I’ve always loved books – reading, borrowing and buying them. So much so that as of a few years ago, I have a husband-imposed embargo on bringing home any new ones. It’s not strictly observed but it does exist.
Obviously, I’ve tried to pass that love on to my children from an early age and some of my fondest memories from my cub’s early childhood include lazy Sunday mornings spent in our big bed, browsing through books with them.
Through the years, we have built a home library of children books, combining all the languages that are, or will be, part of our children’s lives. There are classic children stories in Slovene, which I and Marko used to read through our childhoods, encyclopaedia-style books in French, some English specimens and the random book in either German, Luxembourgish or Italian.
Slovene books, not being widely available in our immediate surroundings, take the most space on our bookshelves. Every trip to our motherland ends up in a bookshop, where purchases are carefully selected before returning with us to the Dutchy.
The fact that we have an amazing public library, means we don’t have to stack up on much else since it fulfills all our reading needs in French, German, Luxembourgish, and English. Although located right in the city centre, it took me a few years of living here to discover it, thanks to my good friend Maja, whose love for books exceeds my own. A library card for myself and Mia was ordered immediately and once he was born, Jakob got one as well at the ripe age of two months. The building itself is quite peculiar with the entrance on the ground floor and two more floors filled with books below that one. What my children used to love when smaller, and are still sometimes mesmerized by, is the pond in the middle of the building; they would just sit there at the window, staring at goldfish, giving me ample time to choose my own reading material to last me until our next visit.
And this is the usual mishmash of different-language books we bring home. Both my offsprings love first choosing them, and once home, browsing through, reading, asking questions about what they’ve discovered in them. On one of our recent visits, we’ve stumbled upon The Famous Five series in French, where Mia got the uncontrollable urge to rearrange the books in the correct order because ˝Look, they are all mixed up! It starts with 22 and ends with 3˝. After choosing a few and bringing them home, it was bizarre owning and comparing the same books, same stories in two different languages – the ones from the library with my childhood books form a few decades ago. A true multilingual moment!
