Organizing our Home Library by Author and Dewey Decimal Number, or, I Have Finally and Inevitably Lost the Plot

In our current house we have [had] books in just about every room of the house. Large-format non-fiction reference lived in the basement playroom. Adult fiction and some non-fiction lived in the living room, as did certain ready-reference books and popular magazines. Children's books mostly lived in their bedroom. Homeschooling and crafts books lived in the studio. My esoteric fiction and non-fiction (Welsh-English dictionary, anyone?) lived in my bedroom.

This was inconvenient on many levels. I periodically had to sort through the adult fiction shelves to find books that Will would be interested in, as her reading ability and maturity grew. If we were researching a particular topic--frogs, say--we might have to scan books in the living room, in the children's bedroom, the studio, and in the basement playroom, and we still might miss a couple of relevant resources. If I was looking for a book that I wanted to re-read, I didn't know if I would find it in the living room or in the children's room or in my bedroom.

One of my many organizational goals for our new house is to shelve the entire family's books in one central location, probably the big family room with the very high ceilings. I'd like to make a bookshelf similar to this pipe bookshelf shelving unit, also using some marble slabs that Matt bought from our IU Surplus Store back when we were planning to actually put countertops in our kitchen (we never did; they're still plywood). Will agreed to the plan, as long as none of the bookshelves are out of her reach (I may offer a compromise with a stepladder, but we'll see). The plan will only really work, however, if the books are more or less organized; having to scan every book on four dozen shelves is barely less work than having to scan every book in four different rooms.

So while I'm relatively fresh in the face of packing, my first order of business was to organize every book in our house by fiction and non-fiction, to further organize the fiction using alpha by author, to further organize the non-fiction using broad Dewey Decimal categories, and to pack them up in boxes with labels on so that they stay organized.

In case you DON'T think that sounds crazy, check out what doing it actually looks like:

Um... yeah, those are a billion mile-high stacks of books, each with an index card on top labeling it with its author letter or Dewey Decimal category. I spent an entire Saturday doing it, and as if that's not crazy enough, whenever Matt and the kids weren't in the room to witness this further deterioration of my sanity, I arranged each stack with its spines nicely facing out and then photographed it:

This is the S stack. We've got Bram Stoker, William Shakespeare, Lemony Snicket, Edmund Spenser, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Robert Louis Stevenson, Richard Scary, and more. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is in there, as well as Black Beauty and Heidi, and The Sagas of Icelanders, indexed by title since it doesn't have an author.

The P stack is a little light, but we've still got Philip Pullman and Thomas Pynchon. Another way in which this system will be useful is that if I like an author or a series, I like to collect all the available titles, but since I mainly shop used, it's a gradual process. If all the books in the house are catalogued together, it will be easier for me to see, for instance, that I only have the first book in the His Dark Materials series--for shame!

Other than Island of the Blue Dolphins and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the O stack is dominated by Mary Pope Osborne. I'd stopped consciously collecting the Magic Tree House books after Will grew out of them a bit (she still reads the new ones, but doesn't often re-read the old ones), but I'm back at it again now that Syd is a reader.

There's more variety in the M stack. We've got Daisy Meadows, George R.R. Martin, about three copies of The Secret Garden, Stephanie Meyer, Robert McCloskey, Robin McKinley, Herman Melville, Margaret Mitchell, all the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, W. Somerset Maugham, Peyton Place, and L.M. Montgomery.

In the L stack, there's Ira Levin (The Stepford Wives is soooo creepy!), Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, Jack London, Lois Lowry, Gail Carson Levine, and Astrid Lindgren. 

After that, I stopped taking photos because Matt came in, and we've already had many discussions about who is acting crazier because of the move (I say him; he incorrectly says me), so I didn't want to give him any more ammunition.

Matt helped me pack up all the books into boxes--one great thing about volunteering weekly at a food pantry is that I'm able to collect so many boxes!--and label them with Sharpies, and he shoved them into the children's room so that I won't have to look at them.

