Making Omelettes

The Big Egg went away yesterday.

We're a book-centric household. There are books in every room of the house, with the possible exception of the mud room - and that only because there's no place to sit down there. Not that this same fact keeps the kitchen from having a few books in it that we can breeze through while standing around waiting for something to boil. You can't have too many books.

But sometimes it is time to let things go where they can be better appreciated.

The Big Egg was the first book I bought for Lauren to read all by herself. It's a fairly simple tale of cuckoldry (if you think too hard about kids' books you find yourself in all sorts of places where you probably didn't want to go) and loving the one you're with, spun as a morality tale about accepting people despite their differences. The most complicated word in it is "egg" and the pictures are bright and cheerful.

Lauren was just so thrilled when she read it. Everyone else in the house was reading books on their own, and now she could too.

We read it a lot.

But now she has grown past it, and The Big Egg sat gathering dust in the living room. It was time for it to go back into the Kid Stuff Jetstream that makes it possible for everyone to afford to have children. The girls are actually pretty good about that - they pick the things that they want to pass on to other kids, and it feels good for them to do that. I like that they're generous with their stuff that way and don't try to hoard it. Stuff should be used.

So yesterday I took The Big Egg and a couple of other books over to the Montessori school where Tabitha and Lauren spent so many happy days before graduating to Not Bad President Elementary. I like to think that even now some other kid is working their way through it, and discovering why books are good things.

And that's a very big egg indeed.