I want to remember this

After receiving my Master's degree in Library and Information Science, I promptly quit work as a schoolmarm and stayed home playing online games for three years.  This year I decided that I really should do something to justify the enormous school bill that I accrued, and I got the degree because dang it, I really did want to be a school librarian, so I got a job in an intermediate school that serves fifth and sixth grade students.

I am a person whose internal clock normally sends me to bed at one or two in the morning, I wake up about 9:15, and am ready to face the world roughly between eleven and twelve in the morning.  Friends, I am so completely happy in my new job that I wake up at 5:45 a.m. to be in my library 45 minutes before I'm even supposed to be (and me being early to anything??  hitherto an unknown occurance), I work until 5 or 6 in the evening, force myself to go home so I can talk to my husband (who is having some problems adjusting to this new lifestyle, I have to tell you), and fall into bed at 9.  If my life were a Broadway musical, I'd be breaking into song and dancing on the library tables every few minutes.  It's a mountain of work that I can tell is never, NEVER going to end, but I love it all.

Here's what surprises me most....I've really missed the kids.  I like 'em.  This is a good group, overwhelmingly, and there's something about a library that soothes kids that have problems elsewhere in school.  I wanted to share with you my epiphany of last week, the moment that told me once and for all that I am in the right profession and that I am most blessed to be doing what I'm doing.

 I had every language arts class come into the library for their first chat with me and checkout.  That's roughly 40 classes total.  I had a cart of brand new, perfect, untouched-but-for-the-processors books, and I doled them out to each class so that Friday's kids weren't left with only old, grotty books from which to choose.  Ever so often, a child would come to me and ask if I had the newest book by a certain author, and I would quietly take them to the room wherein the spankin' new books were stored and told them to see if there was anything there that fit their needs.  I had one boy come to me one day and ask:  "Do you have anything that's challenging?  I've read all the good stuff out there (pointing to the library proper)."  I smiled at him and told him I might have something that would interest him.  I showed him the cart full of books and his eyes widened.  I left him there to hopefully find something that called his name.  A few minutes later, he came out with both arms wrapped around a thick book, and a slight glaze over his eyes.  He breathed: "That's just like being in heaven."  Yes it is, love, yes it is.