…Kindle Cover 2.0…

Three weeks into September, and we are well and truly in the thick of birthday season. There has been more cake than we are capable of eating. Countdowns and sleepless nights and early mornings and a rolling festival of celebrating our four favourite little people.

This year, our beautiful Bear turned 12. TWELVE. I’m not really sure how that happened. He’s at that awkward in between stage of still playing with stuff but also starting to grow out of a lot of things, so trying to decide on his big gift was hard…in the end, we settled on going a little above budget, and we bought him a Kindle Paperwhite. The kid devours books like he is in the library of Alexandria and the fires are lapping at the doors and he needs to read as many books as possible before they burn so that he can save the knowledge to rebuild civiliation, so we knew it would go down a treat, and indeed it has. He used some of his birthday money to buy some books, as well as starting a Kindle Unlimited subscription, and has been reading pretty much constantly ever since. His tally, in the last 10 days, stands at 20 books, as well as having reread a few of those more than once.

As part of his gift, I also made him a cover for the kindle, to help protect it and to set good habits for the care of electronic devices. I used the same method that I made my own kindle cover with, using some denim from my stash for the inside, and a cute green fabric printed with little cars – bringing in his favourite colour as well as another interest of his. Second time around, it was even quicker to make, and half hour in the craft room had it knocked over and wrapped up.

Now all that we need to do is negotiate the use of prepaid wifi via dongle at the farm, since we don’t have internet connected yet, and the hotspot on my phone is currently running constantly to keep up with his book buying habits!

(The photo doesn’t really show the marks of a well-loved device on the edge of the cover!)

With homeschooling, more time at the farm planned, and our next big road trip coming up, the kindle seemed like a good place to start loosening our kids-and-devices limits. We have set him up his own Amazon account so he can use his pocket money and gifts to buy his own books and be in control of his own spending, using his Spriggy Card**.

So far, it seems to be working well – our biggest problem is convincing him he needs to do his chores before reading!!