Thank you so much for the grant to attend PLA in Nashville. I had a wonderful time. I met many new librarians, authors, and vendors.

I attended a session called “Serving Patrons With Mental Illness and Promoting Wellness”. This session fit in well with my library. We have 3 different “houses” of patrons who are handicapped who use our libraries. We have been trying to establish some programs with them also. We do a one-on-one reading with some of the clients now as time permits. I found all the suggestions on dealing with people with mental illness to be very helpful. I am looking forward to the Mental Health Librarian website which will be coming about May 1. Being we are looking at doing programs, I was glad they shared different programming ideas with us.

Another session I attended was “Adding Mindfulness to Your Storytime Checklist”. The explanation given to us about why mindfulness was very interesting. Teaching children how to pause before reacting along with the storytime, it will be interesting to see how it works. This practice will be done in our storytimes. I would love to see children be taught this instead of just lashing out or reacting in a bad way.

I attended a session on doing the U.S. Census. It was nice to see an actual copy of an application. I look forward to working with our locals on doing the Census. I agree with Stacey how important this is to all cities and states for funding. Everyone needs to be counted!

I attended the Children’s-Author breakfast on Thursday. Of course, disappointed that Henry Winkler was not able to attend. The other authors were very entertaining. I received a copy of Minh Le’s book and really look forward to the upcoming book he described, “Lift”. I also attended the Penguin breakfast on Friday morning and the luncheon on Wednesday with authors. Sue Kidd’s new book, to me, seems like it could become very controversial. She explained the “elephant in the room” about why she wrote a book having Jesus get married. Her reasons are sound and make sense. I guess I will have to wait and see what the patrons think of the book.

The whole conference was amazing! I really enjoyed it and returned with lots of knowledge for use in my two libraries. Thank you again for giving me the grant to attend the conference.