I have to admit I am enjoying the stay-at-home-mom life. Liam is at such a fun, exciting age. I have never found anything remotely exciting about ‘big trucks’ and ‘yellow school bus’es. Yet now I find myself pointing at every big truck and listening to him describe them to me. Or we pass a school bus and I hear him yelling from the back seat “Look, Mom! Yellow school bus! Look! Look!”
Today we went to the library for Storytime. As nerdy as it sounds, I love the Bozeman library…and I’ve really only been to the Children’s Room. Growing up, my mom always took me to the library. And I LOVED it. I loved knowing that I could choose any book from the thousands that were on the shelves. When we lived in Florida and Missouri, we lived in very suburban areas. The libraries were large. There was row after row of books and movies to choose from. I can still remember moving to our small town in North Carolina and walking into the library for the first time. I walked in and could see all four walls. I could literally stand at the front door and see every bookshelf. And it smelled so old. My twelve year old self, who was accustomed to libraries with elevators and rooms allocated to different genres of books, could not comprehend that the small rectangle I was standing in was the entire public library!
And my disappointment continued as I walked back to the young adult section and was met with book after book that was well older than me. There is nothing more disappointing to a kid who loves to read than a bunch of book covers that are tan, white and black. Kids want color. And about the only covers that looked remotely new were the five on the “New Release” shelf at the front.
And things didn’t get better when I moved to Marion. Yes, the library was bigger. And yes there were newer books. And yes they had a Children’s Section that offered hundreds of books. But, it just wasn’t the libraries from my childhood. It wasn’t a library that would make children beg to go like when I was little.
So my inner nerdy child was excited the first time I visited the Bozeman library. When walking in, there were too many walls to count and I certainly couldn’t see them all.
So today I took Liam to Storytime. And he did better than last week! Last week he spotted one of the preschool computers on the way in that had a fish screensaver. Once he got his eyes on that, it’s all he could focus on while Storytime was happening. He kept standing and saying “Watch fish swimming, Mom. Watch fish swimming.” So today I made sure we bypassed all of the computers and headed straight to the Storytime area. But he’s no dummy. He looked right at me, pointed in the direction of the computers and said “Fish swimming?”
And to make the library even better, the lobby has a coffee shop. I haven’t tried it yet but I see many winter days spent in the library with Liam reading and playing and me sipping my coffee and reading!
