I am blessed to have two children who love to read! In fact, my 7-year-old son is known for swiping his Dad's Playstation Magazine and hiding it under his bed before my husband has had a chance to read it. We knew his zeal for reading had reached new heights when he started making off with his nursing journals too.
My daughter insists on saving all of her birthday and Valentine's cards and routinely reads through her current stash. She reads our Webster's dictionary quite regularly, and I had even encouraged her to share a "word of the day" with the family each night at dinner until I started noticing a disturbing pattern in the words she chose...Adder, Anaconda, Asp, Cobra, Copperhead... Last Fall, we had to confiscate her Harry Potter book at bedtime in order to keep her from reading it in the dark. After discovering that she had been sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to read in secret, we had to tell her that an alarm is set to go off if anyone is creeping around downstairs after Mom and Dad go to bed. (Of course, this backfired on me months later when I wanted her to run downstairs to fetch something for me after we'd all retired upstairs for the night.) Whether it's library books, greeting cards, yard sale finds, magazines, or another generous Amazon shipment from Grandma, there seems to be an abundance of reading material circulating in our house. Even the shortest car trip requires a traveling library, and I want to encourage their bookishness. To contain all this fabulous print, we have bookshelves strategically placed in every major room of our house and magazine baskets in all the bathrooms. Yet it remains a struggle getting my little bookworms to re-shelve with adequate frequency. Thus I have introduced the "book basket", where reading material can be tossed with ease by the day's appointed "librarian" during our quick evening tidy-up. Every couple of weeks, the kids re-shelve the contents of the basket and I slyly seed it with a few neglected titles from the shelves upstairs to encourage them to select a variety of different texts to read. "So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install, A lovely bookshelf on the wall." — Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
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AuthorValerie Sheridan is a professional organizer, wife, mother of two, and Founder/Owner of EasyPeasy Living. Archives
October 2022
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