A Tribute to Baba

Baba

Yesterday my mom, affectionately referred to by her grandchildren as “Baba” – the abbreviated Russian word for “grandmother”, turned 70 years old. And you know what she did on her birthday? She showed up at my doorstep with a 9″x13″ cherry cheesecake that she made for ME. On HER birthday.

I should be used to her selfless acts of kindness but I’m not. She continually astounds me with them. Throughout my life, I have never known anyone else to be so completely and genuinely selfless, freely giving of her time, love and resources, and having an unwavering servant attitude toward others. In this regard, she is as close to emulating Christ’s serving heart toward others as I have ever witnessed.

What makes her even that much more amazing is that she is the way she is despite the multiple hardships and challenges she has endured throughout her entire life: born and raised in the poorest of conditions in Soviet Russia during World War II, uprooted with her family to a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany; being separated from her mother who suffered from tuberculosis while in the DP camp, experiencing the death of her 9-month-old brother who died of neglect while in the same camp; being malnourished (along with her 3 sisters) all of the time. At the age of 11, her family was finally able to make the unpleasant passage by boat to the U.S. eventually settling in NJ. Not speaking a word of English she was placed two grades behind her peers. She lived the rest of her youth (and her adult life) in this country of freedom, safety and opportunity yet lived under the oppression of an abusive, alcoholic father and continued to witness the physical sufferings endured by her ill yet hard-working seamstress mother.

A few years after graduating high school she married a fellow Russian who, amazingly, provided for the basic needs of his family as a blue collar worker despite become a raging alcoholic, and she subsequently had three children with him. She was a stay-at-home mom but also took us little ones with her to her part-time house cleaning jobs. When we started school she got a full-time job while always maintaining a meticulously clean house, preparing home-cooked meals every night, doing the shopping, laundry, ironing, sewing, canning, and sharing with the caring for her aging mother all the while constantly nurturing and lavishing love, affection and adoration on her 3 children.

Later in life, she eventually lost her beloved mother, then her father who she also helped cared for in his declining health, and was herself diagnosed with and battled with cancer (with which she victoriously went into remission).

I have never heard her utter a single complaint about her life. Not ever. And she asks for nothing. Yet somehow, she incredulously gives of herself like no other. I cringe, in sharp contrast, in how selfish I am with my time, my love, my resources, how spoiled I am with the easy life I have, and how I pale in comparison to her exemplary performance as wife and mother.

Today, parts of our family are geographically separated so not everyone was able to participate in Baba’s 70th birthday celebration although, no doubt, they were there in spirit. It was a lovely dinner and it was a treat to see Baba get treated on her special day (even though she did bake me a cheesecake). I pray that God blesses her abundantly for the next 70 years and that I may, by His grace, be as selfless, giving, humble, content and amazing as she is. How I love you, Mom!

From one awestruck and blessed daughter,

Tuesday’s Tips: Cheap and Green Laundry

We’re all looking to save money anywhere we can and the laundry room is one of the easiest way to save big bucks.  Turns out it’s also one of the easiest ways to help Planet Earth!

The first thing we did was invest in a high-efficiency (HE) washer and dryer about seven years ago.  The washer model we purchased was large enough to wash 22 bath towels in one load.  That’s a big load!  It literally cut the number of weekly loads we did by HALF.  I’m not kidding: we went from 10 loads a week to 5 loads a week (on average).  And for those of you unfamiliar with the concept of HE washers, they use less water (based on weight of clothes, not on size of load) and less energy.  In addition, the spinning action of these HE washers are so great that the clothes need less time in the dryer!

Sure, the cost of purchasing one of these sets may seem prohibitive but not really.  The washer itself cost $1200 about seven years ago.   That means to date, the washer has cost us $3.29 per week (further decreasing with each week).  We’ve saved far more than that in water, energy and human labor!

Now the really fun part: laundry soap.  I became a pro at finding the best sales on laundry soap, saving even further using coupons, and stocking up, up & up.  Even so, laundry soap is expensive and, let’s face it, we always end up using more than we really need.  And it never occurred to me that the incalculable number of bottles I’ve purchased in the course of my adult life that have contributed to manufacturing greenhouse gases & adding to our landfills (before recycling, that is) could have been completely avoidable.

