Thirty Days Hath November

November in our house means one big thing: Novel-writing!  The NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) Young Writers' program happens during the month of November, and this was our third year to have someone participate.  As a matter of fact, this year we had THREE participants in our house!

Young Writers (anyone under the age of 18) can set a goal to write an entire original novel during the month of November.  They decide on a word-count that they would like to achieve and work all month to complete their stories.  Obviously, the older and more experienced writers have higher word count goals.  This was Chase's third year to participate, and he set a goal to write a 30,000-word novel.  Avery participated for the second time, and his word-count goal was 18,000.  And Courtney wanted to join in this year; she set her goal for 3,000 words.

We always calculate a daily writing goal for each novelist, excluding Sundays and Thanksgiving Day, so they know how much they have to write each day in order to finish on time.  They did a great job staying on schedule for most of the month!  So, by the end of the day on November 30th, we had 3 NaNoWriMo winners in the family!

Okay, so this guy didn't actually participate.  But, he heard his brothers and sisters talking about it so much that he would regularly run in to sit at the laptop, saying, "I gotta go do NaNoWriMo, Mommy!"

Here is Coco working very hard on her FIRST NaNoWriMo Novel!

Three Winners!  Avery's final word count was 19,002 words.  Courtney's was 5,491 words.  And Chase's word count total was 30,097 words.  That was a LOT of work!!  Congratulations, my young novelists!

Meanwhile, we wanted to get one other major task completed before the end of November, which we didn't START until the very last day of the month: decorating for Christmas!  Thankfully, we got it all done in one day and before the weather turned cold and icy.

The tree is up and decorated!  At first, the star on the top was a little crooked.  So, Chase came in and said, "Hey, look, Mom!  The tree is doing a yoga pose: Tipping Star!"  Haha!

Thanks be to Nathan for hanging the outside lights!  So bright and cheerful!

And look, there is already a sweet little treasure under the tree!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!  Hooray!