Teena,
Julie did a great job of answering you. I will also post below the message that we sent this morning to all those families who have purchased MTMM from us for the upcoming school year.
We are grateful for valued customers like you who have purchased Missions to Modern Marvels, and we realize that many of you may have purchased the guide with the intention of starting earlier than our current estimated September ship date. We sincerely apologize for the adjustment in our ship date, which is largely due to the fact that Carrie's father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer several months ago. He underwent major surgery followed by 6 weeks in the hospital. After finally returning home, he experienced complications that required further hospitalization and even now requires daily visits to the hospital for IVs. Nine months of chemotherapy are ahead for him. This definitely affected the time available for Carrie to write as we also happened to be in the midst of our convention season throughout this time. With all that has gone on in our family over the past months, we feel grateful to the Lord that we are still looking at an early September ship date.
In pondering how best to serve our customers, we have decided that it is very important for us to make using Missions to Modern Marvels a successful experience for you. We want you to have a great first few weeks of our new guide, and to do that we believe that you would need the entire guide with a full Appendix, full Introduction, and complete Student Notebook. The guide truly will not function well without any of these pieces. The Appendix and the Introduction are the last things to be written in our guides. Stopping to write those pieces now would be very difficult without having the entire guide in hand and would only delay the ship date.
There is also an extensive editing process that takes place all throughout the writing of the guide but especially during the last 4-5 days prior to sending the book off to our printer. Changing or rushing this process would result in things being missed, and we have no desire to send out copies that contain errors that would usually be caught in the normal process. With this in mind, we have decided that having only a portion of the guide would only lead to frustration for both you and your students. This is not the experience we desire for your family.
Carrie is now fully underway with the writing and is progressing very well. We are anticipating receipt of the guides in final form from our printer on September 11. The guides would ship out the following day, along with all backordered materials needed for starting your school year. We are very motivated to finish the guide by this time, as we will need it for our own son for the upcoming school year.
One way to gain time for those of you who may be used to starting earlier would be to use the guides 5 days a week, even though the guides are written for 4 days a week. We have done this ourselves in the past, and we were able to finish in mid-April (after beginning in mid-September). If this is not feasible, you could consider doing just math on the 5th day of each week to finish it on time, and then either carryover the guide into the next school year one month or consider not finishing the final month of the guide (which I hate to even mention, but it is a possibility just this once).
If these options do not seem feasible to you, and you prefer to return the guide due to the delayed ship date, we will gladly pay your return shipping and fully refund your order. You may also return all Missions to Modern Marvels related materials as long as they are in new condition. We want your experience with Missions to Modern Marvels to be a good one!
In closing, if you feel led to pray for our family, or for Carrie's father Ken, we would be very grateful. We know many of you have been touched by similar situations, and we trust the Lord for His provision in all things.
In Christ,
Mike and Carrie Austin