One of my favorite days of the week is library day. In fact, library day has been a favorite day of mine ever since I was about four (at least that’s how the story goes from my childhood). My mom has told me the story about my love of reading that began when I was little many times, and it remains a favorite because it provides me a pretty good glimpse of my love of words—both reading them and writing them. Because we lived in a small apartment at the time and there wasn’t a lot of space or money for buying a lot of books, my mom used to take me and my brother to the large public downtown library in the city where we lived. My favorite part of this story my mom shares with me is how she helped me learn to write my name and how hard I practiced those letters over and over until I could write them without any help.
You see, in order to get a library card of my very own, I only needed to be able to write my name on the small blue rectangular card. Once I could do that, I was given a library card to check out books to my little heart’s content. And so I did. Every week. We’d take the bus to that large building that seems to me now in my memory’s eye like the Taj Mahal, with its large domed design atop a hill that sat beside a river. That library was as majestic and awe-inspiring to me back then as the Taj Mahal is to me today (and I now know that domed-roof architecture belonged to a building next door to the library, not the library itself; still, the sight of that domed roof signaled the library to my 4 & 5 year old self).
As a mama, I have delighted in carrying on library day with our girls. Ever since they were toddlers, we have ventured off to our local public libraries to explore the world through books and play. To my joy, both teens have become lovers of story and avid readers of books of their choosing. My oldest will claim she is not as much of a booklover as the rest of us, but I tend to disagree with her. While she doesn’t read as wide a range of stories as me or her younger sister, still she takes pleasure in the stories that speak to her heart and her soul. At this point, all four of us have our own library cards and like my mom did for me, I try to maintain a weekly library day trip to pick out new books to take us on new adventures.
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that our girls, like me, want to discover their own way, including favorite books or topics. I have also discovered that sometimes when I choose a book for myself that I think they may also like, a couple of things tend to happen. First, we may end up reading it together as a read aloud (and though they may think it strange or even embarrassing that I read to them, I like to remind them that audio books exist because so many of us still like it when someone reads us a story; and, also, that their dad and I used to read aloud on road trips before they arrived). Second, if I leave a book untended, it may be carried off by my not-so-avid booklover (who, again, loves books more than she realizes).
Because of this library day practice, I get to enjoy watching our girls dive into the unschooling books I bring home and line along our school-related shelves. Nothing thrills me more than the light of their delight—the spark in their eyes and the excitement in their voices—when they stumble upon a topic, a book, an idea, an illustration that invites them in and I get to watch them go. Even more than observing their delight, I get to share in it as they read me a passage from a book or paraphrase something they just learned.
Nothing brings me the same kind of joy and delight as my girls’ delight in learning and exploring and discovering. It doesn’t matter if it’s a new fiction story, a read aloud, a new subject, or a new book on a familiar topic. There is little else that can light up a room than the delight of a reader in her element. And, then, they take those ideas and interesting tidbits and it fuels their creative projects, too. What a way to spend time with these two remarkable young women.