The first thing that came to mind was the public library. I don't know if this is standard in other counties and states, but the Multnomah County library system is awesome. Not only do they have just about every book you could ever think of, but you can reserve them online and have them sent to your local library for you to pick up.
With a lot of the books our kids like, there are other books by the same author listed on the back, so we just go on the library website and reserve those books. Then, it makes for a fun adventure to go pick them up when they arrive. Sacha and I have also benefited from this, because we can get and read books that we hear about in various places and then return them. With the exception of a few well-loved books, neither of us is a big re-reader, so getting books from the library is perfect.
The other great thing about the library is that you can have up to 150 books checked out at once! I never, ever thought we would care about this, but at one point last week, we had 76 books checked out. This prompted a massive library book purge, but nonetheless, it's really great to be able to check out a huge pile of picture books and not worry about if you're going to hit your limit. As a friend was recently saying, her family will take out 25 kids' books, keep them for a week or two, and then take them back and trade them in for 25 more, and repeat, and repeat.
Mateo and Natalia, thanks to their moms and the generosity of friends and relatives, also have a huge collection of books that they actually own, and they love those books. Having the library system in place makes them appreciate books that we get to "keep forever," as they put it, even more. It's a win-win!
Multnomah County library system, I love you. Let's keep this relationship going!
In the spirit of my uncle's suggestion to take photos of your house at various points, so that you can remember what it looked like during different phases of your life, I decided to take some photos of our bookshelves. We keep our books on the top shelves and give the kids the bottom shelf of each bookshelf, except in Natalia's room, which doubles as the playroom, in which every shelf is kid territory. Was that a run-on or what?
Anyway, without further ado, I present our some of our bookshelves, which are actually not as full as they often are, thanks to the aforementioned massive library book purge. We stack the kids' books to make it easier to find things, because they tend to get lost with their tiny spines if we have them upright.
Oh, one more thing! I should note that we also have a huge collection of Spanish or bilingual books that Sacha has collected over the years, and those books have their own piles. We have a system for organizing all the piles, but, unfortunately, I'm not so great at maintaining it, so each pile is more like a big surprise for the kid looking through it!
1 comment:
I can totally relate to this post. We heart whomever invented the library. I've always been a big library person, but with kids, have found them to be even more invaluable.
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