Five minutes after we'd finished, I found a whole entire shelf of books that I'd forgotten to pack, and then Matt found another stack of books up high on a back shelf out of sight, and then I remembered that I'd packed the book we need for this week's Magic Tree House Club meeting. I threw the leftover books in the giant box in which I was packing blankets, so I'll deal with them later, and while the kids are at tennis class, I'll see if there's a library digital copy of Thanksgiving on Thursday to put on Will's Nook.

If only packing clothes and dishes and linens and craft supplies were as interesting as packing books!

Mamma's Strawberry Cake Recipe

In our family, you get to do a lot of what you want on your birthday.

There was no school (although I think on MY birthday, I'll have the kids do a full day of schoolwork without fussing!).

Matt woke up early and made the kids pancakes for breakfast.

I gave Syd a big toy dragon with moveable wings and a dragon rider whose butt has a magnet in it so he won't fall off even when the dragon flies upside-down. She's played with it a lot, but she also plays with two of the twist ties that came with it; she twisted them into dolls, made outfits for them, and keeps them with her constantly.

For lunch, we walked downtown to an over-priced sandwich shop (Matt and I actually split one meal, it was that bad), then the kids did some gardening at the library.

I got the kids to let me do a "photo shoot" with them:

The kids had their first ever tennis lesson--and they LOVED it!

Matt gave Syd a certificate to keep to help her remember that he bought us all tickets to see Marvel Universe Live in January. How cool does that look?!?

We made homemade pizzas and watched Spider-man (the Toby McGuire one, NOT the reboot--ugh!).

Usually on your birthday, you also get the exact cake that you want, but Syd was having trouble deciding, so I suggested that we make my Mamma's strawberry cake. It's got an elaborate ingredients list and was always made for special occasions when I was a kid, and even though it's been made by other family members since Mamma died, I never had the heart to eat it, although in my mind I can taste it perfectly.

I hate it that Mamma died when I was pregnant with Syd, and the two never got to meet. But even Will was just a toddler, so I also hate that she has no memories of her. I guess I hoped that by starting to make some of Mamma's favorite recipes together, it would make her more real to them.

What I had forgotten, though, was the toxic nature of 1950s cuisine. I actually studied this on a tangent in grad school, so I can tell you that in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, recipes became particularly... odd. Advances in technology caused the introduction of tons more convenience food, from cake mixes and boxed Jello to dairy products and a wide variety of canned goods. Raises in wages meant that more people could afford store-bought convenience foods, and they also became a status symbol, as in "Hey, she could afford a Duncan Hines cake instead of a cake that it took her three hours to make from scratch. She must be FANCY!"

But at the same time, the time and effort that goes into making meals remained a status symbol, as well--you still got a lot of street cred for that whole "slaving away in the kitchen" thing. So to satisfy unconscious desires to both use a lot of packaged foods AND slave away in the kitchen, there started to be a lot of really weird, elaborate recipes that used a ton of packaged, name-brand foods in really weird ways. 7-Up cakes. Jello salad.

So here's Mamma's strawberry cake recipe, from the handwritten cookbook that she made me for Christmas one year:

Strawberry Cake

• 1 box white cake mix
• large box strawberry Jello
• 1 cup Wesson oil
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1 cup mashed strawberries, drained
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup coconut
• 1 cup chopped pecans

1. Whisk cake mix and Jello powder together. 
2. Add other ingredients in order listed.
3. Blend well.
4. Bake at 350 degrees in three layers. [Mamma doesn't list a time. I baked my cake in one bundt pan, because I don't have any round cake pans. I started at 43 minutes, which was the maximum cooking time listed for a bundt cake on the box of cake mix, but ended up having to add a total of fifteen extra minutes onto the cooking time.]
5. Cool completely.

Icing

• 1 stick Oleo, softened
• 3/4 cup nuts
• 1 box powdered sugar
• 3/4 cup coconut
• 1/2 cup mashed strawberries

1. Cream sugar and Oleo, adding other ingredients.
2. Cover cake well with plenty between layers. If icing is too thin, add more sugar; if too thick, add a few drops of milk.

