Thrift stores can be awesome and my family sure loves them. We visit our local thrift stores at least once a month. We have two locally that we support: the hospital thrift store and our local community pantry thrift store. We donate and we buy (a lot).

My parents love to shop furniture because they like to refinish the pieces for resale. I have a small house so I buy what I will use. But we buy books mostly. And truthfully we have a lot unread; but when I ask my kids if they want to go to Pat's they get so exited. They don't care about anything else in that shop except for the books.

Our little library

If we're lucky we find old library books or an entire series. I picked up 32 Magic Treehouse books over two months and recently the library a county over gave up a series of Cynthia Rylant early readers: Poppleton and Mr. Putter and Tabby. I think I picked up about 15 of those.

Samantha tried reading the Magic Treehouse series, but it just didn't interest her. So when I found out that one of Samantha's classmates was having difficulty learning to read I gave his mother the entire series with the hope that it might interest him. One day he came up to me and told me how much he loved the books. At first his mother read them to him and slowly he started sharing in the reading until he was on his own. He couldn't wait to read through them all.

Alyssa is at the cusp of learning to read so early readers like Biscuit are becoming very important in our house. And reading an entire series of books that have a common character appear to be what will interest Alyssa the most.

My husband used to moan and groan about the constant influx of books, but he's finally given that up. He sees the excitement in the girls' eyes when they surround themselves with books. And when our interest has waned we bag them up and donate them right back to where they came from.