Library Bags and Bug's Journey to Being a Bookworm

My oldest daughter has always been a voracious reader.  She pretty much taught herself how to read when she was four and she hit the ground running and never looked back.  Bug took a little longer to fall in love with books.  She still would rather have mommy read her a book before bed than have to do it herself.  The unfortunate part for me is that she chooses the most boring books ever for us to read together.  There are only so many Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen books that I can take before throwing my hands up and screaming "Enough!"

So our new rule for bedtime reading is that we take turns picking the chapter book.  I pick one (usually I stick to classics like Pippi Longstocking or Little House on the Prairie) and when we finish she gets to choose one (almost always an Olsen one, why so many Olsen books in my house??).  I think that actually helped to jump-start her reading more on her own because she had so many books that she was interested in that I refused to read to her.  The only way to find out what happened was to read them herself and for the last couple of weeks she's been a solo reading monster!  She discovered she loves The Rescue Princesses, The Guardians of Ga'Hoole and Weird School and so many more standalones and new series are being happily discussed in our house lately.  We've made two library trips in the last week and she's came home with handfuls and is powering through them at the rate of about one every two days!

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I was cleaning my closet out and found these two plain bags that I bought years ago with big plans to do something for the girls with and never got around to it.  I bought a couple of pretty iron-on patches for each girl and raided my craft box for another stack of smaller patches and let them choose which, if any, that they wanted me to put on.  Then when the patches were finished I let them go completely wild with Goose's Sharpie collection.  I know fabric markers would have worked better since I've discovered from personal experience that Sharpie's smudge in the wash, but I didn't feel like buying any and I don't have any plans to wash these so I figured it wasn't a big deal.

Bug wanted to use as many patches as possible and as many designs as she could fit on her bag.

Goose was a little more reserved, just drawing a few simple designs on her bag.  I love how their personalities really shine through how they designed!

(the white blocks are where they wrote their names so I marked them out of the pics)

Now my sweeties have their own bags to pack with as many library books as they can hold!