Saga of the travelling books

Good news – this week we got some school books from Canada!

As some of you know, on top of her classes in Spanish at school, Hannah will be working through a Canadian curriculum this year.  Over the last few months we’ve been working with an office in Calgary to make arrangements.  Everything was set to ship the books when they arrived at the Canadian office.

Then I got a phone call.  "Hi, James?  Your books are here.  You can stop by and pick them up any time."

Sorry, but I’m not going to be dropping by your office in Calgary any time soon!

Apparently the person that we had been working with was on holidays, and we had been lost in the shuffle.  Then began a series of phone calls and arrangements as we tried to get the books for the start of the school year.  By the time the office shipped them (our bill, of course) we were in a hurry (always more expensive).

The books arrived in Dallas, and we made arrangements to have them picked up.  First, the people who were going to pick them up forgot.  Then we talked to someone else, and they said they might not have room, but suggested a couple other people.  I emailed them, but didn’t get a response.  Then someone discovered that the books weren’t even there – someone already had them, and they were in Mexico!

So, we contacted this person, and found they were in Puebla.  Some friends of ours in Cuernavaca were travelling there, so they offered to pick them up (they’re in the process of moving to Puebla *sniff*).

So we wrote several emails and made several phone calls to try to get the boxes somewhere where someone else could pick them up and then get together with our friends who would take them back to Cuernavaca.

Finally, we got the books – over 30 of them (some bought, some borrowed) (Hannah has to learn all this stuff?!), including classics like Voices from Lac La Biche, numerous math, reading, and craft books, and of course the science…. wait a sec.  Where’s science?

Oops, I don’t think they’re all here.  Ah well, another email – no answer – we’ll have to try to call the office in Calgary and get the books we’re missing…

We’re also still getting books from the Come Sit By Me curriculum that Hannah and Nathanael have been doing (it will be part of Hannah’s program this year too).

By the way, I really like Come Sit By Me, by Cyndy Regeling.  It’s for children ages 4-7, Christian, and packed with Canadian content.  It’s flexible, fun, focuses on studying and memorizing Scripture, and uses some great Canadian story books (many of the optional books are a part of Hannah and Nathanael’s wish list.  Although I think we have most of the compulsory ones, we’d love to get some of the other books).

We got one of the last story books for school in our regular mail package – and got a surprise.  The book is The Dust Bowl, written by David Booth and illustrated by Karen Reczuch (a good book about the Great Depression – the Big Dry).  We had ordered a used copy (we were able to order a lot of the books used), and we opened it up, and lo – it was signed by the author!

We actually got a couple of books that happened to be signed by the author – but not like this:

Anyway, now it’s time to sort all this stuff out and see if we can get a little serious eddy-kating underway.