Enter the home-made laundry soap.  There are several recipes available on the internet (some people even have the nerve to charge people for recipes) but the one I use is courtesy of the Duggar Family website (www.duggarfamily.com).  I figure a family with 19 kids has got the laundry thing all figured out (thank you, Duggars!).  And it’s true!  For $2 in ingredients I made laundry soap that will last us for the next 2.5 years.  At my current rate of 5 loads per week, it will cost $.03 for every ten loads of wash! Ka-ching!!!

I was surprised at how easy it was to make as well as how how pleasant smelling and clean the laundry was!  I’ll never go store-bought again (and feel really great about no longer needing to contribute to the carbon footprint required in manufacturing the plastic bottles in which the store-bought soap is sold).

Every family, regardless of economic class, can easily make home-made laundry soap.  Here’s the Duggar recipe with my caveats added to the end:

HAND-MADE LAUNDRY SOAP

Ingredients:
4  Cups – hot tap water
1  Fels-Naptha soap bar
1 Cup – Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda*
½ Cup Borax

Preparation Time: 1 hour

1. Grate bar of soap¹ and add to saucepan with water. Stir continually over medium-low heat until soap dissolves² and is melted.
2. Fill a 5 gallon bucket^3,4 half full of hot tap water. Add melted soap, washing soda and Borax. Stir well until all powder is dissolved. Fill bucket to top with more hot water. Stir, cover and let sit overnight to thicken.
3. Stir and fill a used, clean, laundry soap dispenser⁴ half full with soap and then fill rest of way with water. Shake before each use. (will gel)
4. Optional: You can add 10-15 drops of essential oil per 2 gallons. Add once soap has cooled. Ideas: lavender, rosemary, tea tree oil.

Yield:
-Liquid soap recipe makes 10 gallons.
-Top Load Machine- 5/8 Cup per load (Approx. 180 loads)
-Front Load Machines- ¼ Cup per load (Approx. 640 loads)

*Arm & Hammer “Super Washing Soda” – Baking Soda will not work, nor will Arm & Hammer Detergent – It must be sodium carbonate!!

¹Definitely grate the Fels Naptha soap as the recipe instructs.  I got lazy toward the end and started cutting it into small chunks but it took significantly longer to melt on the stove that way.
²Melting the Fels Naptha soap produces a very strong “soapy” odor which could be overpowering but using the exhaust fan on the stove helped with that.
³You will need a place to store the huge 5-gallon bucket for the long haul (and you definitely need a lid).
⁴I put the recipe in a sheet protector and taped it to the outside of the bucket for future reference. I also taped a 3×5 index card to the laundry bottle dispenser with instructions to “shake before dispensing” and to “use a full cap for every load” (at least for my washer). The reminder will serve those in the family who don’t ordinarily do the laundry.

Laundry soap isn’t the only product you can cut back laundry expense:  you can make your own fabric softener, too.  I was a little skeptical about this one because I am downright fanatical about my clothes, sheets & towels feeling soft on my skin (I think it’s a throwback to when my mom used to hang everyone’s jeans on the clothes line in 30 degree weather and having to scrape on rigid & frigid, rock-hard pants).  I was pleasantly surprised that the Duggar recipe and method for fabric softening (they use the fabric softener in the dryer phase not the washing phase) was completely agreeable with my sensitive skin! 

I haven’t actually calculated how long this batch will last me or how much it will save but my conservative guess is that it’ll last me 3 years, maybe more.  Inconceiveable!

HAND-MADE FABRIC SOFTENER

Ingredients:
1  Container of Name Brand Fabric Softener
4  Inexpensive sponges, cut in half¹

Preparation Time: 10 minutes

Pour entire container of softener into a 5 gallon bucket. Fill empty softener container with water twice. (2 parts water to 1 part softener) Add sponges to softener/water mixture. When ready to use wring out extra mixture from one sponge and add to the dryer as you would a dryer sheet.

