Ours is a house of books.

There are books on the piano, books open and marked on the couch. Books are stacked at my bedside table, and cover the five bookshelves we have in our home. There are also two jumbo rubbermaid containers filled with books in the garage. . .and some baskets overflowing. . .and at a minimum, we need two more bookshelves. You see, we don’t just like to read books. We like to own books.

There is something sacred in book ownership, particularly when you are a child and those books that are read over and over again meld to your psyche and seem to fill in all the cracks of a developing personality. They create adventure, escape and teach us lessons that become a part of us in a way that very few other things do throughout the rest of your life.

I lived between the pages of a book as a child; every moment of free time was given wholly to the written word. Mother sent me outside to play where I climbed a tree and read. My father told me to take a bath and I did, with a stack of books and a towel. They took me to the library where I checked out the 44 book limit each week during the summer, and returned them, completely read, in time for our trip back. My favorites I had at home, on my own shelf, and I read them over and over, as if visiting an old friend. Many books I pick up and open at random, only to fall directly back into the story, as if our conversation had never paused since the last telling. Scout Finch, Felicity, Old Dan and Little Ann, Laura Ingalls, Harriet the Spy- all such dear, dear friends.

When I found out that I was expecting Jonas, I didn’t buy baby clothes and diaper bags. The top of my priority list for bringing a child into this world was purchasing perfect children’s literature. Where the Wild Things Are was the first book, oddly appropriate since my own little Max incarnate showed up nine months later.

Yes. We are a house of readers.

But we’re not stuffy intellectuals by any means.

Yes.

That’s a toilet seat on her head.