I pretty much made this as written, although I couldn't bear to use margarine, and I don't know how much powdered sugar came in a box, so I just made regular butter and powdered sugar icing and added the other ingredients. And I have to say, although it's also horrifying, that Jello does dye and flavor white cake REALLY well. The whole thing was neon pink even before I mixed in the mashed strawberries, and it did taste of "strawberry." So if you don't have sensitivities and you really want a neon-colored, artificially flavored cake, dump a box of Jello into it!

Here's the finished cake (actually decorated by the kids and eaten the next day, because they were too full for cake after our day of fancy meals!):

You can sort of tell that the mashed strawberries by themselves actually did an excellent job of coloring and flavoring the icing. 

I'd like to try a version of this cake that uses more whole foods, with applesauce instead of oil, extra mashed strawberries instead of Jello, and perhaps whipped cream or cream cheese frosting instead of butter, so that it hopefully retains most of the flavor and color of the cake that I remember from my childhood, but doesn't make me worried that we're all going to get cancer and die.

The kids, also, have been inspired by this cake, but not exactly in the same direction: their new goal is to try versions of cake made with different flavors of Jello!

It may be a long, hyper summer...

Growing Like a Tall Tree

Eight years old,

two weeks

 She's eight years old.

one

See the happy birthday girl,

two

She's eight years old!

three

She's growing like a tall tree,

four

As good as gold.

five

 See the happy birthday girl,

six

She's eight...

seven

YEARS OLD!!!

eight

Work Plans for the Week of May 5, 2014: Homeschooling that Isn't

If we're homeschoolers, why are we never at home? We got practically no packing done last week, but we did get to math class and horseback riding, a pizza party at the food pantry where we volunteer, the ballet, our homeschool group's Park Day, and our local hands-on science museum (whose limestone carving hands-on activity has made Will interested in it--must make a note to source scrap limestone and small chisels when we're in the new house). Will went to a Girl Scouts event and chess club. Both kids also had an all-day nature class on Saturday, so Matt and I went to a movie!

Nevertheless, the kids did have acres of time every day to read and listen to audiobooks, often in the company of various cats and/or chickens. There's been a LEGO renaissance around here, so more acres of time have been spent building up elaborate universes, playing in them, and then tearing them down to build another universe. Bug trapping and sidewalk chart drawing  and racetrack building were all major activities, and Will made plans for a lemonade stand, going as far as testing a recipe that, while it did give you tons of energy for about five minutes, had so much sugar in it that it was actually thick. Yum!

The kids also, of course, had math, cursive, and journal assignments every day, and they worked on their International Fair project every day:

I'll tell you later about our DIY chalkboard tri-fold project display. It worked great!

 Will reads the newspaper every day now--

--and not just the comics page, either. She also keeps up steady work on various Girl Scout badges every day, including buying a geocaching travel bug with her own money. She wants it to go to Egypt!

Syd's also been working hard on her Girl Scouts badges. Here's her most recently updated vest, just after I finished muscling a couple more patches onto it (combination of ironing and glue is ALWAYS required, sigh...): 

We haven't made the violet jelly yet, but we've got several batches of violets steeping and ready:

This week, the kids also have math, cursive, and journal every day, along with a daily hands-on project--got to get that violet jelly made, and some work done on our Arkansas unit study, and Syd needs to learn how to shake hands politely and make introductions for her Making Friends Girl Scout badge. Will just finished researching the candidates in our local primary elections and giving me her endorsements, so we're off to walking to our polling place in a minute. Tennis lessons start this week, and now that Syd is eight, she's officially enrolled in aerial silks class! There's a gardening program at the library, and LEGO club, and our homeschool group's Park Day, and math class, and a playdate, and a pottery class on Saturday that, while it won't last long enough for Matt and I to go to a movie this time, WILL last long enough for us to go out to lunch!

