 Hey everybody, welcome to the Waldoch Way. I'm Jessica. And today's video is going to be our April Amazon haul. You guys, I am so proud of myself. This is two months in a row that this has not been like a ton of stuff. But that means next month's probably gonna be bad, especially if they have another sale. But they did not. Anyway, and I'm proud of myself. So let's get started. I'm gonna always start with the books. So the first book that I picked up was The Incredible Journey. Now this is the book that the movie Homeward Bound is based on, and we love doing books that have been turned into movies during the summer. It's one of our favorite things to do. We love reading the book together as a family, watching the movie, and then comparing the two verbally or with some of my free worksheets. So when I saw that there was a book about that movie, I didn't realize I've seen the movie as a kid and I didn't realize it was based on a book. I knew I had to have it because it's animals. And it has a Siamese cat in it, which is Emily's absolutely favorite breed of cat. So I thought it would be a good book to start our book and movie summer off with. And if you love books made into movies as well, I will list a blog post in the description box down below where I have 45 family-friendly books made into movies and a free printable as well. I also picked up the newest kiddie book. This is the fifth one in the series. She's read books one through four and absolutely loves them because, well, it's based on cats and also because there is some color inside the books and she really loves when the books have color like that. So there is about, let's see, 105 pages to these, about six to seven chapters. They remind me reading level-wise of Princess in Black or Marcy Watson. Maybe a little bit above those. It doesn't have a level on the back, but it's a very, very cute series and she has really enjoyed it. The next set is a series that I bought. I had originally bought it thinking that we were gonna be doing traveling the states next year and that this would be a good addition to traveling the states. I'm now not sure of our plans for next year yet, but if you're doing traveling the states, the series would be really good for your kids and if you're not, well, Emily's read the first one already and enjoys them either way. So it is the mystery, the capital mysteries. There's 14 books in the series. It is about a boy and a girl who watch the news and go to the United States, capital area and there's like a mystery in every book. So they are along the same reading level as Magic Treehouse. They are about 75 pages with about 10 chapters. So they reminded me a lot of Magic Treehouse but confined more to the United States and the area within it. So we have who cloned the president, kidnapped at the Capitol, the skeleton in the Smithsonian, a spy in the White House, who broke Lincoln's thumb, fireworks at the FBI, trouble at the Treasury, mystery at Washington Monument, a thief at the National Zoo, the Election Day Disaster, the secret at Jefferson's Mansion, the ghost at Camp David, trapped on the DC train and Turkey on the National Mall, on the National Mall. So it must be on top of it. So again, I think there was only 14 in the series and we just went ahead and got all 14 of them. All right, you guys, the next set of books that I have are, I would love to say they're my birthday books but they're not because actually I had already spent my birthday gift card and then bought more books. I went to Barnes & Noble and got, I think like eight books from Barnes & Noble. I finished reading Lisa Jules, then she was gone. And I haven't read like a mystery, thriller, suspense type book over a decade. So I wasn't even sure I was gonna like it but I loved it. I mean, like, loved it. So when I went to Barnes & Noble, I bought another seven or eight books, two of which being Lisa Jules. I sped through them in less than a weekend and so I realized that that is kind of the genre that I was really into right now. I also read another Ruth Ware book, The Lion Game, and loved it. So I picked up four more books from Amazon, two of which are Lisa Jules. So I have the house we grew up in, watching you, another Ruth Ware book, The Woman in Cabin 10. And then every time I looked up any one of these books, this one kept coming recommended. So I was like, well, I obviously need to read it and that is Behind Closed Doors. So those are the four books that I picked up for myself. And then I picked up two more copies of Home Learning year by year because I have a few cousins who are going to start homeschooling this year. And I wanted to be able to gift them this book. It's probably one of my favorite. I call it My Homeschool Bible. It stays on my nightstand. It's the one thing that I will say has brought me the most peace in our homeschool as far as knowing kind of what to teach when. So I like to try to gift it to new homeschoolers. So I bought them each a copy of that. Now, because I have been reading so much, you guys, I invested a little bit more than I probably would have normally, but I bought myself a book light. It is a rechargeable one. So you just take the clip off and this little N plugs into any USB, like even your little phone charger or your computer to charge. And it gets pretty bright. I mean, it doesn't look really bright because it's middle of day time, but it gets pretty bright when it is nighttime. And I ended up liking it so much and loving that it was rechargeable because we've had some before that use like watch size batteries and that gets expensive that I bought Emily, one of these two. So we have two of these now. And you will probably remember from last month when I showed you the aftershock headphones that Kevin had got for his birthday, I have actually been wearing and loving them. And again, I don't ever wear headphones. I don't normally like them. So I bought myself a pair because they've just been so awesome. And him and Emily really don't like hearing me edit videos because when you're trying to edit, you have to replay the same thing over and over and