Celebrate your very own Heart of Dakota box day!
When you order your homeschooling curricula from Heart of Dakota, you get to celebrate your very own ‘box day!’ Often times, by the time you order, our family has actually gotten to know you. Through helping on the phone, at conventions, through email or FB, on the blog or HOD Message Board, we often know you personally. As I see our sons and nephews picking your orders and packing your boxes, I envision your ‘box day!’ Through the past decades, we’ve received pictures of families enjoying their ‘box day.’ We love these pictures! I’ve put them in our HOD Photobooks, on our message board, and even on my office wall. We feel so blessed you are supporting our small family business by choosing to order from us. We thank God for you! That is why we take special joy in the emails, pictures, and phones calls we’ve received through the years capturing that brown HOD box day (or a white HOD box day, if you’ve been with us from the start).
Capture your box day in pictures!
I think the number one most celebrated way to remember box day is to capture it in pictures! Of all the pictures we’ve received of box days, this is the one we see most often. Year after year, we see children growing up with Heart of Dakota celebrating their box days! Smiling for the camera, we see beautiful children full of joy posing with their HOD materials! Often, they like to spread all of their books and CDs and things out in front of them like a buffet of living materials they can’t quite believe is all theirs! These pictures are precious to us. I often get to share them with our sons and nephews, as there is usually a brown HOD box and a massive pile of packing paper in the photo. These boxes and paper are special – our sons and nephews put their hands on them, and they packed them thinking of your children enjoying Heart of Dakota. We love it when families capture their box day in pictures!
Unpack, sort, and re-wrap your HOD things in gift wrap and bows!
If you have multiple children, each Heart of Dakota box will contain a mixture of your children’s things. Because of this, often times, moms will unpack the HOD boxes and separate each child’s things for the homeschool year. Then, moms will lovingly put them back into a box (or two – hey, we love books at HOD) for each child. Wrapping each box in gift wrap and bows, each child gets to open their box(es) and see what amazing books and resources he or she will enjoy for the year. The look on these children’s faces as they open their gift-wrapped boxes is priceless! We love it when families gift wrap their HOD things for their children!
Hide and seek your HOD things!
One of the more creative box days we have seen is the hide and seek box day! Often times moms do the sorting and piling of resources first. But then, they hide each child’s Heart of Dakota repacked box somewhere in the house. Let me tell you, we have some pretty creative moms! I think if it were me looking for the box, I may not have found it. Of course, this appeals to the dads as well, which is probably why some of those boxes have been hidden in near-to-impossible places to find! We love it when families play hide and seek with their HOD things for box day!
Make a treasure hunt for your HOD things!!
Yet another fairly ‘out of the box’ idea (sorry, I couldn’t resist) for box day is to make a treasure hunt. With each clue, children come closer and closer to the treasure. Outdoors, indoors, at home, not at home – we’ve seen it all! Anywhere can be a good place for a treasure hunt for your HOD box day! We love it when families make a treasure hunt for their HOD box day!
Sip your coffee, and quietly enjoy your own HOD box day as a homeschool mom!
Finally, one of the least captured-on-camera box days that is one of my favorites is simply opening your HOD boxes as a homeschool mom yourself! We don’t receive many pictures of this – any, actually. Homeschool moms are humble. They are focused on their children, not themselves. If someone makes it into the picture, it’s the children. But, I like to picture the box day I think many moms I get to know have. They are hardworking, humble, loving, amazing moms, who rarely take a moment to sit. I like to picture them receiving their HOD boxes and just sipping some good coffee, slowly unwrapping their boxes and dreaming of their year ahead. Lovingly fingering each book, unwrapping the beautiful notebook pages, smiling at picturing their children particularly loving this or that. It is a mental picture I have, and I love picturing moms quietly opening their HOD boxes and dreaming of their year ahead!
No matter how you enjoy your HOD box day, our family thanks you! We know you have a choice in who to support when you order things. What a privilege it is to have you support HOD by ordering from us! May the Lord richly bless your upcoming homeschool year, and may you have a wonderful box day, however you would most enjoy it!
Love in Christ,
Julie
This Post Has 10 Comments
When our boxes arrived this year, they sat unopened for a few days until I had a chance to go through them. Then I grabbed a few of my kids an we unpacked everything piling it into stacks of similar size items. Then I got the invoice and called out the books for them to find until they were all checked off. Then we labeled everything with colored stickers and put them back in the boxes for a few more days until we got a new shelf for all our materials and then we unpacked and sorted them on the shelves. Ready now to be place on our current year shelf. Some of your “box day” ideas sound fun. I’ll try to remember them next year.
Some years I have enjoyed organizing my HOD box things with our children too! They are such helpers, and it goes more quickly when we organize together. They often get side-tracked by reading the back cover of a certain book they are excited about or by flipping through this or that resource to see what their year will entail, but together, we can make quick work of organizing our things for the year. Thanks for sharing your box day idea here, Suanna!
I am thoroughly excited to experience our first ever BOX DAY!!!
Hooray for BOX DAY! Snap a picture if you get the chance – so fun!!!
I love Box Days, but I can’t let my 4 boys touch the books. They are allowed to look at the stacks, read the titles even, but not pick up the books. I have to put everything away on shelves, that no boy is permitted to take a book off of without permission or our year long book selection will be read before we get to the start of the year.
The pain of having avid readers huh?! We have the same rules
So true, Rebekah and Samantha! The books are THAT good! No taking chances they won’t read them ahead of time!
We love receiving our HOD box! I think I’ll re-wrap each of the girl’s this year as a special ‘start’ to our new school year. So thankful to be starting our 14th year with HOD!!! 1 homeschool graduate down, 3 to go!
Our family counts this as such a blessing, Carolyn! Thank you for your 14 years with HOD, and we look forward to the next years ahead with you with your remaining 3!!! I love the rewrapping idea – how special!!!
We love Box Day and didn’t even know it was “a thing”! My husband pulled everything out one day while as I was work and checked that everything had arrived. A few days later, when I was off and he was at work, I sipped coffee as I went through and organized the books onto the shelves and dreamed of the school year ahead and remembered the successes and failures of the last school year. When my girls realized what I was doing, they joined me in sifting through the books with many oohs and ahhhs! We are all excited to crack open our new books and see what the year ahead holds. Thank you to the whole team for making our transition to homeschool such a positive experience!!