Toddlers and Libraries

I love the toddler stage. It's exhausting (to parent) and hysterically adorable all at once, and we are now enjoying this phase for the fourth time. (Actually, because our little ones are relatively close, all these stages have just been running together, in one perpetual display of childhood!) Chase, of course, is no less entertaining - and tiring - than any other toddler, and I daresay he's probably one of the most active and amusing toddlers I know (forgive my shameless bias!). This afternoon, for instance, when I was trading pieces of Pirate's Booty for a grammar lesson that included recitation of "The Caterpillar," Chase was quick to get in on the deal, standing by each sibling as they quoted the poem, and eagerly jabbering what must have been his rendition.

However, the toddler stage is not compatible with library privileges. In the very beginnings of my mothering career, when my only charge was a little girl who always seemed to know the rules, this was not so much of an issue, but a couple more years into my parenting journey gave me the delightful experience of trying to quiet a uncoopertaive and very loud young man as I attempted to manuever him, his sister, and a load of books up to the circulation desk at the library. We repeated this on every library trip for the whole of his second year at least. I also began to hear at home, with alarming frequency, that dreadul, sickening sound of pages being ripped out of books - and they were ALWAYS library books. Just as Drew grew out of this stage, his baby brother began to grow into it, and as is usually the case with Ryan, with even more intensity. Even confined in the sling or stroller, taking him to the library as a toddler was often a nightmare, and I often left insisting that I would leave him with his father next time - maybe for every trip for the next ten years... We have now come to the happy place where he behaves at the library (and with their materials) fairly well more often than not, and of course, this is just in time for Chase to step up as the library's nemesis, which he has, with gusto. This evening as I was picking up around the house, I found a corner of a page from -you guessed it - a library book, and finding it was made all the more upsetting by the fact that only this morning, I had witnessed him gleefully tearing a page out of another borrowed book. "No more library books!" I said in exasperation to myself, then recanted instantly, because the library is a lifeline for us. So we'll simply weather this descructive stage - and continue to support our library financially all the while. And we'll be thankful that Chase is just so cute! It covers over a multitude of transgressions. :-)