So when your mom is a librarian. . .

You might remember from “Foster and Panda in Print” that our stories had made it to the Christian school library a couple of years ago. We were so excited to know that the students wanted to check them out. Mom had printed our stories from the blog and put them in binders.

But this year, she is the actual librarian! It’s kind of a long story, but it just “unfolded”, and she has been having a great time organizing and decorating the library.

This is the animal stories section. Mom’s pretty excited that she had enough to make an “advanced” and “intermediate” shelf. In the plastic bins you can see the “Imagination Station”, “I Survived”, and “Boxcar Children” books.

This is the little kids’ section, which we like because of the colorful baskets.

And here, below the Bible story books, is the Foster and Panda section! Yes, you read that right! We now have our own section in the library.

Shortly before the school year started, Mom decided to take the binders apart and make it so the kids could check out the individual stories. It made more sense to have multiple stories available, rather than the binders, which contained up to six stories each. Now more students can take home one of our stories, which is always a good thing.

The first thing she did was insert a blank piece of paper into the plastic sleeves to make the pages a little sturdier.

Then she put washi tape across the top of the plastic sleeves so the pages wouldn’t fall out.

We thought they looked pretty good.

This is when I was supervising the way they would look in the plastic container.

I personally thought I would look better in the container, if I could just fit . . .

Yep, just as I thought!

“If I fits, I sits.”

Meanwhile, Mom wanted the pages to stay together and lay flat, so she sewed along the edges of each story.

This is how they looked after they were sewn together. The next thing was figuring out a way to bind the edges so they didn’t show.

She cut the edges off with her paper cutter, which I am not allowed to touch. So, if you were wondering, that’s why you don’t see me helping in any of these photos.

So far, so good.

After the washi tape was put onto the edges of the books, Mom was happy that they opened out so flat.

It was so exciting when all the bar codes were put on and the stories were ready to go into circulation.

When she finally took the stories to the library, she realized that it would be better to lay them down flat so the students could look through them more easily.

The only ones that are still in a binder are “An Olympic Adventure” parts 1 and 2.

The kids were excited to check out the stories with our new electronic scanner. As of this writing, there is only one that hasn’t been checked out.

Mom and I hope you enjoyed seeing our new library books. I have to say that now Mom has a whole new “passion”, and she never lets anyone forget that she is, in fact, a librarian.