So, my daughter has the most elaborate castle bed. We started working on the design of her bed before she was born. My husband would love to create custom kids beds for a living. A castle bed was a no brainer for us after she came out as a girly girl. The planning of the design took MONTHS of discussion. Today I am going to talk about her turrets and their importance in our home.
My piano teacher from high school gave us the best baby shower gift ever. It has become one of the most well loved books in our home with both our kids. As I was designing a nursery plan in my head before our first was born I had the following list of items I wanted to display in her room:
A handmade quilt by her mother
Cute window covering
Crib
A seat (which we used a glider we owned and took the bottom of an old glider and made an ottoman)
A toy box (which Russ made and she still loves)
Pictures on the wall that reminded her of how important she was to us and also her Savior
However, the biggest...most important thing:
A basket full of my favorite books
I put this basket in a prominent place on her dresser. The only other thing on her dresser was a lamp and a table runner covering the bad chipping paint of the dresser. My daughter was a crier. Seriously, she cried A LOT. In hind sight and after having the best second baby ever, I call her the devil child. She truly is not as bad as the worst, hardest kids out there, but she was a really HARD baby. As a first time mother however, you just go with it and think that this is how it should be. Whenever i was home and she wasn't screaming, I found myself sitting in the glider reading to her. It was so fun to use her fingers to point at the pages. There were days when I would read the book super super fast to get all the way through the pages before she was done and there were other days I would hold each picture open long after I had finished reading the page and let her point at everything on the page.
At that point I started to set aside $5 a month for our book collection. I would go to our closest thrift store...which at the time was Deseret Industries run by the LDS church. I would sort through their board books and hard backs and find a few new books to bring home each month. Lets just say, by the time that she was 2, we had twice as many children's books as we had children's toys. I wanted reading to a prominent part of her life.
So, when we were discussing the bed design I told my husband that the turrets had to be bookshelves. I needed a place to store all our books. So we put her toy box under the bed, added a light to the design and now I often find her under her bed reading to herself.
Because we never have time to go shopping, I now scour ebay for used books. I have already purchased all the books I am giving my kids for Christmas. It is awesome. They are going to love them. Madalynn is getting a whole collection of the Madeline books and Remington is getting a couple construction books. Last year Madalynn got the entire Fancy Nancy collection. I got all the hardbacks used for probably less than $20. I had to wait and search for a while and collect each book one at a time for several months, but seriously 40 books for less than $20 is hard to beat.
We use our local library....a lot. We did their program, Read a 1000 books before Kindergarten, in less than 4 months. We check out a lot of books and Madalynn loves reading. I will write a separate post about what we do with her to learn how to read.
Hope you enjoyed.
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