If you let them read books

One area that I exercise my privilege is that I practice almost no restraint when it comes to buying children’s books. We’ve started going to the library, which I love and appreciate and genuinely use for my own reading endeavors, but if I’m honest it is more as a civics lesson than anything for kid’s books*. This being the case, Andrew has approximately 10,000 books in his room. His baby sister has (as this post is being written while feeding her before bed) three. 

 

We just don’t want to clutter her pretty head with all those words and ideas.

 

HA! But seriously, this was a parental oversight and/or failure on my part. I naively thought that we’d migrate Andrew’s more baby-ish books to Miranda. This hasn’t worked for the titles in his room. Similar to his parents, Andrew has a penchant for hanging on to books that he will likely never read again. The other factor which we need to put our foot down about is that as I buy Miranda books they have a sneaky tendency to migrate to Andrew’s room. This started out sweetly because we’d all do stories together in his comfy chair before naps. However, it feels like it has become a one way funnel.

So it’s time to remedy this one. We will try the following action items.

1.     We will install a proper bookcase/shelf in Miranda’s room rather than the basket we currently use. Her library should look more official.

2.     With all the hypocrisy we can muster we will get Andrew to do a bit of a book purge.

3.     He’s got to return books to her room when we are done reading them or at least the flow of book traffic needs to be more even. I actually would prefer that no one member of the family OWNS any books himself, rather that the whole family has a library, but I understand that we all four have certain titles that are special to us.

 

…maybe there is a book on book sharing.   

 

*Cutest moment - we checked out a dinosaur book which had the other titles in the series on the back. Andrew became obsessed with finding the other books so when we returned the first book we talked with the librarian and he found them elsewhere and placed a hold for us. Now we’re swimming in dinosaur library books.