fall is here ... thank god

that's right ... today is the first day of school. yay! the children are no longer here 8 hours a day. yay! oh sweet relief. guess what? it's quiet in here! like a library or something.

let's see my poor forsaken blog readers ... what has been going on?

i went to honduras to visit my beloved bolshevik for a few days. that was lovely. i will not summarize it for you, but i will instead quote the bolshevik .... "that image of the man at pico bonito hotel, walking up to us as we arrived and offering us rum drinks in coconuts ... that will stay with me until the day i die." indeed, bolshevik. indeed.

also, the manager of happy new shiny library has sadly retired. we all loved her so. and now we are awaiting the arrival of a new manager. this is a little frightening since we do not know who said manager will be. shhhhhh. it's a surprise! i typically love surprises. but not this one.

anyhoo, now that it is fall we get to go back to our regularly scheduled programs, which means anywhere between 1 to 3 programs a day instead of the intense summer schedule of 3 to 5 programs a day. phew!

our highlight this month is the girls club & boys club. do not let the name fool you. it is not "boys and girls club." the boys and the girls will not be mingling. instead we do girly activities with the girls and boy stuff with the boys. we are imposing strict gender roles! but it's so fun. the kids really get into excluding each other. is that wrong?

anyway, yesterday at girls club we made these fab bracelets out of toilet paper tubes. we had some fun fabrics that we got from Materials from the Arts and we used them to cover the toilet paper tubes (you can see how this was accomplished with the bracelet on the right). then we glued on all sorts of bling. oh how i love bling! we used glitter foam shapes, beads, rhinestones, feathers, sequins ... anything that could be glued down. i must say that i had insisted on purchasing a bunch of glue guns with our grant money, and it was one of my most useful acquisitions.

and that's the story for now.