library numbers

Maybe the title of this blog should be "We live in THE library" ... as in the public one. This year, just because I was curious, I've been keeping track of our numbers on library books. Here's our count for 2015:

-- books checked out in 2015: 1552
-- the most books checked out at one time: 198
-- the most books brought home in a single haul: 47 (we did this twice)
-- the most books checked out within a calendar month: 189, in September. November was right behind with 183.
-- the least books checked out within a calendar month: July had only 51. Three months had double digit numbers, the rest were triple.
-- libraries we frequented: South Windsor, Manchester, Glastonbury, and one visit to the downtown Hartford library

(Yes, I took a child to the library wearing a swimsuit. This was in August and she would wear no other clothing at all, except her pajamas.)

Caveat: "books" includes the occasional DVD, but I've kept those pretty limited this year - just a couple per month at the most.

Of those 1552, we lost only ONE and ruined only ONE when it was left outside in the rain. I know all of those books weren't read, and many of them were repeats that were checked out over and over and over. (Elephant and Piggie, I'm looking at you.) And that certainly doesn't include all our reading in general - that's just the library checkouts. That's not all the books we own at home and read incessantly, or read on the Kindle.

With all of these library books, we've been plugging away at the 1000 Book Challenge for Birdie, Magnolia, and Azalea but we're only at 408 after an entire year. Two reasons for that - one is that in February, we were well past 100 and someone deleted almost the entire list on the computer. So we were back to about 50, and I didn't have all the books anymore to rebuild the list. Oh well. We probably read them all again anyway, which is the other reason. For the challenge, it's 1000 different books - no repeats. And we've read LOTS of repeats this year. Last spring, I couldn't get Magnolia off an Elephant and Piggie kick for anything. The new goal is to read the remaining 600 before our camping trip at the end of June - 100 books per month should not be a problem at all.

My other goal relating to our mad reading skillz for 2016 is to do better at maintaining reading lists for the older girls - maybe even weekly or monthly blog posts of reading lists and recommendations. Sunny is rolling into the middle years now (year 5!!), and I need to practice maintaining transcripts on the possibility that we'll still be homeschooling when she hits high school.