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.

Alyssa and I decided to head out to the Gilroy library after dinner/dropping Samantha at theatre. Our poor Hollister library is lacking for recent books. It's sad. I paid the equivalent of Santa Clara taxes to join the Santa Clara County Library. It's a totally different world. There is an entire floor for kids! And we can borrow e-books too.

The girls are excited about it. Samantha is devouring The American Girl series and Alyssa is in love with Biscuit, an early reader series. When I asked Alyssa if she wanted to check out more Biscuit books she gushed, "Really, Mom!"

We ran a few more errands and then took our dessert at Starbucks. We sat outside while the sun set and she drank her hot chocolate and danced. She sat facing the window so she could see her reflection. And she squiggled in her seat until she was finished. Then she got up and danced to the Starbucks music track. 

In those moments I feel so at peace. There isn't anything else in the world but my little life, my children, dancing, music and all. I sat and watched Alyssa dance on the patio while people and cars bustled around us. 

Book Nerds' Paradise

We bought our little house before we had kids and it seemed so big. We've acquired a lot of stuff over the last 10 years and are constantly purging and finding space for the existing things. The most underused room in our house is the dining room. Truthfully, I never wanted a separate dining room, but the house we bought had one. Not a deal breaker by any means.

In the throws of rearranging.

We don't use our dining room 99% of the year except for coloring, computer work, and bill paying. We were in need of something functional.

I stumbled on a blog and fell in love with the idea of bookcase storage. And I've (secretly) pined for a library room. After much discussion and a little table version of musical chairs, we decided that bookcases could be a functional storage solution. So we moved the small round kitchen table into the dining room, the five-foot rectangular one into the kitchen, and the vision was complete.

We bought some black-brown bookcases and a secretary from Ikea. We purchased five large and two small bookcases, one which rounded out the unusable corner. We can purchase doors too, but decided to wait until we could better visualize the space. We strapped everything to the wall (a must in earthquake country) and started shelving.

We moved the new secretary to the living room and the table back into the dining room. I can't believe how much bigger the space looks and how much more functional it is. As soon as we placed all the books, the girls started playing library and bookstore. They even got out the pretend cash register and started accepting Dora credit cards.

When the time comes we can open up the table and serve 12. But for every day this is a dream come true.

Samantha also inherited the two oak bookcases that were previously overflowing in the living room. She's so excited to have her own library to fill and it's made for extra storage in her room.

I love the satisfaction of moving existing furniture and pictures around the house, finding new ways to use what we've got.

The sanctity of books

In our house books are treated kindly, almost revered. We do not mistreat them, we do not write in them, and tearing them is punishable by law--children are not allowed another book at bedtime until they can prove that books are not confetti. So it goes without saying that books that are not our own should be held to an even higher standard. I even go so far as to put mangled books in the recycling bin rather than donating them. Nothing bothers me more than donated literature with torn pages or crayon marks.

In our single income state I've begun pulling from the library shelves more than usual. This week I collected an Elizabeth Gilbert ILL (Inter Library Loan--love the acronym). About a century in I gasped--okay I am appalled. Mind you, I'm not at all appalled by the content. . . . But the binding contains the leftovers, yes, I said leftovers, of someone's blueberry scone and the outside edges are marred by a cappuccino.

If I had so much as dripped a drop of tea on the book I'd have been embarrassed, even ashamed. If I had dumped a cappuccino on the edges and my scone was embedded in the ink I would have purchased a new copy for the library, and with a face full of shame, declared the book lost. But never would I have returned it to the library for it to be delivered to another and read in her bed with my scone crumbs falling out on her sheets.

Lord, help protect his or her tainted soul and banish them from all public libraries.