¹I think they call for 4 sponges because they have multiple dryers running at the same time in the Duggar laundry room.

It’s not that our family can’t afford laundry soap or fabric softener, we can.  But knowing what we know now, why would we want to?  Making our own is easy, is easy on the earth, inexpensive and time-saving.  So go, ya’ll.   Go forth and be a good steward of the money God has blessed you with and, at the same time, be a good steward of this beautiful Earth He has created for all of us!

Digging the Duggars,

The MobileMe Syncing Blues

Apple’s MobileMe service is a beautiful thing.  For $100/year, all my contacts, emails, calendars and browser bookmarks are completely and instantly synchronized on any PC I happen to be running Microsoft Outlook on, as well as on my iPhone.  And it’s worked splendidly for almost the past year that I’ve been using it.  That is, until most recently when suddenly and inexplicably I started to receive the following error message during the automatic sync process:

“Calendars could not be synced due to inconsistent data.”

This was annoying when it first happened to my Vista desktop but I soon learned that the problem does not discriminate operating systems as it also spread to my XP desktop and then finally to my Vista laptop.  Now all 3 of my PCs could no longer sync Calendars with MobileMe (it’s my understanding that this problem could also happen with Contacts). 

Forget any help from Apple.  Unless you own a Mac, you can’t speak to anyone or even chat with anyone that could help.  The various technical forums offered no viable solutions as each one of the suggestions I tried failed miserably including blowing away my Outlook Calendar completely and trying to sync down from the MobileMe cloud.  I spent countless hours trying to troubleshoot this now intensely aggravating problem. 

Here’s the solution that finally worked for me:

1. I unregistered all my PCs from MobileMe via the MobileMe Control Panel installed on my PCs.
2. Before blowing away any of my PC’s Outlook calendars, I determined which one was the most current and exported it to a file on my hard drive.  Then I exited Outlook, renamed the exported calendar file (because sometimes Outlook automatically grabs it and opens it) and re-launched Outlook.
3. Since I had previously ascertained during my troubleshooting trials that starting with a completely blank calendar in Outlook and syncing down from the MobileMe cloud proved unsuccessful, I reasoned that there was some sort of corrupt data in the calendar in the MobileMe cloud.  I wasn’t able to figure out how to delete the calendar from the cloud except to overwrite it from my blank Outlook calendar so that’s exactly what I did.   I deleted the entire contents of my Outlook calendar.  I did this by changing the view: View->Arrange by->Current view->By category then selected all the events and hit delete.
4. I re-registered the PC I was working on back with MobileMe (via the MobileMe Control Panel) and only selected Calendars to sync and selected Sync with MobileMe Manually.
5. I clicked on the Advance button and selected Reset Sync Data.  From here, I selected Replace Calendars “on MobileMe with sync info from this computer” then hit the Replace button.  This cleared out my MobileMe calendar.
6. Now that I had a blank calendar in the MobileMe cloud and in Outlook, I then imported my Outlook calendar file that I had previously exported.   Once it was imported, I then repeated steps 4 & 5 thereby populating my calendar data up to the MobileMe cloud.
7. From my other PCs, I re-registered them back with MobileMe (again via the MobileMe Control Panel) and resumed the normal syncing options.

And thus ended my syncing problems with MobileMe.  I still would like to know how the data became corrupted up in the cloud to begin with but for now I am content just to be able to sync again.

Doing the Snoopy Happy-Sync-Dance,

It’s a Sock Thing

I have a thing about socks: they must match one another, they must match the outfit and absolutely, positively must not have ANY HOLES. Not just on myself, but on my kids and husband, too. It’s one of those rare things that really embarrasses me because I feel if my kids and spouse are wearing mismatched and holey socks then that is somehow a direct reflection on me and my ability to present my family in public. And the ironic thing is…they could absolutely care less what is on their respective feet. Even more ironic is that I don’t feel any embarrassment if they wear wrinkled, stained or ripped clothing…just the socks.

