Young Cultivators Merit Badge: Let’s Go To Town, Beginner Level, Part II

The adorable, always humorous MBA Jane is my way of honoring our Sisterhood Merit Badge program, now with 6,861 dues-paying members who have earned an amazing number of merit badges so far—9,721 total! Take it away, MBA Jane!!! ~MaryJane 

For this week’s Each Other/Let’s Go To Town Beginner Level Young Cultivator Merit Badge, I was still in the library …

… where I had misplaced one small child, two Young Adults, and a couple of elementary-aged bookworms. Not to worry, dear readers, my local librarians are amateur sleuths in their spare time (evidently, detective skills are required in order to become a Children’s Librarian), and the little ankle biters turned up posthaste. One had snuck into Story Time and was sitting on the lap of a mom (who had several children and didn’t seem to notice the extra thumb-sucker), one was gleefully scanning books at the Self Checkout machine, and the teens had found the coffee shop.

All together once more, I sternly gave them a lecture about staying close to Auntie Jane so she doesn’t have a heart attack and ruin our perfectly lovely outing.

We pinky swore, so it was all good.

Andy and Piper were fit to bursting with some exciting news and they practically pummeled one another trying to tell me about it, as I wrestled a paperback romance novel out of the toddler’s mouth.

photo by ParentingPatch via Wikimedia Commons

“They show movies here!” Piper gasped. “Like, for free!”

“And they aren’t lame ones either,” Andy interrupted. “And they’re like, free!”

“With popcorn!” Piper squealed. “And they also have music!”

“And there’s a Craft Day, too,” Nora piped up. “And a Book Club just for girls my age! And a PreTeen Night, and a class about drawing, and a contest I could totally enter, and …”

She probably had more on her list, but I was distracted by realizing I needed a bigger tote bag for our treasures we planned on checking out.

Or like, a truck.

Anyway, I didn’t mind their exuberance since it was of the bibliophile variety, so I tried to organize our ragtag group once again. Laden down with stacks of books higher than their heads, they had to use their energy to carry them all, so we made it to the front desk in relative silence. Sorta.

photo by Herzi Pinki via Wikimedia Commons

Then the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed youngsters got their first library cards ever. It was a proud moment. It brought tears to my eyes, although that was the precise moment that Nora dropped the first seven novels of the Nancy Drew series on my foot, so it’s hard to tell what triggered the crying.

The kiddos were a little skeptical at first that they got to take all those books home. For free. Andy especially narrowed his eyes and looked hard at the librarian.

“Is this some sort of trick?” he asked. “A pyramid scheme? Something like that?”

We made it all home, and I’d say it was a rousing success, in spite of my throbbing foot and a slight headache. I dropped all the children off with their treasured stories and I myself settled down with a much-loved copy of Anne of Green Gables.

I forgot to tell them about due dates.

Oh well. I’m sure I’ll remember.