Kids’ minds are so amazing. Their appetites for new information and ideas are so voracious that they sometimes remind me of Cookie Monster gobbling cookies. It’s a beautiful thing to behold and being reminded of it makes me so proud to be a contributor to CLiF’s blog.

A few mornings a week I help out at school. On Tuesday, I got to take a few new readers from my daughter’s first grade class to the library for some small group attention. There were some particular reading tasks I had been asked to work on with them, but the kids didn’t know exactly what we were up to.

When we got to the library the kids acted like they were in a candy shop, looking around at the books with so much excitement. I asked them if they knew what we were going to do at the library. They optimistically guessed, “You are going to bring us here every Tuesday so we can read anything we want for the whole time?!?”

Well. That would be cool, but not now, not exactly. I actually felt cruel focusing their attention on the assigned task. It was like I was at the table with hungry people in a room full of food they were not allowed to eat!

I had to laugh because I get that Cookie Monster feeling in bookstores and libraries myself, sometimes even in other people’s homes.

But their hunger for thoughts, ideas, stories, and information, also reminded me of all of the kids out there whose minds are just as hungry and interested but who don’t have access to books. Or worse, the kids whose hunger is not yet awakened because they don’t know that worlds are available at their fingertips through books.

For me, it’s hard to know that that kind of hunger exists and not do something about it.

That’s why I am grateful to CLiF for the work they do, and grateful that I can be a small part of it.

May no child in Vermont and New Hampshire be starved for books! Fulfilling books for all!