According to my mother, your baby will sleep through the night when you, the parent, can't take it anymore.So last night, R came over to hang out and watch Lost, and when it was over, she went home. And I told her she did not need to call me when she arrived (so that I would know she was safe and alive). Why did I make this major concession? Because I didn't think I could stay up the extra half hour beyond when she left, and I didn't want the phone to wake me if, in fact, I was able to fall asleep.
Fear, along with its related quirks, can be a very silly thing. I made her promise that if her car broke down, or if she was waylaid by highwaymen, that she would call me immediately. There. All taken care of.
25 years ago right now, I was in labor. In fact, I was in labor for all but the first two hours of March 16, and 14 hours or so into the 17th. Good times, good times.
As promised -- or threatened -- here are some pictures of my library display case. They're 20 or more years old; after awhile, I just stopped taking pictures of what I put in there. But some of them were cute.
Remember, the interior height of the display case is five feet, so that'll give you an idea of how much space I had to fill. For this one, I solicited baby pictures from the staff, put them in little construction paper frames and put numbers on them. Inside the library, I had a list of the numbers, and kids could write in their guesses for who each picture was. I've repeated this a few times over the years, with variations.
There was this absolutely amazing woman who had written a book, and came to the library to do a book-signing to raise money for a scholarship fund because her son was on our staff. The family had lived in the Philippines and had been taken captive as civilian prisoners of war when the Japanese army invaded there. This woman had watched her two children grow up malnourished and in a prison camp. Keeping a diary or anything like that was punishable by death, but she did it and managed to take it with her when they were liberated by the Americans, and had it published as a book all those years later. The newspapers are authentic from that time, and are part of the library's historical archives.
I know this one is hard to see, but it took me forever to make, and I loved it. It's a huge sheet of black paper, the size of the window, and I laid it out like a Monopoly board, but it was called "The Welcome Back to the High School Game", for school opening one year. All the squares were lines cut out with an exacto knife with colored cellophane taped behind them, so each square would be a different color, and so it would all look lit up when I turned on the lights inside the display case. The squares say things like "Field Trip" or "Extra Help", and instead of the railroad squares, it says Grade 9, Grade 10, and so on. Instead of the orange and yellow cards -- I forget what they're really called, Chance and something -- it says "Cut Slips" and "Hall Passes."
We also used to do a special display each year just before graduation. We'd call each of the elementary schools in town and get them to send us the sixth-grade class pictures for the current graduating class of seniors, and put those in there. Oh, did the kids love that one! Over the years, the schools stopped keeping pictures on file (and went down to fifth grade; the sixth moving to the middle schools), but we also found that so many kids had moved into town later in the years after that, so the pictures had less appeal. But that was a big hit, when we were able to do it right.
I've also done a variety of displays inside the library, in table-top display cases and on bulletin boards, but the display case outside the library doors in the hall that I can juuuust stand up in has a special place in my heart.
