Good Bye

Photo courtesy of smartkids

Good bye old friends...

This almost killed me. I had no inkling of how difficult it would be to go through our children's books. We are firm believers in "pay it forward" and decided to go through our books and donate the ones that the kids had outgrown to our school. We have several teachers barely out of college and thought it might help them build their classroom libraries. They were excited, the kids were excited and I was...until we started. It was hard. Every book we picked up, seemed to have memories attached to it. Of course we kept the favorites, and most of the hardback books. We definitely were not left with a dearth of books, given that we have so many that we have broken more than one bookshelf. :-) But still, slow death by papercuts....

We are readers. My kids love to curl up together and read. We like to pick quirky books to read together as a family,and we all have our own favorites. We try to keep one night a week in the winter put aside when all we do is read our books, the kids and I in the same room, everyone sharing a bowl of popcorn and excerpts from our current reads.

I know all of that will continue. But still...It killed a little part of me.

I know that we kept the kid's favorite books.

I know it was a good thing to do, and hopefully teaches my kids the principle of giving to others.

I know that other little children will enjoy those books and hopefully catch the love of reading.

But still...somehow, super-imposed over that humble little box of books were visions of my chubby babies sitting in my lap learning to read those books. Time moves so quickly. Good bye old friends....

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