Birthday Shopping

My birthday is next week. My mom is going to buy me a composter, but since she's not a veteran composter either, she's letting me pick out what kind I want. So needless to say, I'm going to be doing some research on various kinds of composters and try to find one that will best meet the needs of my family of (almost) 6. So I went to the only place I know to look, Lehman's. I typed "compost" into the search bar and found a whole bunch of composting toilets...not really what Mom or I had in mind, so I tried looking under gardening, then composting...that was much better. It looks like I have about 3 choices from them. The thing about composting is that it needs to be turned, so two of them are drums that can be tumbled. The third is composted by worms, which for some reason really appeals to me, but doesn't seem like it will do the work I need it to, although it does say you can compost junk mail, cardboard and newspaper. I don't know, maybe the other ones compost the same things. I'm still too clueless. I think the most helpful thing I found was all the books that also popped up when I looked under the gardening compost (again, still not ready to make the jump to the composting toilet...which makes me think about that zero waste family...what do they do with their toilet paper tubes??). I'll have to look and see if any of these books are in at our library and read through them to make the best choice. I know that I want my composter to work fast (one says it will compost in weeks, not months) and that I want it to be easy to use. I have a lot of kitchen waste and we also have quite a bit of yard waste, so I'd like it to be able to hold a lot...one of the ones I looked at is for hobby gardeners (me) and only will hold a small amount. Not sure if that's REALLY what I want or not. So I guess I'll be taking a trip to the library to do some more research. If I can get this composting thing to work for me, I'm excited to see how different my garden is this year.