Where Our Books Live #1

The process of moving can be a cathartic one.  It gives us the opportunity to evaluate the things we keep in our lives and offers us the chance to determine what we are ready to let go of.  But letting go can be so very hard to do, especially when we are talking about books.  This decision is made somewhat easier, however, when your move involves hand-carrying boxes of books up and down stairs. You'd be amazed at how much clarity three flights of stairs can bring.

In 2005 I moved three times. That was the year we got married, sold his condo, and bought our home together.   With each move my book collection dwindled, and by the time we moved into our house I carried only one small box of treasured tomes across its threshold.

My close friend and former college roommate, Tammy, was our first house guest in our new home.  I'd just given her the grand tour of our mostly empty new place and was busily chatting away about my plans for decorating it when - and I remember this clearly - she leaned in and asked in a worried tone, "What about all your books? How will you live in a house without books?"

Our lives and our book collections have really expanded since then. In fact, we now have the opposite problem: our bookshelves runneth over.  A key element in raising a reader is having a literacy-rich environment.  To put it plainly: kiddos need to live with books around them.  With that in mind, I thought I’d share with you some of the spaces in our home where our books live.

This is Kindergarten Kiddo's office.  Ok, so technically it’s supposed to be a breakfast nook, but we use it as her play/art/homework/reading space instead.  I have grand plans for someday turning it into a home library for the entire family, but that will have to wait for now.

Books in our house tend to grow legs and walk away: especially library books.  It seems that they get lonely and yearn to mingle in with our books instead of staying huddled together in the tote they came home in.  This has made for some frenzied last-minute room searches on library days.  To ameliorate this problem (and to save my sanity), my husband bought this lovely basket for all of Kindergarten Kiddo’s library books.

Kiddo knows that when she is finished enjoying her library book that it gets tucked back into this basket.  We keep the basket on the floor next to her table in Kiddo’s office.  See it in the picture up there?  It’s there- under the fuzzy yellow duck and the Hello Kitty lunchbox.  I realize that it’s not the fanciest solution, but it is elegant in its simplicity.  And let’s face it: I need all the simplicity I can get.