Late Fall Books

I have two conflicting problems. One, I am out of control buying books and two, I don't have enough space to store books. I don't even want to try to count up all the books I bought in the last two months, but I'm sure it's well into the double-digits. Granted, a few of them were or will be gifts, and a number of them were used, but many of them weren't. I was doing so well with getting everything at the library, I'm not sure where this recent book-buying blitz came from (three words: Scholastic, Dover and BetterWorldBooks), but I think I need another Buy Nothing Year before we're overrun with books we don't have time to read and, like I said before, have no space to store.

When I was doing a bit of reorganizing in the kids' room earlier this fall, I emptied a shelf of books to make room for toys and moved the books to milk crates, which I prettied up with Undercover Crates, which make them look somewhat less like college dorm decor (someday I'll be old enough to own real furniture, won't I?), and protect the dust jackets from being snagged in the slats of the crate. As you can see, I still have one more to make:

Three of my recent purchases have been late-autumn books, for when I'm done with reading Franklin's Halloween and the Berenstain Bears Trick-or-Treat for the mazillionth time.

Woody, Hazel and Little Pip for that Waldorf-wannabe obsession of mine, and because my two little ones seem to be growing up soooo fast (I think that's the Older Brother Factor), that I just want to preserve a bit of the magic and wonder of believing in fairies and gnomes as long as possible (although after reading the book we went for a walk and I said, "Watch out for Wood, Hazel and Little Pip hiding under the oak leaves" and E said, "They're not in real life." Awwww...they've never said that about The Children of The Forest, for whom we're always looking for a cozy home). The other two, 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving and Squanto's Journey are for introducing a bit of less-Euro-centric history into the holiday. We haven't read them yet (last year we had checked 1621 out from the library, but only got a bit read before we had to return it--it's much more M's reading/age level, if I could convince him to read something other than The Hardy Boys). 1621 I got used, as a library discard. I can't figure out how libraries decide to eliminate books, but there are so many almost-new books available from libraries it floors me.

To store all our autumn books, and because I've been dying to find a way to use Flower Fairy fabric in a house of boys, I made another Undercover Crate. (You can see I did the embroidery free-hand; next time, perhaps, a ruler will be in order. And there will be a next time; there are Flower Fairies for every season. And perhaps I will measure properly next time--the first two were too short and a bit snug while this one came out quite baggy!):

Previously I kept the seasonal books on one of those preschool bookshelves where the books face out, and I kept our library books in a basket, but we kept forgetting to read the library books, so I moved them to the bookshelf, so that we hopefully will remember to read them, without forgetting to read our seasonal books.

One of our late fall/transition to winter books that I got at a library book sale some years ago is Now That Days Are Colder, which appears to have been made as part of a series for schools or something, but which has the coolest illustrations, I love it:

The landscape, plants and animals are very New Englandey, so it's very relevant to what's going on outside our home right now, and the houses in it look just like the Victorians in our old neighborhood in Gardiner. Besides, how awesome are those Very Brady clothes?