Shopping in the Basement

At the change of every season in our household, we do what I like to call "Shopping in the Basement". This means we go down to the storage room and pull out all the boxes marked "Boys: Age X" and see what we can find for the coming season. I am very lucky that my main source for older boys clothes (Sharon's son Edmund) also has a fall birthday, so his clothes are usually the right size at the right time. And since Aaron is a little taller than Andrew was, I can usually get away with most of the clothes that Andrew wore, with a few additions here and there. And since that's where all the toys we're not using at present also reside, Andrew usually drags up a million toys (all the cluttery ones I stashed last time I decluttered the house) and plays with them for two days.

Today while I was doing the seasonal sort, Andrew made a grand discovery:


Thats right. Two years ago at the annual library book sale, someone had unloaded their entire collection of Peanuts Encyclopedias and the entire set of Golden Book Illustrated Bible Stories. And a series he's not big enough yet full of collected classic children's literature (think Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Nursery Rhymes, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Robin Hood, etc).

Andrew decided that he and Aaron were going to do some basement shopping of their own, and promptly spent the next 20 min. hauling all the books upstairs to Andrew's room. Aaron had this idea that he was going to take the whole stack at once, and I kept hearing these frustrated wails. But all I had to do was shout "Take them one at a time, Bubby!"and he would grab one and leave stacks of them just outside the door for Andrew to carry later.

Andrew then spent a good hour - almost unheard of for him -- by himself in his room, looking through the books.


At bed time he had picked out the two bible story books with David and Goliath and Sampson destroying the Philistine temple with his bare hands. Of course.