Ewe's Recent Projects

1. Our home library is organized in Dewey Decimal system. I organized/weeded through/typed up a list of what we have in the 300s. This includes education books (which I have a lot of from teaching in the classroom and homeschooling), nursery rhymes, and fairy tales. It also includes political science and economics which Ram has a lot. The section was a mess. This was a huge project to haul the books downstairs from one end of the house to the other, decide what to keep and type it up, and then haul it back upstairs to reshelve what we were keeping. (I couldn't use our laptop because Ram uses it during the day so I had to use the computer in our schoolroom.) The give away pile has a lot of education books that we didn't need any more. I would love to go through our whole library this way, but that will have to wait until next fall as other projects are now more important. I also worked on our fiction section-not the picture books, just the chapter books and the adult fiction. There were lots of books that Ram purchased at library book sales that were not on my list. It is good to have that updated so we know what we have for future book store shopping. I did complete the fiction and 300 sections.
2. I just began going through the tubs of baby stuff. We still don't know what the future holds for our family, but I hung on to too much. When we moved we got rid of the crib and other baby "furniture" but a lot of other stuff went in plastic tubs and has sat in my garage since then. There were a few years with miscarriages that I couldn't handle even looking at baby clothes, toys, books, and other supplies. Add in that Ram's mom also had 3 boys and gave us a lot of that when Lamb 1 was born, and we have a ton. The most difficult for me to go through is the baby books. Many of the books have specific memories for each Lamb. Lamb 3 loved the Gingerbread Man. Lamb 1 loved this book about lions. One of the first words he said was "mane" from that book. I have so many memories of reading classics like Goodnight Moon. I have a feeling this is going to be like a few years ago-go through and get rid of some stuff this time, pack up the rest to go through again another time. You would think with my youngest being 7 now it would be easier, but it's not. Sigh. I give myself some forgiveness on this since it is difficult to do emotionally. I also try to remind myself that it would be better to give it to people that could use it instead of just sitting in a tub in my garage.
3. Ram and I weeded through the church library and decided to get rid of a lot. A church member volunteered to take a bunch of Bibles to a local mission. We separated old Bibles and hymnals that were worn out to burn so they are taken care of respectfully. I boxed up our old hymnals and not sure what to do with those. We have a whole table of books to give away. We are allowing our members to see if they want any of these books and then I will box up the rest to either donate to the thrift shop or if they are good Lutheran books we'll take them to the Seminary when we go to Fort Wayne for our summer vacation. We reduced about 8 bookshelves to just 1 bookshelf of books we really want in our library.
4. The next project will be to organize all this give away stuff from church and the books from our library and baby items. Pack up what we are taking to deliver on our vacation, make trips to the local thrift store, try to resale some stuff at the local used kids store, etc. I keep thinking about how nice it will be when these projects are completed instead of getting overwhelmed with what I want to accomplish in the next few weeks!