The Book-Eating House

Every Thursday a friend of ours comes over to read with Emily.  She is a reading tutor for a local school and "practices" with Emily.  Emily loves her "reading lessons" and her teacher as well.  Each week her teacher leaves her with a couple of books to practice on during the week.  This past week we lost her practice book.  She's still done plenty of reading but not from her special reading lesson book. 

Today was Thursday.  We looked and looked through every book shelf for her book.  We looked under beds and couches and inside closets.  We even started looking in strange places.  Be careful when you do that in our house.  You might find scary things.  Recently I opened what I thought was an empty box in our cold storage room only to find a purple sippy cup full of stinky, who knows how old, almond milk.  Sometimes the kids like to play in there and Sophia must have left it behind when the game was over.
 
Back to the book…  Looking for one little paperback book in our house is a little like looking for a needle in a haystack.  We have a lot of books!  We have a lot of bookshelves!  It took a long time to look through them all.  But to no avail.  No special reading lesson book was found.  I finally threw my hands up in the air and said, "I think we have a book-eating house.  There is no other explanation.  I can't think of where it can be."

When the reading teacher arrived I was prepared so offer my sincere apologies over the lost book.  I was completely ready to pay for it.  I started to tell her of our efforts to find the book, when she stopped me and told me that SHE had the book.  She had mistakenly taken it with her after last week's lesson.  It HADN'T been eaten by our house.  It HADN'T been lost in our massive collection of books.  And it was certainly not hiding in the cold room in an empty box like the purple sippy cup full of stinky, who knows how old, almond milk! 

We had a good laugh, Emily had a great reading lesson, and now she has two new books to practice with this week.  Hopefully we can keep from "losing" these ones.