The Library & it's Excellent-ness

Yesterday my son and I had multiple errands to run. One of them involved baking cookies for a church festival. I can never make just a small batch of anything it seems like, so we had about 3, maybe 4 dozen monster cookies fresh out of the oven and ready to go. We wrapped up one dozen for church, another dozen for our favorite librarians, and a few for our mailman.

Errands in the summer ALWAYS include a stop our local library. I feel so very blessed to have such an excellent library for the county I live in. Especially since I do not teach in the state in which I live. Our library staff is so very pleasant and helpful. We have inter-library loan service, so I can almost always find any title through the online catalog, and Poof! it arrives within a few short days.

When we waltzed into our library yesterday laden down with several books from the local library, videos, a whole stack of inter-library loans, AND cookies, we were greeted with smiling faces. Needless to say, everyone knows us by name and it's almost like we are Norm walking into the Cheers bar (especially for my son...."Mattie!" The friendly greeting rings out across the atrium.).

As we were persusing the newest fiction picture books, videos, and children's lit, my new loans being checked out. Mattie and I read books, put together puzzles and just relished in the quiet loveliness surrounded by words and adventures waiting to be unfolded.

The best part of this trip occurred when we were ready to check out. Miss Anita, head librarian, was 'beeping' our books, as Mattie calls it, when she asked me again what grade I taught. I answered, and she then said that I have such great choice in books and thank you for some of the wonderful ideas for titles! I was so appreciative, as then I knew that she was a reader such as myself and was taking peeks of the books that roll through her library. I then told I had noticed that new titles appeared in the library after I'd had them on inter-library loan. She also wondered where I get book lists from and I shared the blogs I read and how I kept track of what I read and the grade level of kids I felt it would fit.

It was such a great feeling to share the love a reading with another adult with the same passion. It reaffirmed that I am doing a great thing by being a voracious reader and sharing my reading passion with my students. Now to hold up that other side of writing...which I'm trying to do here. Fingers crossed!

PS We also had to give a monster cookie to the garbage man today! Another person high on Mattie's list of awesomeness!