Anyway, yesterday a friend stopped by to return something we loaned out and my husband and I were enjoying casual conversation with him in our family room. To my horror, I noticed that my husband had two toes happily sticking out of his right sock while the heel of his left foot was clearly seen from the 2-inch diameter hole of it’s sock. Not only that…but one sock had a Champion logo on it and the other had a Hanes logo. AAAUUUGGGHHHHH! I couldn’t believe my eyes so I got up from the couch to inspect the incredulous sight at closer range because I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand how they even ended up in his sock drawer. Standard practice while I fold clothes is to sift out all the ripped socks and clearly mark them with the word “DUST” in permanent black marker and move them to their new “dust pile” home elsewhere in the laundry room. Here’s what I found when I got a closer look:

Uh-huh.  See that?

He started out his day barefoot then at some point decided he needed to put socks on and rather than go aaaaaaall the way up 11 stairs to retrieve a pair from his sock drawer, he would see what was more handily available out of the much closer laundry room.  So he grabbed two random socks from the laundry room “dust pile” and blindly put them on his feet.  His ADD brain gave no consideration whatsoever to the holes OR to the very clearly marked word “DUST” on them.  And even after the revelation, as I pulled the socks off his feet, he simply laughed at his goofiness.  As did I. 

This ADD moment ranks right up there with the time he went to the grocery store for just one gallon of milk and returned home without it after paying for it at the store (he left it on the counter).  And also the time he came out of the shower exclaiming how WONDERFUL my new battery-operated exfoliator was when, in fact, it was my Black & Decker Scum Buster that I left in there because I didn’t finish busting the scum out of the shower.

Living with an ADD spouse does has it challenges…but it also provides it’s share of levity.   Love ya, Honey!!!

Trying to work on the sock thing…

Thoroughly Organized Thursdays: Hold On to the White Space

There’s a saying about homeschooling: “The hardest part of homeschooling is staying home”. It’s true! Especially when you’re plugged into a local homeschool support group as big as ours. We belong to Living Water Home Educators (www.lwhe.org) which currently has 175 member families with well over 300 kids. Between the co-ops & classes, sports, field trips, clubs, parties, gatherings, competitions and fellowship opportunities, add to that some non-homeschool related activities from church and other extra-curricular activities, and then pile on some library visits and various doctor appointments, we find ourselves hard-pressed to find any time for schooling at home! That statement assumes that we sign up for ALL of it which, of course, is an impossibility as much as we’d like to be able to do it all.

I discovered early on that it was waaaaaaay to easy to sign up for things as they became known. I use my computer for just about everything including keeping my calendar so I would check my online calendar (I use Microsoft Outlook’s Calendar feature which also syncs with my iPhone nicely) and if there was an opening that day I’d sign us up for it! That was all well and good until I realized that week after week we were signed up for something just about every day of the week and sometimes even two events per day if there was a doctor or therapy appointment. It got so bad that my kids would whine “Again??? Do we have to?!?!” whenever I excitedly announced our plans for the day. So the first challenge quickly became how to maintain some of the “white space” in our busy calendar so we could get some of the basics covered in our homeschool as well as temper our schedule so that we could enjoy some much needed down time.

The second challenge was keeping my husband informed on where we were on any given day. Since he runs his business right next door to us, he has the flexibility to pop in at any given time, hang out for a bit, or take the kids to lunch, bowling or to a movie, as his erratic business schedule permits. Often times he would come home and not know where on earth we were!

The solution to both challenges turned out to be a really simple idea that a fellow homeschool mom shared with me in scheduling her weeks: a large desk pad calendar hung prominently on a wall that is easily seen by everyone. For us, that prominent wall happens to be our coat closet door next to our home’s entrance. I hang it with a series of four velcro dots lined at both the top and bottom edges of the backside of the calendar.

