Come Stitch With Me

Tomorrow, we’re doing fun Friday of activities at school. It’s a fund-raiser for sorely needed funds to spend on student and staff incentives. Over half of our students have paid the $10 fee to participate in the glow party, color run, dance, robots, bubbles, and yes CRAFTS.

I was tasked with finding craft activities that could be done at little or no cost to the school. Well, I’ve certainly taken advantage of the opportunity offload my slime supplies, Perler bead and yarn collections. I planned slime for 475 kids, pom pom making for 100 kids, melty beads for 100 kids and a butterfly paper plate craft for 150 kids. Everything except the grade level slime kits is prepped. I merely need to portion out the classroom kits once the final numbers are in tomorrow morning.

And those sewing machines I was gifted? The Janome is at school, the Kenmore with me and the other two were deemed “landfill” by my sewing machine repair person. I’m kinda bummed about the vintage White machine, but it’s not worth it to repair, especially given the previous repair slips I found and shared with my friend. I’ll keep the accessories and list the machine as a parts only machine on eBay.

Tomorrow is my husband’s last day of work. It seems like graduation when you move the tassel on your mortar board once your degree has been conferred. He’ll wake up Friday morning with a status change from employed to RETIRED. He said he has absolutely no problem with being a “kept husband” while I continue to work. I told him to enjoy his newfound status while it lasted!

April and May will go by in a blur as I wind down the school year. When we return from spring break (next week), I’ll have 35 work days left. That’s it! Here’s to what’s next!

Well, it happened. The censorship bill (GA SB 226) passed. (Thankfully, the criminal penalties against school librarians were removed from the legislation.) Let’s see how many parents start hounding school principals to remove the books they find offensive from school libraries. Never mind we have a procedure in place that works well. Besides, common sense and having a open conversation with the parent usually alleviates 99% of book challenges.

Yes, every parent has the absolute right to determine what their child may/may not read. We place notes in the child’s record so that we know the kid isn’t supposed to check out that particular series, genre – whatever the parent dictates. What that parent does not have the right to do is to dictate what other kids in the school may or may not read. Parents need to be more concerned with what their kids are watching on TikTok than the books they’re checking out from an elementary school library.

And if my principal asks if we have anything offensive in our library, my response will be, “Yes” because in our current climate, anyone can find something to be offended by if they look hard enough.

Well, not my circus and not my monkeys since I’ll be gone by the time the bill becomes law.