Amy Lu's View

Today I finished packing up all my belongings from my onsite work office. 

I may have to go back and do some cleaning and dusting and paper clip redistribution, but this great task of transition is essentially complete. 

Surprisingly, I feel less overwhelmed than after my first session of moving. Yes, I still haven’t touched any of the papers and paraphernalia that I brought home two weeks ago and dumped in my home office, but today I only brought one more box home. I feel like I was quite successful this time in making hard choices and recycling (and sadly, throwing away) stuff I know I’m not ever going to use or need, despite sentimental attachment.  

Today I took a deep dive into the mementos of my tenure as a youth services librarian. From roughly 2001-2005, my professional speciality was the world of childhood literacy–storytime and fingerplays and picture books and book clubs and so forth. Before that, I also was an assistant in the children’s section of the Cedar Rapids Public Library, so I accumulated a LOT of storytime resources. 

I loved being a youth services librarian (although it was not something I wanted to do for my entire working life) and I fondly looked at all my storytime plans and accessories before recycling them. 

Any observant and regular readers of my blog may be asking–”Didn’t you write in your last post about office clean-up that you couldn’t part with your storytime keepsakes?”

Yes, indeed, so I guess I was in a different headspace today–and I may have been inspired by finding my flannel board story pieces. (If you don’t know what a flannel board story is, please Google it or use a time machine to transport you back to the seventies. Actually, surprisingly and charmingly, flannel boards apparently are still a thing and you can even find YouTube videos on how to make and use them).

Finding these goofy artifacts may have been just what I needed to convince me that I could let go of some of my storytime related memorabilia. 

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These clowns are hysterical. And rather frightening. They look drunk and slightly menacing. I hope they didn’t send any children to therapy. 

I may be creative, I may be musical, I may be theatrical, I may even be artistic–but I am not crafty. Maybe I will be someday, but so far in my journey, that has not been me. There is clearly a reason I usually did my storytimes with limited props. (I think to the dismay of my very crafty sister, who was always more than willing to help me up my storytime game).

It was hard to recycle the many handmade thank you cards I received from various children (usually from visiting school groups), but I reminded myself I didn’t actually remember the individual children and they are probably now in their thirties, so I let the cards go. I DID save a card I got from a grandmother who was a regular storytime attendee along with her grandaughter, Bryn. Seeing 3-year-old Bryn every week at storytime sharing the experience with her grandparents always warmed my heart (my grandparents used to take me to Menards).

Who knows, maybe Bryn grew up to be a librarian…or a clown?