Fun Fix-It Friday

To begin, we headed to one of our local thrift stores today because they were having a 99¢ sale on sweaters. This seemed like a plausible reason to drive across town, so after lunch we hopped in the car.

When we first arrived, I headed for the shoes and books. I'm always on the look-out for good quality kids' shoes (even in larger sizes than we currently need). I have a tub in the garage and when shoes don't fit anymore, we sort through and find a new pair that does. Incidentally, I found an adorable pair of suede boots for Tabi next winter. I'm guessing they'll be about the right size for her.

I then headed to the kids' books section and found a great selection today. This thrift store is usually pretty picked over in books, so I was thrilled to find some that we've been looking for. A number of these are on my wishlist for the kids, so now I need to update it. Here are the books that I found (for $15.50 total):

The three on the right are Dr. Seuss or P.D. Eastman. All great books that have been on my wishlist. The top middle, "Numbers" is a Little Scholastic book - we have a number of these already."Peek-a-Zoo" is our favorite! The Sesame Street book is part of a set that we have already at home, now we're only missing the Elmo one. "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" is a classic. We have the original book, but I love the board book too - and there's less chance of damage with the varying page sizes. On the left we have an Usborne book called "1001 Pirate Things to Spot". I simply couldn't resist this one - who doesn't need a book about pirates for kids. We have a number of Disney Babies books, but not this Baby Goofy one about fears. The last book we didn't find until we were at the check out. It was sitting on a lower shelf all by itself. I was super-excited, since we only recently read this for the first time and Ephraim totally fell in love with it. When I picked it up, though, I noticed why someone had put it down:

I never let a little dirt, stickiness, or damage (as long as it's reparable) to stop me from buying a book, especially when I can get a good deal.

Looks like new and I bet we'll be reading it very soon.

Here's a few other books that have acquired some damage needing repair lately. I usually stack up the books until there are a few and then repair them all at once:

Binding coming off on this one.

Ephraim ripped the back page off of Go Dog Go! when he was reading in bed the other day. He is usually very careful with books, but accidents happen - the occasional "mad" happens too.

Not my best repair job, but it's really hard to fix a page right near the seam.

We love this lift-a-flap book, but sometimes the kids pull a little hard on the flaps and they start to separate from the page.

Good as new!

Here are my tools of the trade:

When I was teaching, I bought a lot of book tape and went from classroom to classroom in the Jr. High repairing our classroom library books to get them to last longer - Jr. High kids are not the most careful with books. After a few years, I got pretty good at repairing books. Never figured that I'd use this skill so often as a parent, but I'm nearly finished with my second roll of tape and am looking to order more.