How can books impact you? Last weekend during a basketball game, my son came down on his foot wrong and ended up spraining his ankle. After we got home from the game, we immediately iced his ankle, which helped with the pain and swelling. No more basketball for this guy for a while.
He was pretty limited on what he could do for the rest of the day and was getting bored with just sitting on the couch watching TV. So out of the blue, I asked him “what are your thoughts on cleaning and organizing your closet today” and to my surprise, he agreed. This just shows how bored the kid was.
Looking around in his closet, we both realized that he had outgrown a lot of his clothes, shoes, toys, and books. While we were trying to figure out where to start, we decided on going through all of the books that he has collected and housed throughout the years. Having two older siblings, as they outgrew the stories, they were handed down to him. You never know how books can impact your child’s life until you start reminiscing.
We both sat down on the floor of his closet and decided on three piles to put the books in. We made a “keep” pile, a “maybe” pile, and a “pass down to cousins” pile. Book by book, we looked at all their titles, ranging from the Berenstain Bears all the way to Harry Potter, asking each other what pile they should go on.
After our piles were complete, we put the “keeps” back on the shelf and proceeded to look through the other piles to make our final decision on what books will stay with his collection, and what ones will be passed on.
Together, we started to look through each book, page by page. He would pick up a book and say, “mom, do you remember this one?” Then I would pick up a different book and reminisce with him on my memories of reading to all of my children. As we went through each book one by one, I realized the impact of most of the books, I or the kids, have read throughout the years. The books felt like photo albums, recalling all the times we read as a family.
Our loud laughs and conversation drew my daughter’s attention to my son’s room and saw us sitting on the closet floor. She asked what we were doing, and my son said “going through books”, and she joined us. Book after book, story after story, memory after memory, we started to put all of the books back on the shelf. They were stories that we were not ready to part with. Books can make an impact not only for your children but for famiies in general as they did for ours.
Later that evening as the entire family started to wind down, we began to pull some of the books off the shelves and started to read to each other. Some of our favorite children’s books were Rub-a-Dub-Dub, My Gigantosaurous Book of Time, and Where’s My Teddy? to name a few. It amazed me that as I started reading, my kids still had most of the words memorized and in sync recited the books together.
What I thought started out as a typical day, turned into a memory maker for me and my family. The books that we felt we outgrown, have grown into memories that cannot be donated or given away but only shared with one another.