Yesterday I took the kids thrifting with me. Close friends would say I must have been desperate to do some thrift shopping. I don't like to take the kids with me, for many reasons. One, if I give them a couple of dollars to spend, it usually takes an extra hour of looking to spend it, and what they find is usually costs more, and by then I cave and just buy it because I was ready to go quite a while ago. Secondly, they usually want to hang out at the toys too much (even though I tell them we will not be buying any toys), and that's not where I want to be, but I don't feel comfortable letting them wander without me. Thirdly, Emma loves to give me lots of crap when I buy something, her favorite is to say, "Are you gonna put this on your blog?" (Said in a very 7 year old, geez my mom is driving me crazy kind of way). All of this wrapped up into one tightly wound, over-caffeinated mom package, and you get the picture.
Yesterday, however, was a success. I managed to quickly steer everyone over to the children's books (a section we all enjoy). I stumbled upon an entire 15 book set of Childcraft/The How and Why Library from 1964 for $4. I love these books so much, and am heading to our family room to clear out a space for them right now, front and center. Kind of a child's encyclopedia set, they are an amazing resource for kids (the target age is approximately 4-8), and the illustrations are so inspiring to me. I put some of my favorite pictures from the issues I've looked at so far up on Flickr.
I went to sleep last night remembering the World Book Encyclopedia set my Dad had when I was Emma's age. No one ever looked at them that I could tell, but I was intrigued as a young child learning to read. I often pulled out my favorites (the ones that had all those see-through pages of the human body were most fascinating), and always reorganized them if they were out of numerical order. I guess the computer has replaced a lot of that sort of thing, sadly. When Emma was born, Peter suddenly felt compelled to subscribe to National Geographic magazine. "Why?", I asked, "can't you get that on the computer??". To him, it wasn't the same, he wanted it in print, old school. So, every month, the new issue came, and every month, I continued to stack them in the basement, where they stayed. Sadly, having a new baby, we never stopped to actually read them after the first couple of issues. The subscription ran out, but we still have them. I caught Emma actually reading them the other day. Finally!
