What to do with $700 Million?

Hi everyone!

I hope you had a good holiday season and a Happy New Year! My family’s Christmas/New Years breaks were quiet and low-key. In keeping with my promise to write more, I decided to do so today. I found this pic this afternoon on my Goodreads feed that made me laugh and think of this blog:

I have had my first Art Explorers program and got a respectable six kids. It doesn’t seem like a lot but given I couldn’t really advertise for the program due to a flyer issue, it is pretty spectacular. I will do my best to advertise the heck out of the program and work on extending the length. I’m so used to not have any time to do the program (as I did with Kids Cafe), that the first one was rather short. So I’ve added a bit to the next two to make them longer. This month’s program was on “The Color Wheel and Pop Art”, and February’s will be on Dale Chihuly. The activity for that program will take longer so I’m not too worried about it. I’m so excited to do the Anglo-Saxon program in March! I’ve worked really hard and managed to squish 600 years of history into 18 slides. I just have to sort out my activity and everything will be awesome.

My first Page Turners (tween book club) meeting will be on Thurs Jan 21st. My co-worker and I asked the kids to have read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe from The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I have read it before, but of course had forgotten that I had, so this time around I listened to the audiobook version narrated by English actor Michael York (which was fantastic). We’re hoping we get more than one kid this time around, though the past one kid per program have been very enthusiastic about the books, and have some cool activities planned. We’re going to create our own shields and hopefully that’ll segway into talking about the author, why and how he created the book and discussion questions. We plan on having Turkish delight and hot cocoa, snacks featured in the book. I’m rather excited about it!  I’ll post more about it in a couple weeks after it’s occurred. February we will be discussing Jacqueline Woodson’s autobiographical verse novel Brown Girl Dreaming (which I totally loved), and we’re hoping to help the kids create a timeline of the last 10 years of their own life, write their own haikus, and create a self-portrait using their hands and filling in activities that make up their lives.

I had my first DiscoveryTime (Preschool Storytime plus STEM) of the year last Fri and it went pretty well considering it’s the first storytime I’ve done since before Thanksgiving. I ended up having a co-worker watch it, as she is preparing for her first one in two weeks when I’m on vacation to lovely Las Vegas to celebrate my 10th wedding anniversary! I did it on Robots, and thought it was a bit short, the kids has a lot of fun creating their own robots out of foam shapes, aluminum foil, pipe cleaners and toilet paper rolls (see my example from last year below). I’m teaching 2 ASL signs per program, as Sign Language is the next big thing in our library’s storytimes. They are using them more heavily in Baby & Toddlertimes where the kids may not be able to speak, but since mine is for ages 2-5, I kind of figured that they would have the hang of that by now. So I’m teaching the word “Silly” (because I like to use the Raffi song Shake Your Sillies Out as my intro music) and whatever the theme is for the day. I’m also teaching my son the signs at home, so we’ve been having fun with that calling each other “Silly Robot”. This week’s topic is on Clouds and the final one of the month will be on Rainbows.

In other news, the Powerball Lottery here in Arizona is up to $1.4 Billion, which is just insane! So naturally everyone is trying to win it. My husband’s job did a pool at $20 a piece to get tickets, plus he went out and got another one for us. So if we were to win, that would be about $700 million a piece after taxes (I think). What would you do with that kind of money? Would you keep it or give it away? I don’t think I would quit my job b/c I know I would get bored otherwise, plus I love it. I could do a lot of things with that kind of money, including the following:

• Pay off my student loan and though my hubby would probably hate me for saying this, maybe take some in-person classes at a good university for fun/to get a PhD because I could
• Pay off my husband’s truck
• My hubby would like a brand new Raptor truck, one of those stupidly expensive trucks with all the bells & whistles (I’ve seen a few around here because of the rich folks that live in Scottsdale)
• Buy us a house and fix it up – or more precisely, move to the NW coast somewhere and buy a house
• Put our son into a really good school and put aside a trust fund for going to university
• Donate a sizable portion to children’s literacy and/or the library
• My hubby would like to buy a house for his parents in England and have all of us go visit them
• I would love to be able to travel more, all over the world; to Northern Europe again, or to Greece, Istanbul, or Japan
• My hubby thinks I should get a new car, but I would probably just fix up his truck and make it really nice
• Buy some nice art/vintage books