The Twelve Days of Something Giveaway

Many thanks to my son, who decided on the name of this giveaway. He thought that my original title, "The Twelve Days of Whatever," sounded too flip and, as he put it, just doesn’t flow well.

Tomorrow is the first Monday of the new year. I'm so thrilled. Really.

Okay, I'm not. I'm still not over the cold that I fought off just long enough to wake up completely ill on Christmas morning, and as of tomorrow I really have to plunge back into every kind of work I've got. Writing, editing, homeschooling, homeschooling other people's kids, giving exciting motivational talks about homeschooling (whee), and let's not forget the joy of housecleaning. Oh, and I just found out that there will be TWO vacancies this month in the little apartment building of which I'm the on-site manager, so I'll have people calling night and day about those. And the longer they keep me on the phone, the less likely they are to want to rent an apartment. Don't ask me why people call to give me their half-hour autobiographies regarding an apartment they don't want. I don't know. I just want it to stop.

But I digress. A lot. I'm sure you're used to it by now.

So, resisting the urge to crawl into bed and insist that I'm really really just not well enough yet to deal with all this, I'm going to try to ease everyone's transition into 2010 by giving away a bunch of stuff. One item at a time.

Okay, it's books. You probably guessed that.

Every one of them was a gift of some sort. Most are review copies. A few are from fellow homeschoolers who asked if I could find a good homeschooling home for some of the stuff that's crowding their shelves.

All of them have adorable life stories that I will present in terrifying detail.

All you have to do to qualify for a free copy of whatever-it-is is post a comment here. And because I'm trying harder to be an actual business person, and of course SHM needs all the publicity it can get, if you can show me a link to a posting you did about SHM on your blog or a homeschooling listserv or loop or something, you can use that as an extra chance to win. I'll be doing my usual random number generating to figure out the winner of each book, since if it's left up to me I'll just start crying.

You don't have to write an ad-type thing about SHM per se. (“This magazine saved me from the heartbreak of psoriasis!”) You could post about the good old Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List. If you like any of the other free-to-read online articles, you could mention and link to one of them. You could post about Bitter/Sweet and promise to bake a batch of brownies for whoever buys you a copy.

I'm going to try to handle this giveaway in a fairly rapid-fire fashion, since it's roughly based on that whole "every day there's a new present" song. So if something sounds good to you, do post your comment promptly, because the next day I might already be moving on to the next giveaway.

I'll start small and pretty, with Julie Shepherd Knapp's graceful paperback storybook "I Learn at Home -- Today's Lesson: Japan." You many know Homeschool Diner (www.homeschooldiner.com), Knapp's web site. "I Learn at Home" is a story she wrote about a day in the life of an eclectic homeschooling family. The main character, five-year-old Rosie, and her family are doing a unit study on Japan. They learn about Taiko drums, kimonos, Tokyo, Japanese volcanoes, the Japanese language (written and spoken), origami, and of course food. Their math is done on an abacus today.

The art of this book is beautiful, with black-and-white charcoal-style illustrations that I was impressed to learn were photographs altered to look like drawings. And the story’s family are not scary, overachieving homeschoolers who will daunt a timid reader. The day is presented with humor and a genuine sense of fun.

The inside of “I Learn at Home” is in perfect condition, but because I have a bad habit of letting my books knock around in my purse or backpack, the front cover has a couple of smudgy spots at the top.

Let me know if you want it.