A Quick Word (or several) Regarding Books

If you have me on Instagram or Facebook, you've seen this photo of our drastically reduced kid library after a couple of rounds of cuts were made to the stock:

We're at a really fun place in books right now - I'm in the middle of reading the Chronicles of Narnia series to them at night (and we have The Borrowers series on deck) Carly is in chapter books, but she still enjoys the beautiful longer picture books, like Jan Brett and company. Bree is in early reader picture books, think Mo Willems (LOVE his stuff!), and she likes read-alouds like Carly's longer picture books. Katie is in board book territory both for her own development and for the safety of our paper books. That kid is a monster with the ripping and the chewing! Anyway, we just bought three more books today, because there is no such thing as too many (good) books. =)

....and because Rule Number 1 is Mommy never says no to books. It's my favorite thing for gifts and I'll almost always help pad allowance spending if they're a dollar or two short of the book they want. I'll make them save up and work for toys or movie tickets, but Mommy never says no to books.

We do have a few guidelines though...for example:
   - No books where Barbie is getting engaged or people are trying to trick other people into falling in love with them. No boyfriend/girlfriend stuff.

 - No Dora. Sorry, I'm sure she's a nice girl, but I can't stand Dora. TOO MUCH YELLING!!!!!

 - Carly has to pick a book within 100 points of her Lexile before she can pick a "fluffy-book." You know what I mean...the kid equivalent of chick-lit. Because her teacher was ah-mazing this year, Carly's level has gone way, way up and finding appropriate, interesting material is not that easy, but the awesome Lexile website narrows things down. Also, there is Amazon.

 - No Captain Underpants, ever. I know she reads that misspelled, scatalogical garbage at school, just like I know she swaps out for her friend's preservative- and dye- and hfc-laden strawberry milk at school. I'm not naive, I'm just picking my battles. =)

And that's basically it. There are so many wonderful, beautiful kids books around, and a quick Google search brings up so many lists, you could spend hours just writing them all down! We believe that reading is the foundation for success in school and later in life, and we're so proud that all our kids love books, too.

It helps that we never say no to books. =)