A book sale, and my cataloging project

We've had sick kids, so we haven't read a whole lot this week.

Kristen started reading The Wind in the Willows to Jaymie tonight. Amazingly, neither Kristen nor I have read it yet.

Last Thursday I went to a book sale at a local private school, and came away with about 40 books for $4.00. We were very excited. There were a bunch of Magic Schoolbus books (some from the original series by Joanna Cole and Bruce Degen, some based on the TV series). All of the kids love these right now, including Stanley, surprisingly enough. Another find was King Bidgood's in the Bathtub by Audrey and Don Wood.

When I got home, I became curious about the number of children's books we had in the house. I borrowed a bar code reader from work, downloaded a copy of Readerware, and set to work cataloging our collection. We have about 500 children's books that we own, plus about 30-40 at any time from the library, which surprised me -- I would have put the number at about half of that figure.

The long-term project is to have a searchable database of our family library available online. For now, maybe I'll highlight a few books each week from our collection that we really like, especially since Julia keeps picking dreck like The Lion King Little Golden Books that we have.