over. So I'll be like replay the same thing over and over and over replay the same thing over and over and over replay. And they're like, oh my gosh, would you stop? So I've been wearing these to edit is mainly what I've been using them for. But I just really, really liked that they sit on the outside of my ear. So I have a pair. Kevin has a pair and then Emily has like a knock off version of them. But now we all have our own sit outside of our ear headphones. All right, I have three games. You guys, that is so much better than usual. I picked up strike because it was a dice game. And Kevin loves dice game. Yachty is his favorite game. He picks it for everything. And this just looked kind of like a fun. It says eight to 99. So any age can play two to five players dice game. You have like this kind of like arena and you throw the dice in there and you can like knock other people's dice all the way or keep them from scoring. You just basically roll match and win. So I thought that would be a fun kind of quick dice game addition to our learning over the summer especially having something other than Yachty that Kevin would play. And then we also picked up two new, actually they're both tree based games. My sister and brother-in-law came over for a game night recently. And we, for whatever reason, were in the mood to play, I guess, tree games. We played photosynthesis and BOSC and then a card game arbitorium and we fell in love with BOSC which is a game of majestic trees and falling leaves. It really is gorgeous, you guys. It comes with trees that remind me a whole lot of the trees of photosynthesis. So you have these, you know, cute little very high quality cardboard trees and then you have small little wooden leaves. I think little wooden leaves and squirrels to go with it. It's really, really great quality and it's similar but a different gameplay than photosynthesis, but it has like a few rounds like that. It actually plays through each of the seasons. So you play through summer and fall and winter and spring. It is by Floodgate Games. And like I said, it was one of our favorites so we purchased our own copy. I will say, I was actually commenting the night we played it. Floodgate Games for BOSC says age is 13 plus. Photosynthesis from Blue Orange is eight plus. Emily can play photosynthesis and BOSC just as easily. So if you have a child who can handle photosynthesis at whatever age that is, ignore the 13 plus age on BOSC because if they can play photosynthesis, they can play BOSC. Then the other one we picked up was arbitorium. It is a gorgeous card game that has like all of these beautiful different tree cards. It is a lot of fun too. And the reason we went ahead and bought both of these to have in our collection is because Arbor Day is coming up and it is included in holiday fun around the world. And we just thought it would be fun to have even more fun with it by having some games. The last thing I purchased is kind of like a two in one type of thing. I purchased another caddy. You guys are gonna be like, really? I think I own four of these now. They are by far my favorite. They have been featured in my homeschool favorites twice, I believe. They're metal. They have four compartments. The back compartment will literally hold like an entire notebook, eight and a half by 11 book will stand up in there and it's straight down so the edges don't curl under, which I found is sometimes an issue with when you get caddies, they're tapered. So your books curl at the corners. This does not have that problem. It's very sturdy. I've had my original one for I think two years now and there's nothing wrong with it. I just keep buying new ones because I love them. The reason I bought this one was to keep our brand new markers. Now we bought a 40 pack of these markers and Kevin started using them first. He fell in love with them and then Emily started using them and she fell in love with them and it wasn't until we were doing holiday fun around the world and she started coloring some of the coloring pictures that Kevin had done like of Holy and the holidays that had very differentiated skin tones that we noticed that these markers or the 40 pack at least did not have a lot of different skin tone colors. I mean, it doesn't, they were just, it was a 40 pack of markers. So there was like some kind of peach, there was like a tan and there was like a brown but there wasn't kind of like those in between where you have like the varying levels of skin colors and Emily was very upset about that. She needed, you know, a wide array because there's lots of different tones of skin. So we went ahead and purchased the 121 pack of them. These markers are amazing, you guys. There is dual tip, so you have one that is the broad tip, kind of like a highlighter and then the other side is a fine tip. I don't know how well you can see that, but and then they have the colors at both ends of the marker, like where you can tell, you know, there's like a number so that you could have it written somewhere for what the colors are. If you get the largest pack, which is 121, they will definitely fit in this caddy because this is our 40 and our 121 put together and we were actually surprised because there was only eight markers that overlapped when we bought the 40 pack versus the 121 pack, only eight of the colors overlapped between the two. So we have over 130 colors in these markers now. And like I said, Kevin uses them, Emily uses them, I don't really color a ton, but I guess if I was to color, I would use them. They absolutely love them. They make the most vivid colors that I think I've ever seen out of a marker. So they're pretty amazing and they are thrilled that they now have over 130 of them in different shades to use. So that's it. That is everything that we purchased from Amazon in the month of April. We really didn't get that much, but we were on spring break for a week and we weren't even home. So that is probably a big part of it. But let me know in the comments down below what you purchased from Amazon in April because I'm always anxious to hear what you guys are buying.