My Idea of Heaven

Jacob got a gift card to Barnes & Noble for Christmas so over the weekend we headed there for some book shopping. I don't normally go into book stores. Not because I don't like them, but on the contrary, because I love them. Too much. So much that it's unhealthy. Before I had kids, ie when I had some sort of disposable income, bookstores and I had an obsessive relationship. But then I had kids, was bound to home a lot and discovered internet shopping. Now I get most of our books used from Amazon or some other such bookseller. I preview the books from the library first and only buy our absolute favorites. It's a much healthier form of book shopping for me.

So we went to Barnes & Noble with the idea that we'd look for the second book set of The Magic Tree House series. Jacob got the first four books from Drew for his birthday and we've recently started reading them. We had books five through eight in our hand when Jacob spotted the shelf of Doreen Cronin books. I don't usually have 'favorite' authors, books or movies. I mean I have a collection of favorites, but not a one favorite. However, after randomly selecting two different Doreen Cronin books a few years apart, falling in love with them, then realizing it was the same author, I can say for sure that she is my favorite children's book author, along with the illustrator of her books, Betsy Lewin.

We first bought The Diary of a Worm when Jacob was a toddler. It was the first book I can remember ever buying him. I fell in love with the book and it's remained one of our favorites. The humor in her books is just so blunt, I don't know how to say it. I was reading a review of one of her books and they called it slapstick. But I don't really know that slapstick humor is what I would consider it. Anyway, they're hilarious. Recently we got Click, Clack, Moo from the library on a whim. It was the funniest thing Jacob and I have shared in quite a while. It's like she's living in his head. It's about farm animals on a farm and how they drive the farmer crazy with their anthropomorphic antics. This is Jacob's life! He goes around yelling about how his chickens got out of the hen house and are causing some kind of trouble that is normally a human activity.

So anyway, that would be my idea of Heaven. Being in this huge place of shiny, new books that are stacked to the ceiling. A place where you can read and learn about basically anything you want. And importantly, a place that is fully stocked with Starbucks coffee. I would gather all the people I love and keep them there so we could snuggle up and read books for an eternity. The only thing I would probably miss is my clothes because I also have a clothing obsession. Don't even get me stared on how I can't go into clothing stores. I actually had a dream last night about a store I was in the other day where I saw a couple of shirts I thought I couldn't live without (this happened in real life). In the dream I went back and bought them. But I didn't want to get started about that...

Besides the books I just mentioned, some of the others that we're reading, or just finished are The Secret Garden, which was mine when I was a kid. It took us almost a year to finish it because it's definitely not a fast-reading book, if you know what I'm saying. For book club last month we read The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls. I really liked it, very good read. Right now I'm in the middle of reading a few different things, which I actually don't like to do. I prefer to read one book at a time. But I have all these parenting-type books that I need to get through, ones where you can't just sit down and read them straight through because it's too boring. There's a sleep book that I'm forcing myself to read, there's Living Simply With Children, which I hope to write more about in the future, and most importantly I'm reading The Vaccine Book (part of the Sears collection).

Beanie's yet to have any vaccines but I decided I'd start them at her six-month well-child visit. She actually hasn't had that visit yet because suddenly my doctor's office is a bitch to get on the phone to make an actual appointment. But I've got to hurry up and finish this book so I can decide which vaccines to get. Oh, so The Vaccine Book is the greatest book ever. Well, for the moment. Everything I've read about vaccines before has been put into one place. It makes sense, it's straightforward, and un-biased and provides information from several different angles. When I first started reading this book and discovered that it was everything I'd expected from it, I was so happy I almost started to cry (for real). It was like a breath of fresh air.

The End.