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For the last few years, my oldest daughter has been dreaming and scheming up plans for her very own bookstore.
Bee’s Books, as she lovingly refers to her imaginary shop, will be filled with books, imagination, and adventure. The walls will be covered in bright murals pulled from the pages of her favorite novels with pillows and comfy places to read scattered across the floors. There will be aisles upon aisles of young adult fantasy fiction, loads of adventure books, nature, maps, trail guides, and plenty on animals too. (Fantasy is her favorite genre and it is becoming increasingly hard for her to find something she hasn’t read in our smallish town library.) The shelves will be filled with all the things she loves.
Bee has it all drawn up, even down to the menu of the tiny bakery that will be nestled in the corner where she will sell poppy seed muffins and mint lemonade. She even has her siblings and grandmother wrangled into her plans.
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Now back to the post…
How do I describe my Bee?
I guess you could say she is a cross between a mustang and a wildflower.
She’s full of sass, wit, words, wildness, magic, and imagination. Larger than life. She’s delightful and chaotic. Beautiful and overwhelming at the same time. As her mother, there are days that I struggle to know how to parent her. How to help her grow while not stifling her power. And boy, does she have power! There are moments she’s like a tornado in a trailer park. There are days I can’t stop laughing and there are nights when I just cry. I can’t tell you the number of times I have knelt next to my bed, begging God to tell me what to do. After all, He was her parent long before I was.
Sometimes the answers come and I am filled with peace, and sometimes I just get told to love her.
And, oh how I do.
Why am I telling you this?
Because my heart tells me that if you are a mother, you’ve felt this with a child of your own in some way or another. Motherhood is incredibly amazing but also unbelievably scary. It’s easy to feel like you are riding this roller coaster all alone.
After a lot of tears and prayer over the last few months, the Lord gave me a tender mercy.
He inspired a teenage boy in my old neighborhood to do a rather unique Eagle Scout project… libraries.
Bee and I have checked out the Little Free Library Book a couple times and made plans for building our own.
Like a lot of things lately, I just haven’t been able to get around to it and felt I was letting her down. I’ve been in a bit of a slump, if you couldn’t tell from the lack of posts here the last couple months. Motherhood and life get heavy sometimes, don’t they? Long story short, because of a wonderful young man Bee now has her very own library. This teen and his scout troop built the library and then cemented it in our front yard. The local library gave Bee an entire box of books to go with it.
All we had to do was paint, decorate, and fill it up with precious stories and fantastical adventures.
It was like magic.
Bee stops at her library everyday on her way home from school.
She straightens the books, gives everything a once over, and then runs in to tell me what is new and what’s been borrowed. She has complete control and ownership of her own little bookshop and it means the absolute world to her. Has every day been perfect since? Yeah, no. But I’ve watched her blossom and gain responsibility. She’s taking pride in something and treating it, and those who frequent it, with kindness. She has a “happy” and that makes me happy.
My mama heart is full as I think about how simple and yet powerful this tiny mercy has been. That’s how the Lord works though, isn’t it? Maybe sometimes I get too caught up looking for the big miracles that I fail to see the small ones. The ones God lovingly sends to cheer our hearts and tell us that He, indeed, is there.
Like a little free library for a little spunky girl who requires a little more love than most.
For more information on the Little Free Library movement, please go HERE.
Adventure awaits and all you have to do is open the cover.
Do you have a favorite fantasy book
suggestion for Bee?
this is adorable! way to go Shelby!