It will never look this way again!

Several weeks ago, (wow, am I that far behind in my blog posting?!) I tackled the final organizing task of moving to our new place . . . sorting and shelving the girls' books. At our old house, we had a very small bookshelf and so a lot of our books for older readers were in storage still. So it was a real pleasure to unpack those books and get them all on the shelf for easy access!


Here's the breakdown: Top shelf, just pictures. Next one down: Classics like Heidi, the Chronicles of Narnia, some Shakespeare and Dickens for children, and several musical books that have a CD accompaniment. Next: Lying on their side are some books too big to put up ("oversize" is the library category) as well as all of our Bible storybooks and other Christian books. The next shelf down is all anthologies on the left, including single author collections like the Beatrix Potter collection and A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh. On the right are early readers (Frog and Toad, Dr. Seuss and others). The bottom two shelves were organized with the idea of helping the girls reach these books easily. The second to the bottom one has hardcovers on the left, a stack of board books in the middle, and softcovers on the left, which include several books of similar kind like Curious George, Madeline, and Mercer Mayer Books. The bottom shelf is basically all board books with some local language kid's magazines on the far right.

I look at this bookshelf and see hours of fun! I loved reading as a young child and was frequently teased by my older brothers that I read so much, I needed to take a UHaul to the library! Certainly our collection is not as extensive as a library is, but we've got a good start. Soon I will be collecting more books in preparation for homeschooling and look forward to adding those to our shelves.

Perhaps this shelf will not stay this organized, but actually I've found that the order has been somewhat easy to maintain since there is a place for everything. And the girls have seemed to respect the order and organization, so haven't had issues with pulling out tons of books and scattering them everywhere. (It seemed like that was always a temptation at our old house.) But at any rate, I wanted to give you a glimpse of the bookshelf in its present state!

Happy reading!