Wild Rumpus

One night, Loran and I were talking about various toy/child themed stores and Wild Rumpus came up. It’s a fantastic children’s book store in Minneapolis. Loran and I had gone once, pre-child, and were spellbound by the magic of it. So much, we had considered moving to the neighborhood it’s located in on the premise that we *might* someday have children. Well, fast forward to where that might is an actually, we love our neighborhood and luckily, Wild Rumpus isn’t too far away. The next morning, I still had Wild Rumpus on the mind so the girls and I set out to the Linden Hills neighborhood. We scuttled around major construction projects and arrived to find a perfect parking spot awaiting us.

There is a special child-sized door cut into the regular door and upon entering, we were greeted by a chicken! A real, free-range chicken just strutting about. With a slight turn of the head, we noticed an orange tabby cat laying in a basket of pamphlets. Another cat sleeping on top of the lizzard cage, several more chickens strutting about, some birds in cages, a couple of chinchillas, some rats in the floor boards and more…and did I mention this was a bookstore? Ella and Lillian were in heaven. A collision of their two favorite things!

“Mom, Mom…there’s a chicken, that’s cool Mom!”

And, the bookstore has a used book section. We were able to get two new (used) books for what Ella calls, “Two coins” – otherwise, known in the financial world as fifty cents. But do not overlook the new books. What a fantastic collection of great children’s books, teen books and even family oriented books. We’ll be back for more chicken wrangling, book reading, book purchasing fun!

Ella was obsessed with the chicken, followed it around and gently cuddled it. I didn’t realize chickens were cuddly, but this one was quite the champ because I’m sure it gets a lot of chubby, sticky little hands obsessing over it daily. I found out the chicken is so popular, it has its own facebook page. And, an amazing name to live up to – Pimiento Marushka Loaf. I’d strut around too.