I’m pretty sure that title is too long, per the rules that we learned in elementary school, but I’m going to stick with it because it pretty much describes our weekend in a nutshell. (Well, except for the part where my mom and I are acting as parents to a 10-year-old, an 11-year-old, and a 14-year-old while their parents are away, which is fun and involves a ton of chauffering/negotiating playdates).

One thing I kept meaning to do over the summer but kept putting off until we were leaving was to do an inventory of the Literacy Lab, really familiarize myself with all the amazing materials that are in there, and organize it. Well, it didn’t happen in Seattle, so we decided this weekend, when we had nothing planned for the Literacy Lab, was the time to do it. On Saturday, while my mom was driving one of my cousins to her traveling soccer game a long way out, I pulled out all these boxes of the book from the back and began counting books. However, yesterday (Sunday), we really pulled everything out. Thankfully, it was a gorgeous day here (can I tell you how much I LOVE Denver weather? 80s and sunny at the end of September! But they still get snow in the winter!), so we just started laying everything out on the grass, as you can see.

Here’s the tricky thing about being on a road trip for 5 weeks in a van where the goal is to collect and give away books while also keeping a huge supply of costumes, props, and toys: you want to keep the van full, but you also want to access all the fun materials you have. We have two book carts (like the ones you see at library) full of books to give away, in addition to banker boxes of books, and that shelving unit we bought in Portland. Those go in the middle. On the sides are shelves where we put our different themed programs (dinosaurs, pirates, water, outer space, princesses and dragons, etc.) as well as our resource materials. There are a few places we can access without having to move a gazillion things around, but other themes are blocked by these (*super heavy*) book carts that have to be moved around.

A common theme of our conversations on the road or at home while cutting out materials to use is how to best organize the van, for now as well as in the long run. What we decided to do for now is make certain themes that we use more often more accessible. Therefore, in addition to doing an inventory of the books we have, we had to pull out all the materials in order to put them back in the van. After about 3 hours of counting, organizing, and shifting, we took a look at all the stuff lying on the lawn and thought, eek! That all has to go back in! What were we thinking?! The kids and their friends had enormous fun trying on the different costumes (whoever says that kids stop loving to dress up at a certain point is wrong–the 14-year-old and her friend were having just as much fun as the younger ones! by the way, we’re available for birthday parties!), and I would have been right there with them.

I do not have a particularly organized, spatially aware brain, so I had ideas of how to rearrange things but then had to figure out how to do it with the space and materials we had. It would have been a great problem for puzzle solvers: there are X number of boxes, X number of shelves, some of which are taller/longer than others, and we want to be able to access X boxes in the least possible moves. And then once we figured it out, we had to actually put it all in. It started getting dark outside, the kids were getting hungry, so I got dinner ready while my mom continued working in the dark. But at last! Everything was back in! The title is a bit of a misnomer, because I do think that we did improve the way things are organized and how to access things (in addition to doing an inventory, which is important for our nonprofit status), but it was one of those moments when we looked in the van, looked at each other, and couldn’t help laughing because to an untrained eye, it might not look any different. But it is, we swear! I’m only a little sad that the van is going to stay in Florida after taking out and seeing all the amazingly fun things. I’m building up my own collection in Seattle, but it’s not quite as impressive as what my mom has built up over the years.

Stay tuned for another blog post about our super-fun day at a Headstart preschool in Arvada, CO!

A friend posted a New York Times Magazine article the other day called, “What if the secret to success is failure?” One of the points of the article, among many, is the pithy line that it ends with:  in order for students to succeed, they first need to learn how to fail. This is not an unfamiliar concept; after all, there has been talk recently in education about how in the United States, we need to teach students to perservere through frustrations (in math, for example).  Linguistically speaking, I like thinking about  the concept of perserverance rather than overcoming failure. I think it’s because  the word failure has such a strong, all-encompassing, negative association when the real point is that you need to learn to perservere through your problems.  At any rate, you’re probably wondering why I’m even talking about failure or perserverance.

