Tonight I casually started purging our kid book collection and ended up spending over two hours on it!! Once you get started you can’t stop or else the kids will get up in the morning and put all the nicely divided piles back on the shelf :) While Eve was in the tub I went through the bookshelf in their room. She got out of the tub and asked me “Who is stacking books?” I told her I was just putting some books “away for awhile.” She fussed, but then when she went looking for a bedtime book she got super excited about finding Madeline. “Look Mommy! Madeline! Oh I’m so happy! We have been missing Madeline for so long, where did you find this book?!?” On the shelf, silly girl. It was nice, immediate, validation that purging the bookshelves is the right thing to do.

I now have two large bags of books to quietly bring to the library, two more bags that the library probably won’t take but hopefully someone on Freecycle will, and one large bag that I’ll need to quietly put into the recycling pile.

I hope the kids wake up and marvel at their spacious, beautiful bookshelves and don’t ask where all the old, junky books went! :)