Limbo-Not A Grandparent Yet

My children are grown. I'm not a grandmother yet. My children are out in the world, working and getting their lives on track, for which I am very thankful.  I'm still "Mom" when it comes to advise. Gone are the days of buttoning clothes, zipping coats and looking for

lost toys. So, what's left?

I was going through a storage container of my children's old toys, favorite books and long forgotten special "bankies". The books that I had saved were all tattered, torn, and well read.  It was the books that got me to thinking.  My children loved to be read to. After dinner, before bath time, we would all go into the living room and settle on the sofa. I would read to them a book that we had gone to the library for or one that we had bought at the local bookstore. At times I found that dad would even join us to listen to the story that was being read.

The books that I was looking at were so old and tattered that they would never survive another reading. I decided to start collecting new editions of all the books that had been stored over the years. I knew that my grandchildren would love to hear some of the same stories that I had read to their mother and father when they were children.

I made a list of all the books that I had and started my rounds of the bookstores. Some books were out of print. For those books I went to online book swaps. I've been able to replace a few from there. Some books I found had more to the series than I had even realized when I was reading them to my children. So, I bought one or two more of them to add to the collection. I bought bookmarks and put them in the beginning of every book.

I found a small, painted, wooden box with hinges that was the perfect size to store the books in. I stripped it of it's old paint, re-painted it white, and stenciled  pictures of children reading, playing and just  being children all over the box.  The box now sits and  waits for it to be opened. All the books are age appropriate. So I have books to read to the babies, books to be read to the school aged children and books to be given to the teens. I'm looking forward to be reading once again to my grandchildren and showing them, like I did for their parents, that reading is a whole world of fun and adventure just waiting to be opened.

DCMerkle