Well, today, we had a Literacy Lab event at an optometrist’s office in Littleton, Colorado. (Have I mentioned yet how we have this awesome sponsorship from Hoya, an eyeglass manufacturer? The importance of being able to see is an obvious connection to be able to read, so we’re really excited about this relationship.) Hoya has connected us to optometrist offices and this was our first optometrist visit. Instead of doing stories in the office and disturbing other patients, we were out in the large parking lot. Unfortunately, no kids came. Which got me thinking about failure (or perserverance, as I prefer to think about it). Why I like to think of perserverance is that every thing that doesn’t work means that we learned something to try different for next time. In this case, what I learned is that if we’re going to be out in a big huge parking lot, our van is not so big that it is really that visible, so there needs to be something to make it visible. I thought it would suffice to be wearing a costume to attract kids to come over, so I had dressed up in my water costume wearing a fish hat with yellow fishermen’s overalls. (I didn’t put on my pirate outfit because it was 82 degrees and I was standing in the sun, sweating as it was). However, the costume was not enough. Someone asked if I was selling something; another person asked if my van was okay. While I did see some kids in cars, it was not super apparent what I was doing there. In the future, I might recommend doing a quieter storytime in the office while kids are waiting. Or, if we were to do it outside in a big parking lot with very little foot traffice, I think we’ll be on the lookout for a big easel so that we can post a sign announcing the storytime.  On the plus side, the optometrist’s office (Mountain Vista EyeCare) had collected a number of books for us to give away. At any rate, my point is that even if this was not exactly the most successful event, it was not a wash because we keep learning how to make this even better.

I’m really excited for our next event on Monday at a Head Start preschool in Arvada, CO. More toddlers and preschoolers! Stay tuned on Monday or Tuesday for those details. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Well, there is not too much to report except that Denver, CO is a looooong way from San Francisco, CA. On Monday the 19th (Day 5), we arrived in Winnemucca, NV. On Tuesday, we drove all day from Winnemucca, NV to Rock Springs, WY. Yesterday, we drove from Rock Springs, WY and arrived in Denver, CO to an excited welcome party of my three cousins (10-year-old, 12-year-old, and a 14-year-old) and aunt and uncle. What maintained us throughout all that driving was a steady diet of musicals and a neverending conversation about how to best organize our materials (we figure we *might* be organized by the time we arrive in Orlando), what we have read about how to best promote literacy, what we should do at our next program, what bugs us about the current educational climate in the United States, and future plans for the Literacy Lab!  What we determined about the various states on I-80: Nevada has a lot of straight, flat driving (we continually saw large signs warning against driver drowsiness and fatigue); Utah is much curvier and greener (the signs we saw tended to warn against falling rocks, for example); Wyoming is brown with interesting jutting reddish-brown rocks all along the way; and Colorado turns green again with much more hills. What ties them all together is how much open space there is. Truly incredible for city folk and suburbanites like ourselves.

Musicals we listened to on the drive (if you haven’t heard of some of these, go check them out! also, this does not even begin to get at all the musicals we eventually will listen to on this journey):

• Les Miserables
• Mamma Mia
• Wicked
• Bye, Bye, Birdie
• Billy Elliot
• In the Heights
• Next to Normal

Today, in addition to getting errands done, we visited the Tattered Cover bookstore (recommended by multiple people!), which was a beautiful bookstore with a lovely children’s section. A dangerous visit–we walked out with a number of awesome readalouds…and a shark puppet.

Tomorrow, we are really excited because we have the first of our optometrist visits! Thanks to the awesome sponsorship from HOYA Free-Form Company, we are connecting with optometrists and their patient base. The link to early childhood development and vision care has a huge impact on a child’s ability to read, so our relationship fits well together. We will be visiting an optometrist practice in Littleton, CO.

This morning, my mom and I dressed up as two mad scientists, called ourselves Professor Plot (Cora) and Professor Page (me), and got to talk about the Literacy Lab with 75 third-graders at a school in Los Altos, California. Before the trip began, we developed a geography Literacy Lab lesson that we’ve been using with schools. We talk about our mission, get the students physically involved in a United States geography activity, read the book The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman by Darcy Pattison or LaRue Across America by Mark Teague, and then do a couple of fun activities. Both activities are super fun because it’s about connecting to kids in other states. First, as a group, we create a scrapbook page about their school, city, and state.  Students brainstorm ideas about what they think other students should know about their state. In this case, California. At the end of our journey, we’ll make a copy of the scrapbook for every school so that students will get to see a picture of the different school classes we visited and hear what other students say about their own city and state. The second fun activity is that we are having students write postcards in every school we visit. The postcards include information about their hobbies, what other people should do if they visit the state, or any other information they think other students should know.  Then, in the next classroom or state, students get to pick a postcard and hear directly from another kid. Promoting writing for a personal purpose! (It’s so fun to read them afterwards…elementary school writing is the best. One of my favorites from Seattle read, “I live in Seattle, WA. I like to make people laugh. I am going to make you laugh right now. There is something on the pig’s nose.” Then on the picture side of the postcard, he had colored in the pig’s nose from Pike Place Market. True to his word, it did make me laugh). Literacy and fun – how can you get any better than that? 🙂

(My multiple attempts to upload photos on this hotel’s slow wi-fi failed. I will try to post the pictures tomorrow. Just picture my mom dressed up as a mad scientist with a green wig, bright pink earrings, a white lab coat, and bright pink shoes. I had a rainbow wig this time).

