A surprising old "friend"

Our boys' school allows them to each take 25 books home over the summer break. Because my husband teaches there, he also gets 25 books, I guess. Additionally the library is open on a few Mondays in June and July. Yay!!! What better way is there to while away the long summer hours except with a book?

I cannot remember this ever happening at schools I've been associated with in Australia. I guess in Australia you can always borrow books from the local municipal library. (English libraries are a bit rarer here.) And in Australia summer holidays for school children are never as long as 11 weeks.

Two "old friends"

So, we've borrowed quite a lot of books this week. Not up to our 25 limit yet, but we'll get back to the library in the coming weeks and on the last "open Monday" we'll get our limit to tide us over until school starts on the 25th of August.

Amazing - I did these as an Occupational Therapist with some of my clients!

The amazing discoveries on Tuesday were two books that take me back to my childhood. We owned both of these books. The left one, The Lettering Book, I drooled over for years. Now I can see that I was longing for a computer with fonts! Back then I could only lament that my artistic skills didn't allow me to reproduce the amazing fonts, borders and other fancy things it showed us. But the book also talks about page layout, and other creative things that I now use when I do desk-top publishing for newsletters, brochures and other things. Funny to look back and see those "gifts" beginning to surface in primary school.

Love the clothes in these photos!

The other book is one volume of the Childcraft Encyclopedia set, published in the mid 60s! It was one of my favourite go-to volumes in times of boredom. I'm the eldest and I am 4 1/2 years older than my next sibling, so I very often had to play on my own. Mum, of course, hated hearing, "I'm bored" and usually found something "bad" for me to do. So I quickly figured out finding my own fun was much better.

This volume is 300 pages of Things to Do. Crafts, cooking, magic, creative play, theatre etc. So many ideas. When the all the volumes of the encyclopaedia was lined up on the shelf you could see this one was the most frequently used because the little bit at the top of the spine was damaged, because that is how I got it off the shelf.

Well we've borrowed both. The funny thing about the encyclopaedia is that you're generally not allowed to borrow reference books, and this one didn't even have a bar code on it! The librarian said it might as well be used! So she let us borrow it. But to do so, my son had to write his name on the library card - just like I used to do in primary school! He was very confused, never having done that before. She kept the card. You can see that no one has borrowed this book since 1995! However old it is, it contains time-less ideas for ways to spend those long hours of summer. I look forward to seeing my boys get into some project...

Meanwhile I better think up some "bad" things to give them to do when they complain they are bored when they finish school at 12 today!