I need to make a better effort to integrate packing into our days, but school and play and introspection and reading always seem to take precedence over chores (as they should, right?). I have offered to pay the children $5 for each workbook (math drills, mostly) that they complete so that I don't have to pack and move it, and my other major goal is to organize and pack all of our books all together--Matt says that although, yes, labeling every single non-fiction book with its Dewey Decimal number IS going overboard, he will abide by an organization system based on Dewey's indexing categories.

So both kids will SURELY be able to alphabetize by the end of *that* project, yes?

Meet our New House

It finally happened.

I feel like I've probably been going on for years about our off-and-on, more-casual-than-not house search. We've always loved our current location, even if we don't love our current house, so for any house to ever match the convenience and joy of living across the street from the park and a mile from downtown, it would have to be just about perfect. It would have to have some acreage, partly grass and partly wooded. It should have extra space for ranging beyond our property lines. It must have privacy. It would have to have, if not necessarily more square footage, more open areas for living. It should have personality, although hopefully not a wonky and spiteful one.

It would basically have to be the house that we just agreed to buy.

I was too excited, and the kids were too wild, for me to take great pictures of our recent visit to the house that we're buying, but, for what it's worth, here are some of my favorite parts of it:

The property has woods, albeit a sort of brambly, overgrown woods that no one has tromped in for decades:

The kids and I explored some of these woods on one morning of our visit, however, and even picking our way around thorns and through brush, we already found so many treasures--a sinkhole, a creek, a jack in the pulpit, a tree growing out of the bottom of an overturned, rusted-through metal washtub.

I've assigned the kids to trail-blazing after we move in, and they've made their own plans for a secret fort where they can spend the night, and a secondary clubhouse, and also a tree house--basically their own little primeval village.

The property has fields, and a substantial amount of them, enough for a giant garden next year:

The current owner says that this field used to be fenced, and horses and cows lived there, so the ground should be very fertile. My dream for it this summer is to fence in an area for a garden next year, then set the chickens free to roam inside and do all my tilling and fertilizing for me.

The property has several odd little buildings on it, including a garage, an actual smokehouse (perhaps next year's chicken coop?), an actual root cellar--

I have no idea what we'll do with this. Do you?

--and a just-about-to-fall-down 1930s general store:

Yes, I'm serious. If it stays standing this year, we can hopefully budget to get it renovated next year--or at least get the floor stabilized enough to be able to walk inside without probably having the whole building collapse on you.

We have a goodly amount of space between us and our next-door neighbors on one side, but on the other side, we do have a neighbor pretty close:

Yes, I'm serious about this one, too. The current owners of the house had owned this drive-in since 1955. They recently sold it to another family, who plans to open it again this month. Matt and I have taken the kids to this drive-in ever since they were born--when they were babies and toddlers, they'd actually fall asleep on the drive TO the drive-in, and then Matt and I would feel like we were dating all over again, sitting on lawn chairs watching a movie with our kids sound asleep in the car behind us. 

My main goal the second that we've moved in is to somehow convince the owners of the drive-in that it would be an excellent idea to let us drag our lawn chairs over to watch movies for free anytime we want. Doesn't that seem like something that you would want to let us do if you owned a drive-in?

Okay, if you're still lingering, rubbernecking our insanity, then now you get to see the actual house!

This is the foyer: 

It goes across the entire back of the house, both the 1980s addition that doubles the square footage, and the original 1940s portion. It opens up to the main door from the driveway AND the back deck, and has two doors leading from it to other parts of the house. I had been hoping to set up an aerial silks rig for the kids (it's the biggest item on their wish list) across one of those beams, but it turns out they're just decorative. Maybe that beam up top will bear weight, or maybe we're just destined to have an aerial silks rig in the living room. The washer and dryer are on the main level in this house--yay!--so the kids can start doing their own laundry, ideally. We also have room for a bench by the front door, and the plan is to set up a system to neatly store shoes and other outerwear here.

From this foyer, there are honest-to-gawd windows that look into the 1940s part of the house:

I guarantee that my kids will never use a door to get from one room to the other.

The kitchen has its own table!

