Four Moms Q and A

 The Four Moms: Smockity Frocks  and  Raising Olives, Life in a Shoe and  Me

Updated to add- don't miss my giveaway!

It's time for Q and A. As my husband likes to say, you got questions, we got answers, let's put them together and see if they match!

Q. What's going with the HM and employment?

A. He is employed full time now as a teacher's aid in the special ed class.  He has consulted with the Veteran's Aide people and they will pay to retrain him- so he is going back to school (starting in June) to get a degree to become a special ed teacher.  As it happens, the special ed teacher in his classroom is due to retire soon.  We hope he can just take her job.  He's good at it, and it makes him a much happier person than his previous job did.  The income made me happy, I must admit, and I do miss it, but I like having a happier husband much better, and it's nice not to get two a.m. phone calls about store alarms going off in stores that are a couple hours north and an hour south of us.

Q. How was your dad's funeral?

A. Thank-you for asking. I so very much appreciate all the kind comments we received.
This is a bit awkward- but there was no funeral and no memorial service. He donated his body to science and the medical university involved handles all arrangements, picked up Dad's body, and filed necessary paperwork. My father has been ailing a long time. Had been ailing a long time. We said our good-byes some time ago. As one brother said, he said them three times already, with three previous incidents with my dad.  And as somebody else said, a death at the end of dementia is a period at the end of a sentence.

Q. What do you do about socks?

A. We keep them in laundry baskets for a while, and a couple times a year we follow Cindy Rollins' advice and throw them all away.I cut them into strips and crocheted a long coil for a rug from them once, but Cindy was disappointed in me, so I left it as a jump rope and never finished the rug.  If you really believe it's Cindy's fault that I did not finish the rug, I have some other things in my life I would like to blame on somebody else.



Q. I wish I'd waited for the Kindle version of your book (4 Moms of 35+ Kids Answer Your Parenting Questions). Is there a way I can get a discount since I already purchased the e-book?

A. We have talked about this, and we have stressed about it. If we knew now what we knew then, we'd have done things differently. If the process had not taken this beginner longer than expected. If my right arm had not detached herself from my body and flown to Germany for two months.  If my dad hadn't died in the midst of the process of reformatting.  If, if, if.

  We just can't figure out how to accomplish this in a way that will be fair to all of us. We don't track sales, so we don't know know who really did buy the book and who didn't.  We don't have an exclusive arrangement with Amazon because of the e-book, and as near as we can tell, we'd have to offer a discount to everybody, not just those who purchased the e-book. And then it wouldn't be fair to those who already purchased the Kindle version full price.=(

We have been racking our brains for a creative solution to this, because we really do appreciate each and every one of you who purchased our book, and we know what it is to live within budget constraints. We hope we've come up with a creative solution that will be satisfactory to everybody. It was late last night at about 9:30 when this post was already written that we figured this solution out. 

IF you purchased the e-book already, and you want the Kindle version, send me an email at Heartkeepercommonroom  I hope you can fill in the rest of that addy so I don't have to share it with bots prowling the web looking for spam. It's a gmail thing.

In your email tell me the first Bible verse found on page 56 of the ebook.  Also make sure you put "Please send me a Kindle doc" in the subject line.  I will then send you the file that is documented for Kindle,which will include a Kindle formatted active TOC. It won't include the cover.  You can email the document to your Kindle account.  This offer is good only until Saturday evening, 7 p.m. Central Time, so please do not procrastinate.

But what if you already paid for the Kindle version through Amazon?  Is this FAIR?  Well, I think we can get a bit hung up on fair, but I'm with you.  So I have another goody for you.  IF you already purchased the Kindle version we cannot give you back your money, but I can send you a jewel of a vintage cookbook, formatted for Kindle, annotated with some updated notes and references.  This is free to those who have already purchased the Kindle version.  You have until Saturday evening at 7.p.m. Central time to email me with the verse at location 1441 in your Kindle version (it is a different verse).Please be sure to include the words "Send me the cookbook" in your subject line.

In the meantime, here are two thoughts- the item you purchased is not less valuable because something came up that you like better. Your purchase can also be thought of as encouragement and a way to bless others (thank-you!).

