Size Matters… So Does Shape

Get your mind out of the gutter…

Our daughter, almost 7 months old already, is enjoying the new found freedom of rolling. She’ll learn to crawl soon enough, but for now she’s pulling the “As… you… wish…” all over the living room – hence we’re trying to baby proof.

Now for any of you first time parents here’s a bit of a hint – the only way to 100% baby proof is to not have a baby; but this is all about harm reduction.

So it was I found myself on the floor trying to sort through my son’s children’s books to put them out of reach of our daughter. Previously, said books were all on low shelves within’ reach of our rolling, roaming heroine, and as my son has a fair number of books, one mispull would see our Cordie overcome by a literary avalanche of biblical proportions (did they have avalanches in the Bible? I don’t remember any… but if they did, they’d be like, huge).

And this is what I realized, sitting on the floor surrounded by children’s books, in this cyclone of shapes, this cacophony of colors – NONE OF THESE BOOKS ARE THE SAME F**KING SHAPE! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO NEATLY STACK THEM!?!? HULK SMASH!!!

So after I put the shelf back up (using crazy glue and duct tape so hopefully the wife won’t look at the underside of the shelf) I began to try and bring order to this book shelf.

In a way these books are like the human race: they come in every single size and shape imaginable, every single colour and they all have something really cool inside of them. But also like people, these books are hard to put in order.

That’s good for people – but not for books… at least when you’re trying to stack them.

There is one good difference between books and people though – when you take a hacksaw to books so they’re all the same shape no one yells too loudly (except librarians); but everyone seems to get up in arms (ha!) when you take a hacksaw a person.