“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”
Something I thought about all the time during my first pregnancy was building up my daughter's library. Reading to her was the thing I was most looking forward to, and I couldn't wait to share all the books that I had loved as a little girl.
In these plans I was quite fortunate, because my parents had kept the extensive collection they had built for me as a child. They had Rubbermaid tubs filled with books in their basement, just waiting for baby J to come and rifle through them.
However, the vast majority of those books, even if they have hard covers, have paper pages. I had one soft, plush, toy-book, and one board book (a much older version of this) as a baby. I'm not sure if this is because board books weren't really "a thing" thirty years ago or if it's because my parents lived in outport Newfoundland, hundreds of kilometres away from even a second-hand bookstore, but that's the way things worked out. In any case, none of the books were very baby friendly, so I slowly began to pull my own collection together.
In all honesty, it wasn't really a hardship. It gave me the best of both worlds: reusing favourite books from my childhood while getting to buy new books for the baby to enjoy. Plus, as there are no Indie bookstores in St. John's (one day I will change this!), all those extra books meant tons of Plum Points on my Chapters member card!
In a perfect world, I would have had a perfectly designed reading nook in my daughter's nursery. I would have decorated it with my favourite quotes and picked out an amazing bookshelf. I would have painstakingly decided which books to feature and in which order they should be placed (sorry to all the pedants out there, I don't alphabetize!). Instead, because J was born during my last week of medical school and I was getting ready to move to Ontario for residency, her new books were popped into a clear plastic tub and arranged from biggest to smallest. Not quite what I had been envisioning, and unfortunately this setup continued in our rental home in Ontario, as there wasn't really any space (or extra funds) for a fancy reading nook.
Still, it was the act of picking out those books that was really special. Rifling through shelves, searching for the perfect selection, envisioning what it would be like to flip through the pages with my daughter. I received some books as baby shower gifts, others from family members who understand how much reading means to me, and a few from friends whose children had outgrown them, but the vast majority I picked out myself. I spent more on baby books than I did on clothes, and that trend has continued over my nearly eighteen months as a mother.
I will never tire of picking out books for my little ones, just as I'll never tire of reading to them.
No comments:
Post a Comment