Books and more books

A year ago (!) I bought some book ledges at IKEA with big plans to put them up in the kids' rooms to hold their vast collection of books.

Our nearest IKEA is 4 hours away so I had snatched them up when I had the chance...and then these nice little shelves just sat around waiting for their turn to be used...for over a year! (and several more trips to IKEA) Michael could have made the simple shelves easily, but to be honest, IKEA is so cheap it wouldn't have saved much money! (and the project it took a year to do would have taken 2 years with everything else we have going on)

We finally put them up last week in the girls' room and I'm so happy with them!

The kids have more books than I can keep track of. What you see here is probably a third or so of the books we actually have. (and they're getting more for Christmas!) There's an entire bin in the basement dedicated to the kids' books in Spanish and one or two more bins full of English books. Both Michael and I collected Spanish children's books because our children would, of course, be bilingual. HA! Epic fail on that one! From time to time the girls will ask me to read them a book in Spanish, but they lose interest after a while. Clifford the Big Red Dog just doesn't make much sense to them en espanol!


Long ago we learned to hide the best books and keep them somewhere only Mommy and Daddy could reach because of how 'loved' our books have gotten by our kids. Lots of torn pages and chew marks just mean they are well loved, right?
So we wanted to hang the shelves high enough to put some books out of reach...even for Elliott.

Speaking of Elliott...he is reading!! It's amazing to watch your kids learn to read. In the last month or so he's gone from knowing some words to being able to figure out just about any word in a kids' book. He now can choose a book from the shelf to take to bed with him and we can hear him reading to Henry at night! Precious!

Switching subjects now...these pictures have jogged my memory to post about the pouf you can see next to the book ledges. I made that months ago and never posted about it. I have a tutorial to share and everything. Soon.