My children visited a bookstore on the last day of summer. Their behavior was shocking.

We spent the last day of summer on the Connecticut shoreline. Among our choice of activities was a visit to our favorite bookstore, R.J. Julia in Madison, Connecticut.

 

Elysha and I once spent hours in bookstores, but when our children entered our lives, that changed. We tried for a while to do some tag-team parenting.  One parent relaxes while the other stops the monsters from ripping every book off the shelf.

It wasn’t fun.

But something happened on that last day of summer. I brought the kids upstairs to the children’s section of the bookstore, and within a minute, with no intervention on my part, this happened:

 

Not only did they plop themselves down and start reading, but they remained this way for a full 30 minutes.

Just imagine how much better it will be when they can actually read!

I probably couldn’t leave them unattended and descend to the adult section, but while my wife browsed below, I browsed the children’s section, which I sort of love anyway. I’ve written a few picture books that I am hoping to  eventually sell, and I missed out on these books as a child, so I still have lots of catching up to do. 

Even if this weren’t the case, this is a huge improvement over chasing them around, shushing them, and returning strewn books to the shelves.

This is good.

There is hope for the future.

My daughter’s favorite library is not a library

My wife agreed to bring my daughter to her favorite library yesterday. “The one with the stage and the trains,” she said.

The main branch of the West Hartford public library has both a stage and a train set in its children’s section, so naturally they went there.

Upon arriving, Clara said, “We’re going to my favorite library. Right?”

“Yes,” Elysha said, pointing to the red brick building in front of them.

“No,” Clara said. “Not that one. That one.” Her finger turned left in the direction of the adjacent Barnes & Noble, which also happens to have trains and a stage in their children’s area.

My four year-old thinks that the bookstore is a library.

She also thinks that a town would place two libraries adjacent to each other, which seems even more bizarre to me, but she’s a kid, so I’ll let that go.

But I’m not sure how to feel about this. Obviously Clara has failed to differentiate between Mommy and Daddy borrowing books and buying books, which says something about her understanding of commerce and the transaction of money in order to procure goods and services, but is thinking of a bookstore and a library as one and the same a bad thing for libraries?

Or for bookstores?