into writing poetry lately, which makes me smile.  

Our beloved mascot won't be happy when we're not hanging out in the school room every morning any more.  

"Hey Mom?  Can you Crikey me a jet mask?"  Yes.  Yes, I can.  I pulled up Design Space, searched "plane," and handed him the iPad to select the image he wanted.  We made it together.  

We've finished Ireland and are moving on to our very last country for the school year:  Puerto Rico!  The girls are taking their final exam in Swimming Creatures science today.  We're really starting to wrap things up.  Very exciting.