Books, Books, and More Books

Matt's workplace is doing a book drive to earn credit at a local used book store to purchase children and teen books to send to some northern bush villages. I had two boxes of kids books ready to donate, but I knew we had more that needed to move out of our home. I went through a shelf of preschool books downstairs and picked out some books. Then I invited Lincoln and Evan to look through the books in their bedroom. Believe it or not (I have a hard time believing it!) Lincoln and Evan have three bookshelves in their bedroom! THREE! They picked two books out of the first ten we looked at and then they decided that was enough to share. All the other books had to stay except for five duplicates that I found. 

Having learned my lesson, when I went through the other bookshelves in the house, I didn't solicit their help. Kara and I went through the board books in the school room and picked out all the nicer looking ones--they would be the ones that weren't favorites. (A well-loved board book is not usually in good enough condition to donate.) After collecting another box of books, I let the older children look through the children's books I had collected to make sure there weren't any of their favorites in the pile. Out of the hundred books they looked through, they only reclaimed five: Disney's "Knock, Knock! It's Pooh!" (a board book with a little Pooh faced door knocker on it), "Say Boo!" (a very thin Halloween book), "Scooby-Doo! in Jungle Jeopardy", "Let's Go Camping with Mr. Sillypants" (a very silly book), and "Born Yesterday: The Diary of Young Journalist" (a very odd book which Viva, our comics addict, wanted to keep).

So we will be donating three boxes (around 200 books).  I wish I could say there is empty bookshelf space, but sadly there isn't. This just cleared up some clutter...and hopefully started a regular tradition of sharing our books with others.  We will be buried in books if we don't.

*****     Update!     *****

Yesterday the older children hopped in the van to go with their mom to donate the books. She needed help carry the multiple boxes and bags in. While they were driving to and back from the donation location (Matt's office building--he's out of town), the children listened to their history lesson on tape. Homeschool is the best!