How I am going to fund a new school wing with lost library books.

There appears to be a new policy in first grade.  One that allows students to borrow THREE library books a week.  Because OBVIOUSLY, the library is a fundraiser.


That means, at any given time, there are 11 borrowed library books in our house.  Or under or beds.  Or being eaten by mice.  Except that a couple of weeks ago, I asked Big J where his books were because the math wasn't working out quite right, and he said they were HERE and then I knew we were $38 worth of screwed. 


I half hoped they were in his desk and I half hoped that they had spontaneously combusted--because that would mean he wouldn't be allowed to borrow ANY MORE BOOKS until the end of the school year.   I mean, it's SO BAD that we have a rule that they are not allowed to take their books out of their backpacks ever, which I know *kind of* defeats the point, but let me assure you--there is no time to READ extracurricular books.  We have twins in first grade, which is the year of intense and repetitive and very painful reading, and when we are done with that we are smoking crack to take the *edge* off.  


But as it turns out, Big J's books were not in his desk--nor under his bed, or in the hamster cage, or in the black hole that is my mini (van)--and it was looking good, until he came home with 3 MORE BOOKS.  Which brings our total up to 14 school library books on any given week, but it's only February, and so I have all kinds of confidence that we are going to be financially responsible for at least 25 books come May--and 15 of them will be on the topic of hamsters, because my girls are OBSESSED with them right now.  Not the ones actually LIVING in a pink cage in our house, but the BOOKS that are written about the ones that look EXACTLY like the hamsters living in our house.  In an ironic twist of fate, those books are going to cost me more than the hamsters themselves, which is like life, imitating art, imitating hamsters.


We've reached that point in the school year where I have given up on pretending like I have my sh#! together.  And by this I mean, I have stopped returning library books AND filling out Little J's Kindergarten reading log.   I actually forgot that we were supposed to sell girl scout cookies, until I turned the form in, LATE, this morning--with only our single, sad, sad order for 11 boxes of thin mints.  I seriously miss the days when there was less paperwork and door-to-door selling, when reading was something we did all cuddled up on a couch; although back then it had the tendency to feel like I was suffocating in diapers and feeding tubes and velour sweat pants and the same old routines.   I guess we've simply traded bibs and sippy cups for ADHD meds and the struggle of CONSTANTLY confusing "that" and "what"--proving this stage (all stages) is awesome in retrospect, but still able to elicit profanities in real time.  


Oh, the joy of watching them learn.  Which is consistently matched by the frustration of watching them stumble.