7.14.2012

we love chapter books and some other thrifting

side note, as Ot gets bigger and bigger i am having a harder and harder time thrifting clothes for him. i just wanted to proclaim this and then make a downer face at this fact. i suppose boys are just too rough on their everythings... anyways, it's not that i only buy clothes for the little miss but that's what ended up happening on our latest, greatest thrift trip...

direct your eyes to the right in that picture. something really super freaking awesome and amazing has been going down at Casa Muth lately and that is the nightly reading of chapter books! this is something i have been looking forward to since, who knows, like wayyyy wayyyy before we ever even started trying to have kids. reading is one of my all time favorite pastimes. spending hours and hours with my nose in a book, curled up on the sofa, being glum, totally got me through some super emo adolescent and teenage years and helped me learn how to be a good person and that i wasn't the only one who felt awkward and lame and odd and hated myself and just. wanted. to. be. liked. books expanded my vocabulary and my life horizons.

i really believe that the books i read back then gave me the courage to become "myself" even if that meant being different from the crowd. so anyways, i am clearly pro books and have been collecting kids' books for the future generations in the house since i was 19 (married yes, but it wasn't til i was 30 that Ot was born and now he's 3 1/2) so ya see? ya see! i am old AND pro books.

some of my favorites from those awkward emo years were Anne of Green Gables, Are You There God, It's Me Margaret, Babysitters' Club (yo, Claudia, i love you, yo), Bunnicula, Harriet the Spy, Little Women, Matilda, Nancy Drew, Nothing's Fair in Fifth Grade, Pippi Longstocking, The Phantom Tollbooth, Wizard of Oz...

books books books books books books books! so how jiggy with it was i when Ot suddenly was all interested in some of the chapter books on his bookshelf? we started with The BFG and i realized pretty quickly it was a little too "rough" so we had to kind of edit-as-we-read but Otto just loved the word play. he collapsed laughing when BFG said "crocodilly". like cackling, face plant on the bed, body heaves of laughter. me = floating to the ceiling and grinning like a goon to see that! so while we were reading BFG a chapter a night, we went thrifting and hit the chapter book motherload. the following pictures are like porn for my book-lovin eyes...
a chapter a night is now a concrete part of our bedtime routine and my heart sings, "laaaaaaaa!".

i'm linking this post up to Mandy at The Haps for her High on Thrifting Thursday. me so high! so high!

so i would really love to hear some of your favorite chapter books so i can be on the lookout. i've heard great things about Gruffalo. what others do you and your kids love or do you remember loving? aren't books the best?! <-- not a real question because they just are.

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