Overbooked

Britt loves books.

No, it's more than that. She's in love with books. She caresses them, coos to them, hugs them lovingly to her chest, and carries them with her wherever she goes. They are her most treasured possessions.

She's no longer content to sit quietly and let us read to her. Nay, she must read them herself. Not that she can read, but she either knows the stories well enough or can piece them together from the pictures that she gives a pretty convincing narrative as she pages through them.

Still, we're not completely off the hook. She'll shove a book at me or Mikey, demanding "Read!' and so we'll start reading to her, but she'll also begin reading another book out loud, and Lord help us if we quit reading because she's not paying attention, because she is. "Read! Read!" she shouts, as if we are letting her down terribly by not valiantly waging our end of some bizarre book-reading duel.

And she has a lot of books, so this can go on for hours.

Yeah, it's very cute and all, for a few months. Finally, in an attempt to hold on to sanity, I stashed her books in our third bedroom (the one room that's still off-limits to her because it houses my computer and Mikey's musical equipment, plus that's where I hide the toys I can no longer bear to deal with, like Play-Dough, until Mikey lets her play in there while he surfs on the computer, and she finds them) and allowed her to have only three books at a time. She wasn't happy about it, but it worked for a while. There were much shorter book-reading sessions and much longer toy-playing sessions.

And all was right with Grammy's world again.

Then Mikey, who can deny Britt nothing, lifted her over the safety gate one day and let her play in the office while he surfed on the computer. She took the opportunity to free her beloved books from captivity by dumping them over the safety gate into the hallway. I was not amused:

There's a reason why that gate is there.
Uh, yeah, that's what you keep telling me.
But you aren't the one here with The Books all day.

So he went and bought an 18-gallon plastic bin with a snap-on lid to hold The Books. This was a moderate success at first, due to the out-of-sight out-of-mind factor, but eventually Britt would stand at the bin wailing piteously because she couldn't get the lid off.

So, eventually, the lid came off and stayed off. And The Books came out and, lo, they were everywhere -- on the furniture, under the furniture, all over the floor, piled in front of the door, stacked in our tiny utility room, etc, etc. In the time it took for me to throw a load of clothes in the washer, Britt would have the sofa and love seat completely covered in books from end to end. I'd go around picking them up and putting them back in the bin five, six, seven times a day.

Once again, Grammy's sanity wavered.

And so, one night while she slept, I put the bin of books in her bedroom (the one room of the house where she never wants to go) and shut the door. And, unless you've had an obsessive toddler on your hands, you can never understand how much I hated lying to her but it was oh so very necessary.

Where are The Books? Well, gosh, Punkins, I just don't know!

That lasted less than a week. Tonight, for the first time ever, Britt learned how to open a bedroom door. And she found The Books and, lo, they are everywhere.

(***whimper***)