Happy first Friday of December! I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving weekend and beginning of the Christmas season. We had a normal week this week and it was wonderful! We haven’t had one of those in so long. Normal and healthy is such a blessing.

I want to thank you if you prayed regarding David’s lack of work that I recently mentioned. He has been OVERWHELMED with new projects this week. We asked for prayer in a few different places and the Lord has abundantly answered those prayers. There is one project offer being finalized that will feed him steady work for many, many months so we are praying that does happen. He’s still waiting to hear on another long-term project that he hopes to get since it involves maps and he loves working with maps. There are also many other smaller projects he is starting with a wide variety of clients and needs. Thank you so much if you prayed for him and us.

This Week’s Artwork

Today is A Young Woman At A Piano by George Goodwin Kilburne. It is described as “watercolour over pencil heightened with scratching out” (1880).

I’ve featured Kilburne before:

• Simple Living This Week No. 92 (includes biography)
• Simple Living This Week No. 43

Homemaking

My main accomplishments were finally celebrating Thanksgiving on Sunday and getting the house decorated for Christmas. I do have one bin left for the few upstairs decorations we put out that I hope to finish today.

I haven’t done any Christmas shopping at all. I have a couple of little things I picked up over the summer, but that’s it. I hope to start next week. My hope is always to be done by December 1, but it never happens. There is always some obstacle in the way every year.

There are several boxes of things that need to go to Goodwill. I had hoped to finish that up before the holidays, but it didn’t happen. Maybe this weekend, but probably next week.

Homeschooling

We had a good week of homeschooling. We’re back at Jane Austen (English Lit), Art History, The Middle Ages (Vikings), and the Psalms. We’re going through a book called Joy to the World: The Stories Behind Your Favorite Christmas Carols. We did a few last year, but didn’t finish so we’re going to try it again! We’ll be getting back at math and science as well.

Work

I’ve spent a significant amount of time on products and my website.

If you scroll through the first two pages of the blog, you’ll see that I’ve published many new posts. I’ve also updated some and republished them. I started up again on the Christmas Eventide Blessing posts that I started last year. I won’t be able to do them every night this month, but hope to do many. I have a plan with the poetry posts and that will start developing as well.

I’m in the process of finishing up a post and product about Christmas in Sweden. It’s been partially finished and on my to do list for a number of years and I’m determined to get this done this year!

I added a small green button at the top of each post that gives an option for printing the post or making a PDF of it. You can control the size of the font and pictures, remove pictures/graphics to save ink when printing, etc. I added it especially for the homeschool moms who use the unit study posts I’ve done. I’m in the process of simplifying/redoing them all and adding more posts that are partially finished. That will be an ongoing project for several months.

I continue to add products to my shop. The new ones are added to New This Month In The Shop as well as the appropriate categories.

I set up a shop yesterday on a newer platform called Classful (Sallie Borrink). I haven’t added any products yet, but plan to start doing that today. Thankfully they do not use PayPal, but Stripe. We are all about diversifying our income so I am going to try out this option and see how it goes. They have the best terms offered by any platform focused on educational products. I hope they succeed.

Related to that, my Etsy shop took some months to show results, but it’s now sending a little steady trickle to us each week. I’ve honestly not done anything with it other than add products. The negative about Etsy is you have to pay a listing fee for every item every three or four months. I need to spend some time deciding if some of them are worth keeping on there. I also need to add some products and try them on that platform. I haven’t added any of my Fun Fact Cards and they might do well. My understanding is that many sellers on Teachers Pay Teachers are moving their products to Etsy as well so it may make that a better platform overall for those kinds of products. Time will tell.

That’s what I’ve been up to. What have you been doing? I hope you’ll leave a comment and share what is going on in your home!