The Reformed Home Schooler

I've been Away But now I'm back Nov. 27, 2007

I went away for a little bit both from blogging and actually physically away last weekend.  I would like to extend my sincere apologies to those of you who depend on my daily dose of wit and enlightenment (all one of you)

 So what have been up to??

Quite a bit actually.  I've been working on my 2008 Home School Catalogue for Upper Room Christian Books This is proving to be quite challenging.  It is my first "real" catalogue, up until now I purely relied upon the Internet and actual store sales.  I've given into the pressure of people at homeschool conferences I attend who are looking for something more tangible to take home with them.  I can't possibly fit everything I carry into one catalogue so it is more of a sampler.  I have selected items for each grade and subject.  I hope to produce two other catalogues one for Family / Christian Living Related Books, and One for Theological Books.  Each catalogue will be about 30 - 40 pages.  I'm still pretty cheap so I'm probably going to print few but will put them on a cd or dvd along with some other promotional items, video audio etc. 

So right now I'm working on the Homeschool one I'm half way through Grade 2 and it's taken about 3 or 4 evenings of work to get this far.  I'm finding it difficult for a couple of reasons I'm trying to make sure I have a good balance of price/quality and uniqueness as well as Canadian content when possible.  I'm using some of the items we have used ourselves, and some items I would of used if I had seen them previously.  After Grade 4 should be significantly more difficult as we have not home schooled that far yet so I will be relying upon advice from friends and reviews on the internet etc.  I'll feel much more confident with teh Family and Theology catalogues which is why I started with this one, get the tough one done first as it will most likely take the most time. 

At the same time I am updating my prices on my web site as the strength of the Canadian Dollar has allowed me to drastically reduce some prices.  And alot of items I have listed I have never fully added information for so I am slowly doing that when I come across such items when writing the catalogue.  I'm sure 7/8ths of the items I have on my site are missing graphics or descriptions, but I also intend on reducing the number of items I have listed in the new year.  I basically put every homeschool item my suppliers carried up to see what items would be popular when people searched my site.  This has actually proved quite helpful and I should be in a better position come spring as I work on my site.

On another note I have had some great time of fellowship the last few weeks 2 weekends ago a family whom we attended church with in Halifax were visitng PEI and they came to church and we had a great time of fellowship.  On US Thanksgiving I had the long weekend off because I work on a US contract at my real job so we went to the Annapolis Valley and stayed with our old Pastor and his family, it was a great time, very refreshing.   We returned Saturday night so we could participate in communion at our church and following the service as per usual on communion Sundays we had a fellowship dinner following the morning service.  And I have been having some great talks with another homeschool dad (actually the only other homeschool dad) in my congregation. 

I'll update some more tomorrow as I try and get back to regularly blogging as for now back to writing my catalogue.

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