tabatha says

Jordan has racked up a bunch of library fines.  The main reason was her mother (me) was too lazy to take the books back on time.  After all she was probably four when she got the fines so as much as I would like to blame someone else, it is what it is.  Nevertheless, she is the one paying the price because she can't take anything out until they are cleared up.  Our library, the Queens library in New York allows children under 16 to participate in a program where they can earn a a dollar coupon for every half an hour that they read.  They call this program, "Read Away Your Fines."

Besides saving me money, it has become more Jordan and me time.  Jordan loves to find two of the same book and she read one copy and I read the other.  I am constantly amazed at how well she can keep up with me.  I know that because she likes to check in about what page number we're up to or whether I have reached a certain part in the story.  God help me, if she gets ahead of me because she is a huge book spoiler who will tell me the plot regardless of my begging and pleading with her.

We also play a game where we read the picture books that are on the table when we sit down, no matter what subject.  Sometimes, we like to speculate about the person who sat there before us because of some of the choices that were there.  This sort of takes us out of our reading element because we are reading books that we may not have picked up otherwise.  We have encountered books about all sorts of things. Some we liked.  Some we loved and yeah, there were some we said, "say what?"  but we are almost always entertained.

Another thing about our libraries in Queens, is that there are always fun, free events happening.  We have learned to play chess and crochet at branches of the library.  We have attended weekly storytimes, arts and craftsclasses, and poetry readings.  We have seen all kinds of presentations such as a how-to balloon class and a wonderful Martin Luther King Day celebration.  Now at the main branch there is an awesome weekly Science Lab for school-age kids that we attend when we can.

Also the Central branch is expanding the children's section to include a Discovery Center.  It will have interactive museum quality exhibits, a childrens computer center and be multi-lingual.  It is scheduled to be opened this Autumn and we honestly cannot wait.

Right now we are very lucky because most of our branches are open six days a week but because of the recession, we are facing huge budget cuts that could change that.  I remember how crazy it used to be about 15 years ago when it happened and it wasn't pretty.  You really had to know the schedule to catch a branch open.  In Queens they have petitions at each library circulation desk which you can sign.  There is also an online version here at  http://www.savequeenslibrary.org/.

I am also pretty sure that this is a nationwide problem so I strongly encourage everyone to do everything they can to save their local libraries.  Write your local politicians, sign petitions, rally.  Whatever.  Let's keep our libraries open.  By the way, thanks to all of those great people at Queens Library we encountered recently with a small customer service issue. 

What We are Reading:

This week Jordan is reading a Magic Tree House book, called Mummies in the Morning by Mary Pope Osborne.  This is the book of the month or week or the century or something for her class and she is having fun with it.  We also saw Flat Stanley, the musical with her class at a local college.  The kids were pretty excited about it and came up wih some unique ideas as to how they would present the character flat in a live production.  In the end they were all wrong but were delighted and a bit tricked with how it came about.  They left the theater with their eyes shining.  It was a lot of fun for us and now we really want to dig into the series.  On her own, Jordan read another American Girl book, this time about the character Molly and is getting into the Bailey School Kids series.  Just a thought...do people even write one single book without a sequel?  Series are great to keep kids wanting to read except all of hers seem to have like, 40 books in each series.  Overwhelming to say the least.  I am really going to have bring those library fines down!