Before we settled on our (I think) very creative solution to the concerns of those who had already purchased the ebook, I had painstakingly gone through the step by step process of reformatting an ebook, and it took so much time I don't want to delete it.  So, if you'd just as soon format your own ebook copy, or maybe you'd like to use this for some other e-book, here are the steps I would take to format the ebook for Kindle before mailing it to my kindle.  Of course, these are specific to the word program I have- Microsoft Office Word 2007. I can't help you with anything else. My knowledge is limited.And some of these steps are specific to our e-book, but I hope this will be of use to somebody:


1. Open up the PDF file of the e-book.
2. Click on file in the top left toolbar.
3. Choose save as text- pay attention to where you saved the document so you can find it again.  Yes, even if you are going to open up the text file immediately.
4. This will save to notepad. Open it, copy it, paste it to word. There are undoubtedly better, faster, nicer ways to do this, but I do not know them, and this is the way I figured out.
5. Now the real work begins.

•  Replace all double paragraph marks with some other character that will be distinctive and wouldn't be found elsewhere in the document- a triple x, whatever.  Here's more on how to do that if you don't know what I am talking about:
• Go to find/replace.  Open up replace. Click on special.  Click on the paragraph mark twice. Now you should see something like this in the first textbox ^p^p.  Go to the second box ('replace') and type in ~~- it really doesn't matter what you type in this box, because you are going to remove it later.  click replace all.
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• Now repeat this again, with these differences- in the find box you only want one paragraph mark- ^P, or click on special and select Paragraph mark. In the replace box you only to click a single time on the space bar. Then choose replace all.
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• NOW, go back and replace the distinctive mark you chose with a single paragraph mark. Put the distinctive makr in the 'find' box and put a single paragraph mark in the 'replace' box.
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• Now you want to get rid of the manual page breaks- they are necessary for an e-book, but get in the way of a Kindle document.
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• To to 'find what' and type in ^m (or click on 'special' and choose manual page breaks). You don't put anything in the 'replace' box.  Click 'replace all'.
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• Personally, I would go to the top of the document and remove the top four lines of text.
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• All those dots in the table of contents are distracting for Kindle, and they aren't alligned properly. So highlight the table of contents, type three dots into the 'find' box, do nothing in the replace box, and click replace all.  You will then be asked if you want Word to do this for the rest of the document. Click NO.
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• Now, this is just me, but I think it will help with reading this on a Kindle.
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• Go to the find, replace box at the top right toolbar.  Paste Connie Answers in both boxes.  Move the curser to the second box, click on it, then go to the button on the bottom right called 'format.' click on it, choose font, and then choose bold, and choose an underline style.  Click on replace all. If you are asked if you want Word to do this for the rest of the document, say yes.
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• Repeat this for: KimC Answers (except that with subsequent replacements you do not have to repeat the 'font, bold,' etc, unless you wish to choose a different underlining style for each one)
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• Now look for the 'clear formatting' button.
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• Paste this into the 'find what' box: FOUR MOMS OF 35 + KIDS ANSWER YOUR PARENTING QUESTIONS
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• Click on 'match case'. Make sure the 'replace' with textbox is empty. Click on Replace all.
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• We have bullet points in the e-book and bullet points do not show up in the Kindle very well. So here's how I fix that:
• I carefully copy one of the bullet points- just the dot- and past it into the 'find what' box. In the replace box I type ^P, or choose the Paragraph Mark from the 'special' box, and then I follow the P with an asterisk: ^p*
• Choose replace all. This should make all the bullet points back into nice, tidy lists again. Scroll down to the appendix to make sure it worked.
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• Personally, I would also scroll down and delete the text about the printables, as they don't come through on the Kindle (for those purchase the Kindle version we provided a secret code you can use to access them online and print them from your computer). It's not necessary to delete that text, though. It will just look tidier.
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• This is still not perfect for Kindle- for instance, in this version, the table of contents is not hyperlinked and you've lost all the other hyperlinks in the document. I did that for you with the Kindle version.
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• In this version, you have page numbers, and they are not necessary and the document would be tidier without them. You can remove them by Pasting this in the 'find what' box:
• | ^#^#^#
• and then leave the 'replace' text blank and choose replace all.
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• Now paste this in the find what box:
• | ^#^#
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• Repeat.
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• Now this:
• | ^#
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• Keep in mind some people prefer to keep page numbers for reference when discussing a book.
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• There are also some pages with a chapter title at the top of the page. To format the document for Kindle I had to remove those by hand. I don't know a shortcut for it.
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• Save this document, then mail it to your Kindle account. I know this seems tedious, and there may be a faster way, but it is also easier to do than it is to explain, and less tedious to do than it is to read through this stuff.

That's all I have for today, because, WHEW!  Have a wonderfully blessed day!