The desk pad calendar we use is BIG: about 22″ wide by 17″ tall. You can get them from any office supply store for $5-$6, although this year we’re using one that was given to our business by one of our vendors. Each page covers the entire month so the squares for each of the days is sufficiently large enough to write multiple appointments in them. For each month, I pencil in (it’s important to use a pencil – NOT A PEN) all of our existing recurring activities (eg. the kid’s program at church on Wednesday night) as well as any known doctor appointments and birthday parties. Then, before I would commit to participating in any other activities, I FIRST consult my computer’s daily calendar to see if the timeslot is available and, if it was, I would THEN consult my prominently hung desk pad calendar to see if there is adequate “white space” left in that week. If there is, then I sign us up for the activity but if there isn’t, then I don’t commit to the activity and the balance of our homeschool universe is preserved.

My husband loves consulting the calendar on his way out the door in the morning to give him a better idea of what our homeschool day is going to look like…and when he forgets to consult it and unexpectedly pops in during the day to find no one is at home, the calendar reminds him of where we are.

This method of keeping everyone in the know and balancing weekly schedules isn’t just for homeschooling families; it can be used for public- or private-schooled families as well. For those families, the crunch time begins immediately AFTER school lets out in trying to fit in all those appointments and extra-curricular activities before the kids have to get to bed. It’s equally important for EVERY family to maintain a healthy balance of down-time and keep everyone on the same page, as it were.

Wishing you and yours adequate white space!

Bedtime Rituals: The Good Night Kiss

Every night my 9 year old tries desperately to escape the grasp of my 5 year old who, equally desperately, tries to kiss his older brother good night. If only the 9 year old would realize that by acquiescing for one second would negate the need for 10 minutes of struggling with the little (but strong) squirt!

Tuesday’s Tip: Get Free Stuff and Save the Planet With Freecycle

I love free stuff.  It doesn’t matter if it’s new, used, re-gifted or re-purposed.  I also have a passion for being green: recycling, reusing, repurposing, and conserving whenever possible. When I found Freecycle I hit the jackpot on both counts!  

What is Freecycle?  The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,873 groups with 6,885,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills.   It’s simple to join:  

1. Go to www.freecycle.org and search for the nearest “region” near you.
2. You will be prompted to sign up for your local freecycle email list via Yahoo’s Discussion Group.  This is how all Freecycle offers are posted and will land in your specified email inbox.  If you don’t already have a Yahoo ID you will be prompted to create one.  But don’t worry, you need never check it because you can specify the email address of your choice in which to receive your Freecycle messages.

After that, just start perusing the Freecycle postings in your email’s inbox every day and if something shows up that you are interested in, respond to the poster by email and if they pick you, designate a day/time to pick up that item from them.  It’s that easy.  

Freecycle isn’t really junk.  Some people refer to it as junk but you know the saying: “One man’s junk is another man’s treasure”.  Just in the past 6 months, our family has been blessed with the following “treasures” from Freecycle:  

1. Clothes for my kids (I haven’t had to buy any clothes for my oldest this way)
2. Linksys Wireless-G Router
3. A live dove with a cage
4. Brand new queen size mattress
5. New Iced Tea Maker
6. Pottery Barn Toddler Bed
7. 6′ long computer table (that I use as a utility table in my laundry room)
8. Nerf guns
9. Tiki torches
10. Wood & Wrought Iron Garden bench
11. Water cooler (heats & cools water)
12. 11 boxes of mason jars
13. Boxes and boxes of books & curriculum
14. National Geographic magazines
15. Boxes of pinecones
16. Cross-stitch supplies
17. Knitting supplies
18. Sewing supplies
19. 60 wooden hangers; hundreds of plastic hangers
20. Azalea bushes
21. Interlocking foam pieces for the cushioning the floor
22. Soccer cleats
23. Candles
24. Beach chairs
25. Various coupons
26. Cork boards
27. White boards
28. Photo albums
29. Metal lockers
30. Free-standing wooden bench swing

Our Freecycled Dove

It’s been amazing.  These treasures, some new and some used,  would otherwise just be left at the curb to take space in our landfills.  And my list doesn’t even cover 90% of what’s offered on Freecycle:  computers, perfumes, jewelry, furniture, household items (dishes, sheets, fixtures, etc.), trampolines, baby items, TVs, stereos, tires, appliances to name a few.  Even “junk” junk, like chicken wire, scrap metal, piles of wood decking, and old lumber!  And weird stuff like live beehives and a ton of coal! And it ALL goes to SOMEONE because there’s always SOMEONE that is looking for that precise item!  