After the event, we had lunch with a good friend, and then headed out on the road. It’s cool to be talking about our journey in the morning and then be riding the journey in the afternoon. Today’s drive was particularly enlightening in terms of getting to know the country. We started in the highly populated Bay Area and just a few hours later, were out in wide open spaces. Going from a city through mountain passes and ending in the vastness that we’ve discovered is Nevada is a pretty wild experience. At about 8pm, we started getting a little tired and ready to settle down for the night. I had randomly picked a town on the map that seemed possibly big, but as it turns out, that town had nothing in it–no gas, restaurants, and definitely no hotels! So we had to keep going until we ended up in Winnemucca, where we stopped at a local and quite delicious barbecue restaurant before settling into the Shady Court Motel. Tomorrow, our goal is to get about an hour past Salt Lake City.

One thing we’re realizing about driving across the entire country is how big the United States is. Seriously. I recently read a fascinating book called Why Geography Matters  all about the importance of studying geography, (which is not just physical geography but human movement as well). However, sometimes it is hard to get an actual picture of what geography means until you physically see it. At least for me, which is probably one of the reasons I love to travel so much.  But this trip has cemented for me the vastness of this country. Being from Seattle, I think of California as being pretty close, but it took us 2 days to get there! (Okay, so we like to take the easy route and not drive more than 8 hours a day).
Anyway, on Friday, we drove from Sutherlin, Oregon to Sacramento, California. We ended up staying at another lovely Best Western and having dinner with a good friend of mine who graduated with me from the University of Washington in library and information science (and is now an awesome teen librarian). What we were really excited about though, was our storytime on Saturday morning with toddlers. We got up early, had our (free) breakfast, headed out to the parking lot…where I proceeded to back into a parked car. Um, really? I’ve had the Sprinter van all summer long and have been driving since I was 17 and the one time I’ve gotten into an accident was with little time to spare before I go to read and give away books to children?! Turns out karma was not with me that morning. However, as my mom very kindly reminded me, at least there was no one in the car and the damage was only minor. Plus, we were able to get to the storytime! So, despite a morning mishap, the storytime went off without a hitch. (Well, mostly. When my mom came out dressed like a dog after I had read a few stories, one child did burst into tears, oops.)  We read the fun read-aloud stories, No Sleep for the Sheep, Jazz Baby, and Piggy Pie Po. (Go check them out if you haven’t read them! ).

 
The rest of the weekend has been filled with fun visits with friends. We’ve discovered that while we love the city of San Francisco (we got to walk on the Golden Gate Bridge!), we do not love driving in the city. Tomorrow, we’re going to a school in Los Altos, CA to visit third-graders, after which we start on the looooong drive toward Denver. More on the school visit tomorrow!

The adventure has begun! So yesterday, our intended departure time was 10:30am. 2 hours later, after packing and re-packing the van (kudos to my mom) so that everything fit, we left Seattle. It felt very strange…and still sort of does, since our first story program is not until tomorrow…to have finally left after planning this for months.

When I realized that my mom had never been to Oregon, and more specifically, Portland, and more specifically, Powell’s Books, the most amazing bookstore I’ve ever been in, we decided to stop. Coincidentally, the parking space we found (as in, YAY! we found a parking space in a city! for a giant van!) was right across from the store, Storables. My sister Allie will laugh, because she knows how much my mom and I LOVE container stores. Our van is packed to the gills, but one thing we’ve realized is that the loading and unloading of boxes from the back of the van to bring into schools needs to be a little smoother. We have these huge rolling bookcarts, but they are unwieldy and hard to get in and out. Well, at Storables, we found this shelving unit that you can put together (easily) and decide how high you want it, how many shelves/drawers you want, etc. So we went and bought it! And then put it together! Apparently, my mom thought we could put it together later, which sounds pretty smart, but I was eager and jumped the gun before she mentioned that and started putting it together on the street. Which actually worked out pretty well–we had one question about how to put the shelves in and were able to jump back in the store to help, plus we managed to finish it before it started raining. Our good karma is working for us.

