We took our daughter to a high school football game last night. As we’re parking she goes, “I want to watch people play game ball!”

When I say I’m a school librarian, most people can make a connection and have an understanding. And as long as their next comment isn’t some Fox News bullshit (which was real fun at my grandmother’s funeral), I can usually leave it at that.

But the actual day-to-day complexities of what I do isn’t going to be understood. Most days I am checking out over 400 books to students, which means my volunteers, me, and my para (assistant) are checking in and reshelving over 400 books each morning. That’s over 800 books scanned each day. Then, I am also teaching six 45-minute classes every day and I see each student in our school (over 700) twice a week in those classes. So I am planning and prepping for those classes, teaching those classes, and running the book checkout. Not to mention managing behaviors and helping some of our new students (especially kindergarten) understand the expectations of the library. I am currently planning our book fair happening in a few weeks, getting ready to start my after school club, facilitating a $500 per grade level order for books and supplies, fielding sales phone calls, balancing my ~$10K budget, and being the team lead which involves monthly meetings to attend, twice a month meetings to run, and many additional emails. So yes, I do read to kids and let them take books home, but that’s nowhere near the end of my to-do list.

I like these badges, and want them for my school. First, we absolutely need better gun laws and need to change the gun culture in the United States. But even the school shooter stuff aside, we have 700 elementary kids at my school. Several are prone to seizures. Several are diabetic. MANY have life threatening allergies. Several have disabilities (or poor parenting/lack of resources at home) that leave them prone to outbursts that at a minimum disrupt the classroom and at most endanger the safety of the other students. We do not have enough walkies to give one to every teacher who has a severe need in their classroom. That leaves the option of calling the front office or going to the wall and pushing the call button for the office to respond. Badges like this can help so many stressful situations, and eliminate the excessive amount of chatter on a walkie.

The Halloween section at Costco

Today was a big day! My two year old went on three new non-kiddie rides at an amusement park (pirate ship, caterpillar ride, and log flume) and also went number 2 on the potty twice

Please don’t eat your shoes

2 year old taking a big drink of milk. “Tastes like ahhhh”

Yesterday while sitting at a table waiting for ice cream my two year old looks at me and says “I wanna touch the wall. I wanna touch the wall a widdle bit” So I told her to go ahead. Helped her down. She walked over. Placed her hand on the wall. Then came back to sit. Kids.

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Using a stroller fan to cool down hot food. I prop up the fan and then my hands are free to stir the food around. Works much quicker than blowing on it and don’t have to worry about getting lightheaded

So an attempted achievement we had was going ice skating yesterday. There was a toddler class where the ice wasn’t clean from the previous day’s practice and kids could go out on their street shoes. They have sleds to pull them around, mini hockey sticks to hit around pucks, Pom-poms to throw in the net, and other activities to get them used to the ice surface. Then they put on skates off-ice and get used to the feeling. My child took three steps onto the ice and stated “I need all done ice”. We tried for about thirty minutes to get her comfortable in various ways and she wasn’t having any of it. I think a big part of the problem was for whatever reason she was literally the only kid there. So it was her and three adults, two of whom were complete strangers, in a completely new environment, with no other kids to feed off of. So while it didn’t go as I had hoped, she did step on the ice for the first time and hopefully when we go back in a few weeks she’s more comfortable with the idea.

Coming home from vacation we sent my husband on the plane first to set up her car seat and I boarded last with LO to get out last minute energy. She saw a plane outside the big window and yells “Hi dada! Go ahead! See you later!”

So here’s one of our conundrums. Toys in the bath. Several months ago a little rubber duckie got caught under the tap when the tub was filling up. This sent our then 18 month old into a panic. We’ve had to completely remove toys from the bath and have only just been able to recently add them to the water after it’s filled up (before that toys even near the water would have her screaming, crying, and throwing them as far away as possible). Toys can stay in the water when it’s draining, but not filling. If the toys are in the empty tub she says “it’s okay. Toys okay.” but you’d think somebody was dying with the way she panics if there’s anything (even a wash cloth) in the tub while the water is on. She loves water otherwise.

Bubble gun in the bath. I shoot bubbles towards the ceiling and it gets her to look up long enough for me to rinse her hair. Also, we have finger paint soap. For awhile she was refusing to get her body washed after a string of bad diaper rashes from daycare. She would stand up to paint the wall and we could get her clean.

My two year old saw a bug and immediately knelt down by it, exclaimed “ladybug! How sweet!”, then proceeded to stand up and attempt to stomp on it repeatedly.

I’m a teacher and a few days after my first (and only) was born the Uvalde school shooting happened. Postpartum emotions play a part, but it is really difficult to escape the growing negativity about the state of the world. She’s two now and while I do still have many concerns about the future I’m focused now on making each day as positive as I can for her. In my experience, in time, the intensity fades a little. You do what you can, accept you can’t control everything, and make the best with what you have.

2 years old - a puppet at a puppet show story time. She was in tears at the first song then for the rest of the show she kept repeating “puppet not bite you” and “puppet stay in blue box”.

But then later said “I need more puppet” so maybe she got over it.

Kids.

I browse Lemmy. Sorted by top 12 hours in the voyager app. That gets me through a few hours each day during the week. Then on the weekends when I have a little extra scroll time I go to mastodon when Lemmy is exhausted, and then I visit the few Lemmy communities I subscribe to sorted by new. I also have Feedly for RSS feed articles and Pixelfed occasionally. I have an almost 2 year old. My husband has a couple mobile games (mostly Pokémon related) that he’ll use for a few minutes at a time.

Edit: I’ve also used Libby to read ebooks. If I have to stop suddenly because kids, I’ll just highlight whatever word I stopped on and pick back up later.

I read a book last year (Song for a Whale) about a Deaf girl who would play a game with her grandfather where they would create a story together while using the same hand shape all throughout. So maybe they would make a fist, or ann open palm, or a “y” shape and then the story was created using signs that used that hand shape. If you couldn’t continue the story with the same hand shape you lost. Not exactly a pun but I thought it was interesting.

Not only that, the article states that they’ve only succeeded 4 out of 13 times getting the really crazy one nominated. So they’re playing with fire and wasting millions.