Freecycle allows you to find a specific item. The other nice feature of Freecycle is if you never come across that certain item you have been wanting and waiting for, you can post a “Wanted” listing for that item.  I was looking for canning jars and within a few hours of posting my request I was offered 11 boxes of canning jars from 3 different freecyclers.  

Freecycle is better than having a yard sale.  Getting rid of stuff on Freecycle is better for our family than having a yard sale because we’re not particularly fond of accumulating junk all year long only to have to label, sort, organize, advertise & get up early to brave the heat for only a few bucks at the end of the day.   With Freecycle, as you come across something that’s of no longer any use, you just post it, pick someone, and set it out for pickup.  

Freecycle lets you unload stuff you have long forgotten about.  Sometimes you don’t realize you have stuff to get rid of until someone makes a “Wanted” posting for it.  Just the other day someone requested Wiggles DVDs & VHS tapes.  I have dozens of Wiggles titles that I had forgotten all about because my kids have long outgrown them.  So I passed on the blessing.  

Best of all, Freecycle makes you feel good about keeping unnecessary items from ending up in our landfills.  Not much more to be said about that.  

Make the most of Freecycle.  Many people join the Freecycle list then end up removing themselves from the list because the many emails in their email inbox makes it unmanageable for them.  Here are some tips to help manage the deluge:  

1. Create an email just for using Freecycle’s email list (ex. MyFreecycleEmail@gmail.com) and check that email’s inbox frequently throughout the day.  In this way, you keep your Freecycle emails separate from your regular emails.  The downside to this option is that you have to check more than one email account throughout the day.
2. Select Yahoo’s Daily Digest mode of email delivery versus the Individual Emails.  This way, you will get one email a day with all the postings from that day.  The downside to this is that because you won’t be getting the individual emails as soon as they are posted, you will likely miss out on the opportunity to get the treasure.
3. Create an email rule.  The best thing to do is if you use Outlook, or another feature-rich email client, add your separate Freecycle email account to your existing list of email accounts then create an ”rule” specifying that any email incoming from your Freecycle email address gets automatically filed into a specified inbox folder (ex. I call my folder “Freecycle”).  In this manner, I don’t have to bounce between different email accounts; they all come into my Outlook and I can see whenever a new message has arrived in my Freecycle folder and be able to respond to it quickly.

Now that you know the ins and outs of Freecycling, what are you waiting for?  Go sign up!  You’ll feel so good about getting free stuff that in no time at all you’ll be singing “I’m a Freecycler…I’m a Freecycler” (sung to the tune of “I’m a Girl Watcher”) on the way to the pick-ups!  

Wishing you lots of Freecycle jackpots!  

Reach Out and Skype Someone

Remember the old Bell Telephone marketing slogan “Reach out and touch someone”?  Or “Long Distance – the next best thing to being there”?

My brother, his wife, and our four beloved nieces recently moved from being 20 minutes away to being 6 hours away.  It was and remains a difficult adjustment for us emotionally.  So, sorry to disagree but picking up the phone to call long distance ISN’T the next best thing to being there.  But thankfully, with today’s technology, being able to Skype someone really is!

Skype is an application that offers voice and video calls over the internet (so it’s assumed you have an internet connection before using it).  The video calling portion of the application is FREEEEEEE! 

The first thing you need is the Skype application.  Go to www.skype.com and download it to your computer.  It’s FREEEEEEE!  During the installation process you’ll be asked to create a Skype account in which you will select a Skype ID and password.  The Skype ID doesn’t have to be your real name but it does make it easier for friends and family to find you if it is.  My Skype ID is irene.taschek.  

The second thing you’ll need in order to fully use the video calling feature of Skype is a webcam which, if your computer didn’t already come with one installed in the monitor, you can purchase an external webcam from Best Buy, Amazon, even Walmart starting as low as $30.   