But Powell’s, oh wow. Every time I go back, I think to myself, (a) why do I not come to Portland more often? (it’s only 3 hours away from Seattle), and (b) why is there not one of these in Seattle? (Elliot Bay Book Company is really great, but I’m afraid it has nothing on Powell’s). My mom was in heaven. Plus, since it’s a combination of used and new books, we were able to find some really great, beautiful-looking hardcover books that will make great read-alouds for $4-8.

This is why we did not arrive to Sutherlin, Oregon until about 9:45pm. But it was well worth it. As soon as I finish writing this post, I am going to jump in the shower, and then we are on our way to Sacramento! California or bust!

My mom (Cora) and I leave tomorrow on our cross-country, Washington to Florida, exciting adventure. YIKES! But also, YAY! Over the past three weeks, as pieces have been falling into place (including an awesome sponsorship from HOYA, an eyeglass manufacturer) and the schedule has been sorted, and re-sorted a dozen times, I’ve been thinking of how impressed I am with rock bands setting up their tours. (Obviously, setting up tours is not limited to rock bands–think political campaigns, international and local tour companies, event planners– but perhaps because my fiancee’s brother’s band Cataldo is going on tour at the same time as us, I’ve been thinking about it more). The process of setting up a cross-country tour is pretty fascinating, especially when neither my mom or I have done something remotely like it before.

First, we decided the date that we wanted to arrive in Florida. This was mostly due to the fact that I am getting married at the end of November and wanted to have a few weeks in Seattle between the Lit Lab adventure and the getting-married adventure, so we decided we should be in Orlando, FL by the end of October.

Then, we determined the places where we had the most connections/possibilities and decided how many days we wanted in those specific places (usually, we planned 2-4 days).

After that, we factored in a week for Denver where we will babysit my 3 awesome cousins while my aunt and uncle go on a little trip to celebrate 22 years of marriage.

Talking over the phone and email, we wrote down a tentative schedule, which I then transferred to a Google calendar set-up that we both could access.

Then, we contacted places to let them know we would be in this place at this time.

What is interesting about setting up a tour is how exact you have to be, without knowing exactly what the road conditions or weather will be, whether places can accommodate you at a certain place on a certain date, and what happens if you decide you want to shift one place a day forward or back. (What happens is obvious: everything else gets shifted one day forward or back). Thank goodness for online maps that give you driving directions. I have a lot of respect for those who planned trips by using a physical map and scale rather than plugging in, “Seattle, WA to Sacramento, CA,” on an online map.

But we have done it! We have a route! And here it is:

Thursday, September 15th (Tomorrow!): Drive from Seattle, WA to somewhere in Oregon about 7 hours away

Friday, September 16th: Drive from somewhere in Oregon to Sacramento, CA.

Saturday, September 17th: Storytime at the Galt branch of the Sacramento Public Library system. Drive to San Francisco, CA.

Sunday, September 18th: Drive from San Francisco, CA to San Jose, CA.

Monday, September 19th: Event at school in San Jose, CA in the morning. Drive to Battle Mountain, NV.

Tuesday, September 20th: Drive from Battle Mountain, NV to somewhere in Wyoming.

Wednesday, September 21st: Drive from somewhere in Wyoming to Denver, CO.

Thursday, September 22nd through Tuesday, September 27th: Denver, CO

Wednesday, September 28th: Drive from Denver, CO to Lincoln, NE.

Thursday, September 29th: Event at Elliot Elementary School in Lincoln, NE

Friday, September 30th: Drive from Lincoln, NE to Minneapolis, MN

Saturday, October 1st – Sunday, October 2nd: Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN

Monday, October 3rd: Event at schools in the Twin Cities. Drive in afternoon from Minneapolis, MN to somewhere in route to Chicago.

Tuesday, October 4th: Arrive in Chicago, IL. Event at night at a school.

Wednesday, October 5th: Chicago, IL.

Thursday, October 6th: Drive from Chicago, IL to Detroit, MI.

Friday, October 7th – Sunday, October 9th: Detroit, MI

Monday, October 10th: Drive from Detroit, MI to Cleveland, OH.

Tuesday, October 11th: Drive from Cleveland, OH to Newark, DE.

Wednesday, October 12th: Event at Simon Eye Associates in Newark, DE. Drive from Newark, DE to Summit, NJ.