Think of it--a table, just for eating, right in the kitchen! AND there's room for another table in the living room:

The video game stuff that Matt and the kids like could go in here, and I don't know what else. It would be nice to have a place to watch family movies, and certainly some of the children's toys will need to be stored in here. I'm not in love with the carpet, so perhaps this is the place to put the table for messy art activities, with a cheap rug underneath. This is also likely where we'll install the aerial silks rig, if it doesn't work in the foyer. When the girls are older, though, we might give this room more over just to them, so they can have a more private place to socialize with their friends.

The kids' new bedroom is a little smaller than their current one, but it has a big closet, and won't need so many shelves as they have now, because our dream is to shelve the entire family's books together in the big family room. It does have sunny windows--

--one of which leads to a concrete patio where they can play and we can have a container garden.

The kids will also have their own bathroom, thank goodness:

On the other side of the bathroom is another room just that size that I would like to use as my study/studio space. See the skylight?

I'll also need to upgrade that lighting fixture at some point, because that other window looks out onto the foyer, not the outside. I'd love to not store our homeschooling materials in this room, because that's what takes up the majority of my current study/studio, but I'm not sure where else they'd go. This house does have two humongous walk-in closets, so perhaps one closet *could* be dedicated to homeschool materials, with materials currently in use stored elsewhere?

Perhaps here, in the big family room?

We'd like to put a permanent space for the children's computer and our printer here, perhaps underneath a loft bed that we already own, with a reading space on top and large bookshelves on each side. My dream is to shelve the entire family's books together, organized and alphabetized like a library. The space is also big enough that I'd like to score a huge conference table from our university's surplus equipment store, large enough that we could have a couple of projects going at once AND have space for schoolwork. Our big dorm couch can go here, and our record cabinet. I'd also like to attractively store our large collection of games and puzzles here , and the children's creative, large-format toys that love to have space and that the adults love to jump in and play with, too--building blocks, racecar tracks, etc. The room also looks out onto a large back deck:

It will be a friendly space to live our days on in nice weather.

Matt and I plan to upgrade to a king-sized bed in our humongous master bedroom:

We'll actually have room for nightstands to hold our books, and my treadmill could go here and not be squashed for space.

This room has its own big bathroom, with a giant walk-in handicapped shower (that wants to be renovated into a large jetted tub, perhaps?) and TWO giant, walk-in closets.

So that's our house! Our hope is to be settled in by the end of May, so we can start stressing about who on earth will want to buy our current house.

Ideally, someone who really wants a hallway with handmade comic book wallpaper, and a basement that has a giant timeline on it, and kid-painted rainbows on many surfaces...

Future US President Visits the Indiana Statehouse

I've known for years that Will is interested in politics and the government, but until recently, my supporting role in this interest has mostly been to focus on active citizenship--voting, campaigning for a favored politician, following the news and forming opinions, letters to the editor and comment cards to businesses, etc.

One of the first things that Will did after she began to free school, however, was latch onto the Inside Government Girl Scout badge, and begin to work towards earning it. We've had a lot of success this year using Girl Scout badges as a curriculum spine, so later I'll go into all the activities and resources that we engaged with for this unit, both from the badge book and from my own research, but one particular badge book activity is a field trip to a center of local or state government (national, too, I suppose, but how many Girl Scouts could swing that one?). Will really, really wanted to visit the Indiana Statehouse for this activity, and I was shocked at how easy this was to set up.

Our capitol building, the Indiana Statehouse, has a public tour department that offers public tours every hour. The site said that they often had scheduled groups come during these times, but that even those scheduled tours were also open to the public, so I emailed the office, told them what day we planned to visit and what grades the children are, and asked if there were any scheduled tours that day that would be particularly appropriate for us.

The office replied with the times of several school group tours with children in the correct grade ranges, and gave a recommendation about which group we'd like best. I took their advice, and that's how we busted out our front door SO early one morning, barreled down the highway with all the day commuters in order to be in Indianapolis, parked in a garage, sans camera (forgot it in the car but didn't have time to go back for it), hoofed downtown, through security, and were waiting in the rotunda of the Indiana Statehouse bright and early at 9:00 sharp.

