Back on the Grid, Free Stuff Included

We're just now recovering from our 23-hour power outage here (I want to be one of those mothers who looks at a power outage as a chance to reconnect with her family without the intrusions of technology, but I am most definitively not one of them), which blew all our big Sunday plans--Matt was going to do all the household laundry, and fold it AND put it away, which is a BIG DEAL, while watching football, and the rest of us were basically just going to craft and play and stuff, but with, you know, a light to pee by--and so instead of the photos of the brand-new awesome door shelves in the playroom, which I didn't get to take, or the photos of all the awesome craft fair stuff I made, which I didn't get to make, I'll show you what we got today from the public library's book sale FREE DAY!!!!!

Wait, that's the cat. MOVE!!!Ah, here we go! The girls' shopping cart (which they took into the sale because they are just that awesome) and the stack next to it are all romance novels for my students--I'll make them take one and read it and write a paper analyzing it when we study the romance genre later this semester (right now we're on Star Wars--I just tonight had to break it to them that Luke Skywalker was a member of a terrorist organization attempting to overthrow a ruling government. Yes, friends, blowing up the Death Star was an act of terrorism). The romance novels range from the 1940s old-school Harlequins with the duchess who falls in love with the brutal yet passionate czar to the contemporary ones that all seem to revolve around a single woman looking for a father figure for her adorable yet troubled child. Weird.

The girls picked clean the children's area (they got all the awesome geography picture books that nobody wanted to pay for--Tasmania, and Eastern Bloc, and My Mommy was Born in Germany) and then ransacked the young adult shelves for all kinds of inappropriate titles, but I bribed them into letting me sort through their collection and take out the teen heartbreakers by offering them a set of animal encyclopedias, so now we're flush on good animal pictures to cut out and do stuff with.

I got a couple of books to read for real, but mediating my kiddos requires so much energy that I really didn't have time to give the sale a good go-through just for me, so mostly I just grabbed all the halfway-decent crafting books that I saw. I got Needlepoint: The Art of Canvas Embroidery, which I'm not that excited about except that it does have some construction patterns for canvas containers; Better Homes and Gardens Gifts to Make Yourself, which has instructions for making those big cardboard puzzles that little kids like; Sewing The New Classics: Clothes With Easy Style, whose clothes are mostly baggy and ugly but from which I think I can figure out how to make jammy pants; Have a Natural Christmas 1980, from which I am totally going to make some pomanders; and , which has a pattern for bell bottoms(!).

Yep, it took me three trips to the car to drop all this stuff off, while the girls sat on a bench on the sidewalk and spilled chocolate soymilk on themselves (from Bloomington Bagels--don't get me started on how much I hate taking my kids to a restaurant by ourselves, but we were off the grid, and we had to eat!), and then I got yelled at by some guy who'd apparently been waiting on me to leave in my car so he could take my space, but I'm sorry, it's not my job to watch my kids and where I'm going and figure out what the people in other cars are doing, too, and then we went back into the playroom and the girls played while I utilized the library's electricity and wi-fi to write my lesson plans and grade my online homework submissions, and then we left the library, and I was yelled at AGAIN by some woman who got out of her car to come over and ask me if I was leaving my spot because I put one kid in her carseat, then the other kid in her carseat, then got in the car, then got each kid a book, then a different book, then got one kid a snack, then called Matt on the cellphone to see if he knew if the power was back on at home or if I should drive the kids to a restaurant--again, not my job to leave a parking spot as quickly as possible so someone else can have it. Have I ever mentioned that I LOOOOOVE to bike to the library with the girls? Weather willing, that's what we'll be doing again tomorrow morning, because come rain or come shine, storytime comes every Tuesday morning.

When is your storytime?