Thursday, October 13th – Saturday, October 15th: Summit, NJ

Sunday, October 16th: Drive from Summit, NJ to Rockville, MD.

Monday, October 17th: Drive from Rockville, MD to Winchester, VA.

Tuesday, October 18th: Drive from Winchester, VA to Richmond, VA.

Wednesday, October 19th: Drive from Richmond, VA to Wilson, NC.

Thursday, October 20th – Sunday, October 23rd: Wilson, NC

Monday, October 24th: Drive from Wilson, NC to Fletcher, NC.

Tuesday, October 25th: Drive from Fletcher, NC to Savannah, GA.

Wednesday, October 26th: Drive from Savannah, GA to Orlando FL.

Arrive!

Phew, that was really long typing it all out, especially since I realized that many of the event details are still getting filled in. But, in the (grammatically incorrect) words of Rebecca Black, “We, we, we so excited. We so excited.”

p.s. You may have thought my title was a misnomer since really, it seems like the only way we are like a rock band is that we are going on tour.  However, we also are awesome, as (many) rock bands are. 😉 Instead of rocking out hard to music, we rock out hard to books, storytelling, costumes, props, games, AND music.

The concept, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” has been ingrained in me since childhood. I’m that type of voracious reader who will read anything thrust in my hands (note: this does not at all mean that I will like or will necessarily finish any book). Lately, I’ve read everything from a nonfiction book from the perspective of a undertaker to a silly children’s mystery that involves secret agent librarians. My mom recently told me a funny story that when I got the suggested summer reading list when I was going into high school, we went to the library together and got every book on the list that was available, about 25 in total, and I went home and started systematically reading every one.

That said, I still judge books by their covers. AS DO WE ALL.  You all know what I’m talking about–you’re looking for the “right” book to read and a cover catches your eye, so you pick up the book.  You might then read the back to decide if it really interests you, but I’ve noticed that kids often don’t even get to that second step. I think often, as teachers and parents and librarians and guardians, we so want kids to pick the just-right read and try to steer them gently away from books that are too old/too young/too babyish/too dark/too similar to what they have been reading/too ___________, that sometimes we forget that as adults we go through the same process, except that no one is (usually) telling us what we should and should not be doing.  That’s not to say that adult guidance is a bad thing, because I think it’s healthy to challenge kids, push their reading boundaries a little bit, and take into some consideration the appropriateness of a particular book. However, I think that kids need some room to decide what interests them. Particularly reluctant readers.

Which brings me to yesterday’s storytime at a shelter in Seattle. There were 4 kids who came (I’ll talk about what I think defines success in another blog post, because I would consider this a success, even if there were only a handful of kids). One girl loved the Lemony Snicket A Series of Unfortunate Events series (go read at least The Bad Beginning, if you haven’t) and I was able to find her a particular book in the series that she wanted. Another boy saw the books and decided he really wanted to take the eighth book in the series, even though he hasn’t read any. This other girl and I suggested he start with the first book, but he said, “this one looks better” and was utterly unconvinced that the first one would be any good. All based on the cover. What I ended up doing was having him take both the first one and the eighth one. I gave him the first book partly to appease my sensibilities (and ostensibly, so that he gets to know the set-up of the series); I gave him the eighth one because he was excited about it. How awesome–that he was excited about reading. Maybe that can be enough sometimes?  There are those of us (ahem, me) who like to read a series in order and not be told any spoilers, but I have friends who don’t care about spoilers or don’t mind picking up a random book in a series. I think we need to give kids more room to choose a book by its cover so that they are excited about the prospect of reading, not the prospect of satisfying someone’s guidelines. Once they are readers, then we should start help to expand their boundaries!

…with all kinds of particular places to go! (My attempt to parody, badly, Chuck Berry’s “No Particular Place to Go”).

ROOF Community Services

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This week, I actually went two places in southwestern Washington on two separate days: Camp Wannaread through the Youth and Family Link program in Kelso, WA and ROOF Community Services in Rochester, WA, both connections I got through the inspiring Page Ahead, the likeminded organization that is letting us park the Lit Lab at their office. Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, I could have combined them into one day since they are both pretty much right off the main North/South highway from Seattle, but one of the big challenges I’m coming to recognize with the Literacy Lab is scheduling. It is all about calculations and cooperation. Calculations to make sure I can actually make it to a storytime and back and cooperation with the local agency to work around their schedule as well. I was scheduled to do a third storytime this week and realized (thankfully the day before, but ideally it should have been sooner) that to attend a morning work meeting, drive an hour and fifty minutes out, do a storytime, drive an hour and fifty minutes back, and make it back to class by 4pm was actually not possible.

