Dr. Who, Free Books, and Civic Participation
A homeschooling triple whammie: a building project, a charity project that promotes literacy, and a tour of City Hall. Here's how it all started:
We were at a local park w/ some other kids from Z's preschool, and we found a Little Free Library. Later on, while geocaching, we found a cache that happened to be located in the back of yet another Little Free Library.
Z got all excited about them, and I looked online to find out how to make one. Well, turned out they wanted $250 for the basic kit, and that's not counting paint and a post to stand the thing up on.
Enter my mom and her husband, Roger, who is, among other things, a carpenter. Mom did some further reading, and said, hey, I see some of these made like TARDISes! I bet Roger could make you a kit for a TARDIS! And he did. Bless him, he built the whole thing first to make sure it would work, then took it apart again so Z and I could say we made it ourselves. So while we were at Mom's place in Florida for the 4th, Roger helped us paint and assemble it. He still did the lion's share of the work, but Z can proudly say that he helped build his own TARDIS.
But where to put it? Neither Aaron nor I really liked the idea of attracting random strangers to our house. And we don't really live in a high traffic area where a lot of people would see it. I didn't fancy the idea of dealing w/ the city bureaucracy to get permission to put it in a park--but then Aaron reminded me that our part of town, Brookhaven, had recently incorporated to become its own city. So instead of Atlanta's bureaucracy, I'd be dealing with the much smaller Brookhaven bureaucracy.
So I looked up Brookhaven city hall, and discovered there was an open house meeting of the Parks and Recreation committee in July. Which is where Z and I were last Tuesday night, and we met both the mayor and our city councilman, who is going to put us in touch with a person who has a grant specifically for putting Little Free Libraries in the parks. He also gave us a tour of the new city hall and introduced us to the mayor. (For those non-Atlantans still reading, this is not as impressive as it sounds--Brookhaven is about the size of my high school.)
We were at a local park w/ some other kids from Z's preschool, and we found a Little Free Library. Later on, while geocaching, we found a cache that happened to be located in the back of yet another Little Free Library.
Z got all excited about them, and I looked online to find out how to make one. Well, turned out they wanted $250 for the basic kit, and that's not counting paint and a post to stand the thing up on.
Enter my mom and her husband, Roger, who is, among other things, a carpenter. Mom did some further reading, and said, hey, I see some of these made like TARDISes! I bet Roger could make you a kit for a TARDIS! And he did. Bless him, he built the whole thing first to make sure it would work, then took it apart again so Z and I could say we made it ourselves. So while we were at Mom's place in Florida for the 4th, Roger helped us paint and assemble it. He still did the lion's share of the work, but Z can proudly say that he helped build his own TARDIS.
But where to put it? Neither Aaron nor I really liked the idea of attracting random strangers to our house. And we don't really live in a high traffic area where a lot of people would see it. I didn't fancy the idea of dealing w/ the city bureaucracy to get permission to put it in a park--but then Aaron reminded me that our part of town, Brookhaven, had recently incorporated to become its own city. So instead of Atlanta's bureaucracy, I'd be dealing with the much smaller Brookhaven bureaucracy.
So I looked up Brookhaven city hall, and discovered there was an open house meeting of the Parks and Recreation committee in July. Which is where Z and I were last Tuesday night, and we met both the mayor and our city councilman, who is going to put us in touch with a person who has a grant specifically for putting Little Free Libraries in the parks. He also gave us a tour of the new city hall and introduced us to the mayor. (For those non-Atlantans still reading, this is not as impressive as it sounds--Brookhaven is about the size of my high school.)