This entry may come off as a bit of a public service announcement, but really it is not. To the right is pictured one of our favorite places to go: The Matthews Public Library. It is an amazing place and looks a little like the clock tower from the Back to the Future Movie (actually this striking similarity makes it much cooler). The public library that I remember growing up in Lakeland used to scare me. There were always weirdos in there and I had absolutely no use for it whatsoever. Well, flashforward a couple of years and now I am the weirdo and I have tons of use for it - and now I will tell you those uses.

1. A place to go and get out some energy. This library sits right by the train tracks (not to mention a caboose that is always stationed there) - if we time it right we can watch the train go by out of the giant windows there. There are tons of tactile little work areas for the kids and a computer station made by little tikes that she may not understand yet, but enjoys being able to play with. 

2. This is a blog post all its own - but our daughter loves books. There was an older woman who used to work there that would make these packs of books based on reading levels - we used to love getting those. This lady retired and the packets stopped being made. What they do have are reading lists that are age appropriate. Some of the titles are hit and miss - but we get about 6 or 7 books every couple of days. On our recent favorite reads are the Olivia the Pig books - namely "Olivia Forms a Band" and "The Mightiest" by Keiko Kasza. We actually picked up several books by Kasza this week - but this one seems to be a favorite. One of the most interesting things that we have found is that Sophia is actually memorizing these books. We recognized this when we were reading Olivia last week and got distracted and she was able to fill in the blanks while goading us back into reading. She could quote entire sentences from the book. She has since become embarrassed by this because when we found out we made her do it so much. At the end of a day - a girl just wants her parents to read to her. (And shocker: they also have books for us!)

3. The "d's". This is both for Sophia and us. I don't know if you know this or not...but the public library has a great selection of movies both for us and her. The first thing we do when we head to the library is rush over to the DVD section and pick out 3 dvds for her. They have a great selection of education and movie titles. Recently I was able to petition them to get the "Signing Time" titles in their rotation and so we enjoyed that. They also have current movies for the grown-ups on hand and if they don't have what you want you can go to their website and request a title.

4. The music - they have cds - all kinds of them.  

Well - that's my pitch for the public library