Mary and I had a wonderful mommy/daughter date this morning. We started out by going into Horton’s and she got to pick whatever she wanted.
She was so excited to have a whole apple juice to herself that she only had three bites of the cookie!
After that we went thrift store shipping. It was really fun and she picked out a few books. I always have great intentions to look at everything but I rarely come out of a thrift store with anything other than books. We found some really cool books, this one especially excited me:
This is the atlas that I used when I was in elementary school. I loved looking at atlases as a child, I was thrilled to see it on the shelves of the bookstore.
Once I got home I was flipping through the pages and reminiscing about colouring maps and other geography assignments when I got to this page:
Hmm. Something isn’t right here! I don’t know if you can see it but I’m pretty sure the ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republic’ is no longer in existence. That made me feel old.
Then I came to the page on Canada:
Now my dear American friends may not see anything wrong with this picture but Canada looks a little different today. In fact we have an entire new province now!
So I guess that when my kids are ready we will be buying a new atlas. I’m going to keep this one though, Mary has already spent some time flipping through it with me and I suppose it will be a good example of how things change over time.
Finding Joy in the Little Things 
I have that atlas too! It is funny how out-of-date some of the information is 🙂
When they are old enough, it will make a fun history and geography lesson to compare their new atlas with this one. When I was in elementary school our custodian found a box of atlases from the 40s or 50s. Our teacher gave us each an old atlas and a new one and we had to “spot the differences”. It was fun to also compare the country facts in the atlases- some countries changed national languages and religions, etc.