No, the herd is not the kids! The herd is the crowd of nearly 4000 books in my house. Some mind their manners in the library, some jostle in the assorted book shelves in other rooms, but many perch insolently from any horizontal surface they can find, daring us to find more shelf space.
It was time to thin the herd.
You can't toss any book that any child, adult or near relation ever loved. You can't get rid of a book that might be hard to find again if, say, your 6th child develops a fascination with wombats. You can toss a book that was loved to death, but only after ordering a replacement... Really it's a ticklish job. Home schooling makes it all worse: you can't toss a book of superior educational value. Did I mention that we buy library tape in bulk?
This messy business took most of the day, but I think we may find ourselves some 300 books or so leaner. On the other hand, the library looks like a herd of cattle stampeded through it.
We ought to be embarrassed by our, er, lack of restraint when it comes to books, but really I had no shame... until I realized that we were taking out 1000 items a year from our public library since we didn't really have enough books of our own...
1 comment:
You are a family after my own heart!!
I have a hard time "culling" and we also take out a ton of library books every year.
:-)
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