Our Own Library

We loooooooove books! I started collecting children's books long before I had children. The Grandmas send us books. We buy books from Scholastic flyer that comes home from school and we frequent book fairs, book stores and, well... anyplace that has books. So we have a sizeable collection. So many, that sometimes we forget what we have even though we read every single day.
Thus, the library idea was born.

First we had to clean up the playroom, which is in a constant state of disarray. Then we sorted books by subject and displayed them around the edges of the playroom, along with decorations, when appropriate.

The dinosaur section.


The Princess/girls section.


The animal section. I don't know if you've ever noticed, but so many children's books are about animals.


Unprompted, S. made this sign for the...


Unicorn and pony section.


Misc.



In case you are wondering, no these are not all of our books. Some were still on the bookshelf and we also keep some on an upstairs bookshelf.

Our first patron was B. She brought along her baby. You can never start too early imparting a love of literacy.


We had a 5 book at a time limit. Brenna got to work selecting her books.


She then took her books to the librarian, who had her fill out her library card.



And then scanned each book's barcode with a LeapFrog toy. This was a high-tech library, yo!


Then it was S's turn to choose books. Anyone want to guess which section she bee-lined to?



After we were done taking turns being the patrons and librarians, it was story time on the rug.


Luckily our library has a PJ's fine/shoes optional/no-hairbrushing-necessary policy.

As a bonus, when we cleaned up, I was able to prune out some books that we no longer needed and we will donate that stack. Also, the bookcase is now neat as a pin. For the moment.