Which brings me to my first storytime and another lesson: to make sure that I have the correct address of the location. Tuesday morning had already not started out well because I took the half-hour bus ride to where the Literacy Lab is parked, only to realize that I had forgotten the van keys at home (for hopefully my first and last time!). A little panicky because in order to arrive at the time I had arranged with Camp Wannaread I needed to leave within a half hour and yet the round-trip bus adventure to pick up the keys would be more than an hour, I called my wonderful, amazing fiancee who had not left for work yet and begged him to drive out of his way to drop the keys. (Which he did, with nary a complaint or guilt-shaming look!). The drive was uneventful until I arrived, a little late, to Youth and Family Link at the address I had. Except, oops! Camp Wannaread was actually being held at an elementary school. I found it, rushed in breathless, and luckily, since it is a camp with a regular schedule, did not keep them waiting too long. I performed the water storytime again, but added a storytelling component to one of the stories that I had learned in an amazing workshop for educators called Bringing Theatre into the Classroom. What’s fun about doing the same theme more than once is how it gets adapted. In this case, the children were about 15 students in elementary grades. While upper elementary school students do not bring the same sense of amazement and wonder as preschoolers at, for example, an activity mixing oil and water and food coloring, their level of engagement is deeper and they ask more probing questions, which I found thrilling. Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of the storytime or children.

But I do from the following day’s storytime! The storytime at ROOF Community Services was the biggest crowd I’ve had and also the widest age range: there were probably about 35 students ranging across the elementary grades. While some of the students (particularly the older ones) hung back at first, by the end, I had about half of them “on stage” performing “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Shell” using various props and had students really curious about the science behind the oil and water experiment.\

And by a quiet storytime, I mean that there was no storytime because no kids showed up. I decided to write about it anyway because (a) personally, I got to see a dear friend who I hadn’t seen in about a year who graduated with me from my library science program and is now running (!) a library in the Olympic National Park, and (b) in the literacy/non-profit world, there is a lot of talk about outreach, but sometimes the fabulous outreach program that was planned does not work and it is important to reflect on how to do things differently next time.

Last June, when the Literacy Lab was just a dream in the making and I was finishing up a master’s in library science, I took a Children’s Materials library class in which we had to plan a program. I planned and presented to my classmates a bilingual Spanish/English one around Dia de los Libros, a day that celebrates the importance of reading for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This past March, my friend Brooke Pederson who was now the Library Manager of the Amanda Park Public Library on the border of the temperate rainforest that is Olympic National Park, asked if I would do a bilingual storytime at her library in the summer to reach the Latino families in her 600-person community. This past Friday, after a busy week attending an incredible professional development workshop for teachers (the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s “Bringing Theatre into the Classroom“), I drove out to Amanda Park, WA. I arrived in the dark, amazed at how much this community was immersed in the Olympic National Park. (Not to mention a little terrified that I would miss the town altogether). The picture below does not convey what it is like to drive in the dark, turn on a road called North Shore, and have faith that you will eventually find your friend’s house thanks to her excellent directions).

We woke up on Saturday, headed to the library, and I prepared my materials for the bilingual storytime, including familiarizing myself with some Spanish vocabulary that I haven’t used recently and making sure the water tornado and various props were good to go. I was ready by 10:00. Brooke had purposely scheduled the storytime at 10:15 to get the after-Catholic-mass crowd (the community is so small that the Catholic church has a service on Saturday since the priest has a Sunday service in the main “town” Aberdeen where everyone in Amanda Park has to go to do grocery-shopping and is an hour away). Unlike the Northwest typical summer of blue skies and no humidity, the skies had opened and I truly got a sense of what living in a temperate rainforest means. 10:15 came…and went. No kids. Since the library was open until 3pm, I told Brooke that I’d just keep my storytime materials ready in case we wanted to do an impromptu storytime for any kids who came into the classroom. I curled up with a book next to the firestove in the library (it was cold enough to warrant a cozy fire)…and waited. Some community members did drop by, but not one single kid came into the library. Just one of those days. One of the challenges of managing a library in a very small community is that summer reading programs are just hard to predict. During the school year, Brooke had storytime with students once a week, but without the predictability of school, there is no guarantee.  We decided that perhaps I should return when school is in session.