Tonight, when we brought Nate home from his grandparent visit, I had a stack of exactly twenty-five books waiting for him.
Hello, my name is Whitney and I am a children’s book hoarder.
Book hoarding is easy enough: there seems to always be a library book sale, a thrift store, a used book store with stacks of beautiful stories just there for the taking. Full price, of course, is a little intimidating ($20 dollars for a book - crazy!), but a quarter here, a dollar there, and well, it can reach epic proportions quite fast.
But this is one vice I refuse to apologize for. To use a cliche, these stories are a part of our lives. Three short glimpses:
Long before we thought about having children, my husband and I visited a favorite used bookstore in Maryland, where I impulsively bought a copy of Richard Scarry’s Busiest People. Now, it ranks as one of the most well-loved books in our home. I make sure to bring it to any appointment or doctor’s visit as Nate literally will look at it for hours. The busy scenes are the perfect entertainment and secret vocabulary lesson (“Pumpkin car!”) for even my very young pre-reader.
Months and months ago, Nate’s first word was dog. He was obsessed with them. A cousin gave us a copy of P.D. Eastman’s Go Dog Go and even as an barely walking toddler, he was fascinated with the dogs, cars, and repetition. “Go dog go!” he loved to scream. The child would not hold still for anything else, but that sixty-four page book rendered him silent. It has become such a part of our family culture that we took it along during a family portrait session to be forever memorialized.
This winter seemed to blend into fall and sneak into spring; I keep wondering if it will ever warm up and complaining that life isn’t very livable right now. At the Prince William Library, Nate and I found Nikki McClure’s Mama Is It Summer Yet?. Even as the little boy in the story watches winter thaw and spring blossom, he is reminded by his wise mother that yes, summer is coming, but look, enjoy the beauty around you now. So yes, I remind myself now, it will be sunny again and soon we run and swim, but for now, let’s hold what we have now.
These stories are the reason I will continue to stop frequently at McKay’s Used Books and why I browse thrift stores to allegedly find something “on super sale.” The books that fill our seven bookshelves are the words of our daily lives. Not all of them are read right now, of course, but those are waiting for a different time to season our lives. We treasure the ones we enjoy now and anticipate the rest.