Once those two are up and running, the only other thing you need is another person to Skype with!  It’s so easy to use, even my parents (both of whom are about to turn 70), can use it.  

The kids and I use it to Skype daddy when he’s out of town.  I can’t describe the joy in being able to talk to and SEE the person you are talking to at the same time while being separated by an enormous geographic distance.   Heck, we even use it to Skype not-so-distant loved ones just because…well, just because we can!  We love being able to stay in touch with friends and family in this manner.   Check Skype out…you won’t be sorry you did.      

Cousins Skyping One Another

 Skyping out,

The Makings of a Lumberjack

1. Start ‘em out young.
2. Dress ‘em up in warm Carhartts.
3. Don’t let ‘em leave without safety glasses on.
4. Stuff their pockets with grandpa’s beef jerky.
5. Kick ‘em in the butt to stop their whining on the way out the door.
6. Gather. Thaw. Repeat.

 Keep those fires burning!

Thoroughly Organized Thursday: Keeping Track of Your Books With LibraryThing.com

I have always owned hundreds of books…never wishing to part with a single one. Not even an old college textbook. Now that I have children, my book inventory has exponentially exploded to THOUSANDS of books. It’s a disease, I think. More so when you’re a home educator. It had gotten to the point where I would be browsing books in a store or yard sale and couldn’t remember if a particular title was already a part of our home inventory. It got bad…really bad.  I found myself buying books I had already purchased before!

I needed a system to help me list and organize all my books. At first I considered building my own database from scratch but then I somehow got clued into www.LibraryThing.com. It’s a FREE online database that allows you to create and organize an inventory of all your books. All you need to do is enter in the book’s unique ISBN (International Standard Book Number…that 10 or 13 digit number over the bar code on the back of the book) and…Voila!…it’s part of your online library with a photo of the book cover, pre-assigned categories, publisher, publication date and a whole bunch of assorted goodies.

Doing a unit study on volcanos? Simply search your LibraryThing.com library with the keyword “volcano” and it lists all the titles that include it!  Or do a search on a specific category such as “American Revolution” and any title in your library that is related to that topic will be listed for you!

Found some Hardy Boys books at a store or yard sale but can’t remember which ones you already have? Use your LibraryThing mobile (available on smart phones) to search your library real quick to be sure before you purchase any duplicates.

Here’s a few tips to get started:

1. If you’ve got a large inventory of books all over the house already, entering them all in will take some time.   Do a little each day or hire cheap labor (i.e. a teenager) like I did to plow through them in one fell swoop (or multiple swoops). 
2. After the books have been added, now is also a good time to physically organize them (back) into a fitting bookshelf somewhere in the house where it makes sense and will be easy to hunt down.  You can even add a location in the Comments section of the online book entry such as “Geography shelf” (if, in fact, you have one) or “Kid’s Bedroom”.
3. The process will go by quicker if the inputter is an expert in the use of the numeric keypad on the keyboard.
4. Some book’s ISBNs just can’t be located in the LibaryThing database sources.  No worries, there’s a way to input the book and its information manually.  Fortunately, this is a rare occurance.
5. I also use LibaryThing to manually enter other titles that are not of the printed type, such as DVDs (documentaries, movies, etc.) and even Unit Studies that I’ve save to PDF on my computer.  Just be sure to add an appropriate category or keyword to help locate that title during a search.
6. Get into the habit of adding any new books that come into your house AS SOON as they enter the house.  If you are a member of BookMooch.com, they provide a nifty little interface to immediately link over to LibraryThing during the process in which you acknowledge receipt of one of their books.

LibaryThing is more than just listing and organizing your books.  You can create reading lists, post reviews, have  discussion chats with other users, as well as share your library with others.  Personally, I just use it for listing and organizing books right now because that’s my greatest need at that moment (and, quite frankly, any other spare time I have is sucked up by Facebook). 

LibraryThing.  You’ll love it.   Happy book organizing, folks!