I’m pretty sure that title is too long, per the rules that we learned in elementary school, but I’m going to stick with it because it pretty much describes our weekend in a nutshell. (Well, except for the part where my mom and I are acting as parents to a 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, and a 14-year-old while their parents are away, which is fun and involves a ton of chauffering/negotiating playdates).

One thing I kept meaning to do over the summer but kept putting off until we were leaving was to do an inventory of the Literacy Lab, really familiarize myself with all the amazing materials that are in there, and organize it. Well, it didn’t happen in Seattle, so we decided this weekend, when we had nothing planned for the Literacy Lab, was the time to do it. On Saturday, while my mom was driving one of my cousins to her traveling soccer game a long way out, I pulled out all these boxes of the book from the back and began counting books. However, yesterday (Sunday), we really pulled everything out. Thankfully, it was a gorgeous day here (can I tell you how much I LOVE Denver weather? 80s and sunny at the end of September! But they still get snow in the winter!), so we just started laying everything out on the grass, as you can see.

Here’s the tricky thing about being on a road trip for 5 weeks in a van where the goal is to collect and give away books while also keeping a huge supply of costumes, props, and toys: you want to keep the van full, but you also want to access all the fun materials you have. We have two book carts (like the ones you see at library) full of books to give away, in addition to banker boxes of books, and that shelving unit we bought in Portland. Those go in the middle. On the sides are shelves where we put our different themed programs (dinosaurs, pirates, water, outer space, princesses and dragons, etc.) as well as our resource materials. There are a few places we can access without having to move a gazillion things around, but other themes are blocked by these (*super heavy*) book carts that have to be moved around.

A common theme of our conversations on the road or at home while cutting out materials to use is how to best organize the van, for now as well as in the long run. What we decided to do for now is make certain themes that we use more often more accessible. Therefore, in addition to doing an inventory of the books we have, we had to pull out all the materials in order to put them back in the van. After about 3 hours of counting, organizing, and shifting, we took a look at all the stuff lying on the lawn and thought, eek! That all has to go back in! What were we thinking?! The kids and their friends had enormous fun trying on the different costumes (whoever says that kids stop loving to dress up at a certain point is wrong–the 14-year-old and her friend were having just as much fun as the younger ones! by the way, we’re available for birthday parties!), and I would have been right there with them.

I do not have a particularly organized, spatially aware brain, so I had ideas of how to rearrange things but then had to figure out how to do it with the space and materials we had. It would have been a great problem for puzzle solvers: there are X number of boxes, X number of shelves, some of which are taller/longer than others, and we want to be able to access X boxes in the least possible moves. And then once we figured it out, we had to actually put it all in. It started getting dark outside, the kids were getting hungry, so I got dinner ready while my mom continued working in the dark. But at last! Everything was back in! The title is a bit of a misnomer, because I do think that we did improve the way things are organized and how to access things (in addition to doing an inventory, which is important for our nonprofit status), but it was one of those moments when we looked in the van, looked at each other, and couldn’t help laughing because to an untrained eye, it might not look any different. But it is, we swear! I’m only a little sad that the van is going to stay in Florida after taking out and seeing all the amazingly fun things. I’m building up my own collection in Seattle, but it’s not quite as impressive as what my mom has built up over the years.

Stay tuned for another blog post about our super-fun day at a Headstart preschool in Arvada, CO!