Let me just tell you right now: IT WAS WORTH THE STRESS! I don't know if every tour is this amazing, or if it had to do with the fact that one of the children in this tour group was the grandson of one of the state reps, but this tour was an incredible experience, so far beyond what I'd expected that I can still hardly believe it.

The docent didn't go into much detail about the Statehouse's architecture (except to note the Indiana limestone, of COURSE), but I snapped a few lousy camera phone shots to help us remember:

We found The Gettysburg Address! I love it when we find references to previous studies.

The tour itself was wonderfully, appropriately focused on the three branches of government, the seats of all of which are located at the Statehouse:

reading about the governor-- 

--and then standing right outside his office door!

 The docent led us to the House of Representatives, where we all got to sit where the state representatives sit, while first Representative Robert Behning explained to the children why voting is important, in a really kid-friendly way:

He referenced several practical matters that affect children's lives, such as the length of the school day, and sales tax, and explained that it's voting that decides these matters (more or less), and that if the children want to help decide them, they have to vote when they're older.

I *think* it was Rep. Christina Hale who spoke to the children next, and I'm bummed that I didn't write down her name so that I could remember for sure, because her speech to the children was inspiring. She told the children how important it was that they consider running for office when they're old enough, because they have contributions to society that they can make. She told them that this responsibility is especially important if they're girls or are not Caucasian, because their contributions are currently under-represented in public office.

Syd liked the idea of this:


As an aside--I really liked the group of schoolchildren with whom we toured. They were bright, eager, engaged, participative fourth graders who were funny and clever and outgoing, and didn't seem to bat a single eyelash at a couple of random kids tagging along on their field trip...

...even when the random kids didn't appear to understand how to walk in single file. Seriously, my kids can stand in line like champs, and they get the reasoning behind that, but I suppose that walking in line must simply be a matter in which they're not well socialized, because they just don't understand the concept. The hallways are wide at the Indiana Statehouse--why not walk wherever you would like? To be fair, since I can't name a single instance as an adult in which I have walked in single file, I don't really super care, but I did continually berate them in a whisper on this trip until they finally agreed to do it--more or less:

They preferred to be at the front or back of the line, because the middle of the line, with its personal space invasions, totally baffled them.

 The Senate space is far roomier, so instead we piled into the public viewing gallery above it while a senator's aide gave a presentation and tossed souvenir pins to the children:

My favorite experience, however, was the visit to the State Supreme Court. I like the impartiality of judges more than I like the politics of any of the reps, and I absolutely loved our presentation by State Supreme Court Justice Rush:

She spoke to the children about her previous experience in juvenile court, and she clearly has an affinity with children, because her body language was so welcoming, and her speech so suited to them. She spoke in detail about all the studies required in becoming a Supreme Court justice, and all the reading and research and writing that's required of them, and told the children that if they liked to read, and were interested in things being fair, that they should consider becoming a judge when they grow up. She also pointed out the portrait gallery of justices on the walls of the chamber, and told some stories about some of them, and she, too, explained to the children that diversity among the justices is crucial to reaching fair decisions, and especially encouraged any children who might bring a different perspective--girls, in particular--to become a judge.

After this beautiful, inspiring speech about why girls, in particular, were needed in the justice system, she asked all the girls who were thinking about becoming a judge to raise their hands. All the little girls except Will dutifully put their hands up. Later, I asked Will why she didn't raise her hand, too.

"You don't want to maybe be a judge when you grow up? Justice Rush said that judges have to like to read, and you LOVE to read."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I'm going to be president when I grow up."

Oh.

The docent actually did an activity with the children in which she demonstrated very clearly what each child would need to do, starting now, in order to become a Supreme Court Justice or the president one day, so Will's short-term goals are to study hard, be active in extracurriculars, become the president of a club, and serve as a page in the Indiana Statehouse when she turns twelve. 

Long-term goals: State senator. Governor for two terms. Bus campaign tour of the country. President of the United States.

She promises me that I can live at the White House with her if I want to.