Storytime and Sharing!
I really wanted an assortment of books for future kids, however motherhood materializes, and so I took them. The idea came from the stores of children’s books that parents have once their children leave the nest.
What do you do with these?
Do you keep them? (Because you have sentimental attachment to them.) Do you have a massive garage sale and spread the love?! Or do you save them in an unspecified and barely marked box for your children for their future children? Well, we decided we weren’t going to do any of the above and we are going to have a baby book exchange!
The idea is to use library cards to keep track of whose child gets read to and shaped by each book in the order that we have them. It’s a literary timeline in our lives! Sweetest lemonade out of lemons be Sharing second hand book love. What’s better than a love of reading imported onto your kids?! Here’s how:
I downloaded a template for a library book envelope and sized it down to fit two to an 8.5x11. Then I created my own custom card inserts.
I downloaded an app to help me catalog ISBN numbers as I get new children’s books. They all go into a spreadsheet that then fills in the custom library cards via a “mail merge.”
In traditional library books, the card insert indicates the line of succession of children who have checked the book out of the library. In our case, it is going to indicate which child (in birth order) came first amongst our friends group. So it’ll start with whomever has the first child and who gets read to first and then proceed to the next child and so on and so forth.
A really sweet way amongst friends to share the love and the literacy!