When I picked Andrew up from school on Friday his teacher caught me in the hallway and wanted to talk to me. Oh oh. Never a good thing. At least in this case it wasn’t a totally bad thing. Yet.
She wanted to let me know that Andrew had a library book checked out that he needed to bring back. They can only check out one book at a time, and he needed to be able to check out a new book in order to participate in the Accelerated Reading program. I told her we’d look for it over the weekend so he could return it on Monday.
We come home and begin the search. About 20 minutes into it, Andrew informs me he thinks he left it outside. So, here I am not really knowing whether to believe him or not. On the one hand, he knew I’d get upset and doesn’t normally lie, especially when he knows it’s going to upset me. On the other hand, he doesn’t like “working” and was tired of looking for the book. Add that to the scenario in which he described to me how he ended up outside with the book, I’m not so sure about it.
I’m not going to spend my time looking for a book that might be outside, so I just tell him he can’t play outside all weekend because I’m going to have to pay for the book. We have the talk AGAIN about how library books are to be kept in his backpack unless he is reading them on the couch. And never, never is he to be reading them outside without special permission. I didn’t even know he had a book from the library.
I went to the school to pick him up this afternoon and talk to the librarian about our options. Obviously I’m going to have to pay for it. Thankfully it’s only $8.96 and so I tell her that I will not be able to pay it until after the first. I ask her if there is anyway that he can check out books for this Accelerated Reading project in the meantime. Nope. Not going to happen. Instead she asks him to give up his last recess everyday to come and read in the library until I can pay for it.
Correct me if I am wrong in my thinking here. It’s one book. It’s less than $10. I have made the effort to come into the school and make arrangements with her. Would it really hurt to let him check out one more book? If he loses that one, I can understand, but give me a break.
Your thoughts? Am I being unreasonable? Maybe my cold is messing up my thought process and making me irrational.
My thoughts would be that he wouldn’t be able to check out another book until you paid for it, not pay for it and take his recess away. Sounds kinda like a mean librarian to me.
That is really not called for :(
Go look at my blog for something ;)