NICOLE! I am SHOOK

 So last night I was trying to sleep again and finding it stupidly difficult again, and picked up my phone out of frustration and went on to one of my message groups and several other people were on complaining about not being able to sleep. What the heck is going on? I took a sleeping pill even (over the counter, but still, it usually knocks me out). I did eventually fall asleep for a few hours, which is better than the night before, but I laid down feeling sleepy and comfortable and within ten minutes I was twitchy, prickly and thrashing around trying to find a good position and finding all the positions terrible.

Eve Facetimed me last night from her living room, and later coming out of the bathroom wearing a towel, just to revel in the newfound freedom of living in an empty house - a couple of her housemates live nearby and will be in and out throughout the summer, but for now she's enjoying having the fridge all to herself and being able to clean her bathroom and have nobody else use it. 

So Wednesday is usually my least taxing work day - the fewest classes, the fewest books to put away, time to tidy and organize. HOWEVER, there was an art gallery thing happening at the school in the evening  and as part of the Education Week activities, there was a Scholastic Book Fair happening starting at four.

The other librarian asked if it was okay if classes came in for viewing and filling out wish lists during my work time. And obviously I said yes because what else was I going to do? But it's been a few years since a Book Fair could happen the way it used to, and I had sort of forgotten that having kids to come in for a viewing period was going to, well, suck.

First of all, it's a big school, and because the book fair proper is happening tomorrow and Friday during the school day, I had double classes for most of the day. And while during the actual book fair there would be a few volunteers circulating and I would usually be manning the cash register, at this point it was only me, the teacher and a bunch of jacked-up kids running around with sharpened pencils. Also, the younger grades have never seen a Scholastic Book Fair, and explaining how everything works was, well, a touch challenging.

Nicole and I have both written numerous posts about the book fair, including the numerous times we have to answer the same questions. No, you can't eat the cupcake eraser. Yes, the sticker price is the actual price. Yes, you can buy the UV spy pen but it's probably a piece of crap that will work for two days at most and is a giant waste of money. And the posters? The posters are five dollars each.

THIS book fair, for something wild and crazy, is a 'buy one get one' deal. Yes, this means you buy one thing, you get a second thing of equal or lesser value for free. This is unprecedented in all my many many years of helping at and running book fairs, and it's really cool. You know what else it is? Surprisingly difficult to explain to six-to-12-year olds.

"Wait, so.... you buy one thing and you get a thing free?" yes

"If you get a poster you get another poster free?" yes

"Where are the free books?" They are whatever second book you buy.

"What if it's a poster and a book?" The cheaper thing is still free.

"What if it's a book and an eraser?" The. Cheaper. Thing. Is. Still. Free.

For the first couple of periods, I was extremely tense - I guess the kids weren't the only ones who had lost their muscle memory for the book fair. It was so loud. There were so many children. They weren't supposed to put their wish lists on top of the books to write. Many of them still did. If I asked them not to, many of them looked unrepentant when I restated the rule, but one little boy gasped and said "Oh! Sorry. Just a little bit of an accident". Him I liked. I caught one little girl ripping open a flap on a book when I had SPECIFICALLY said no opening any of the flaps or compartments on the books. I was very angry for a second, until I remembered that six-year-olds are largely strangers to impulse control and, let's be honest, bringing them in for a viewing period was maybe not the brightest move.

After that, I took a deep breath and reminded myself that really, the worst that could happen was not very bad. A little bit of damage, which is the cost of doing this business. A few misplaced books that I would pick up and wander around like an idiot with, unable to find their pile even though the entire display was not that big. Where ARE you, eight other Bad Guys books? I swear to the heavens I JUST saw the Third Grade Mermaid and the Narwhal, where did they GO? And where the heck are the....OMG, there's a Fly GIRL in this Fly Guy book?

And then things were better, although still very loud, and very hot, and very not-chill. There was a sixth-grade girl in the last class that was really fun to talk about books with and she said Goodbye and Thank-you when they left. There was a funny teacher who said "NEXT year I might have the most well-behaved class in the school" when his class wouldn't line up. 

The only real traumatic thunderbolt came early on, and I'm still not sure I believe it. Like I said, one of the major touchstones of the Scholastic Book Fair has always been that, yesterday, today and tomorrow and from time immemorial, the posters are five dollars each. But now, NOW...

Poster-flation!