This Story Has An Important Moral

In first world blog problems…

I served on the 2014 Caldecott committee. It was completely wonderful. Locomotive was our winner.

Now that I’ve been on the committee, occasionally people will ask if I have any advice for those who will be serving in the future. I’m here to tell you that the most important thing is to not move.

Yep, don’t move. There are, of course, a lot of other things that are important, but not moving is sort of like the thing you have to ensure so that all the other things like reading, re-reading, and evaluating are able to happen.

In Maslow’s Hierarchy of Blogging, Not Moving occupies the same space as “shelter”. Don’t change shelter while on the Caldecott committee. There are so many books coming that it throws everything off. We moved to a new house with about 4 months left in my Caldecott committee year, and were having to make daily trips back to the old house (about 20 minutes away) to collect packages of books that weren’t going to our new address yet.

But the confusion didn’t stop after my Caldecott service was complete.

I’ve been writing here for going on 8 years now and that means I’ve snuck my way onto a few mailing lists for books. I tried to contact everyone, but there were still stragglers that got sent to the old address. Slowly, these numbers dwindled. Eventually, I stopped swinging by the old place to do creepy, slow drive-bys looking for packages on the front porch of a house I no longer owned or lived in.

The other day, on Twitter of all things, the folks who live in our old house contacted me. There were some packages and they would appreciate me picking them up.

Arg. I felt embarrassed that the problem wasn’t resolved and someone had to be bothered to collect my mail for me. I apologized to the new owners and headed over to the old place.

After exchanging pleasantries, one of the new owners showed me into the front hall. “I figured you’d want this” he said.

He was right.

Thank you Brian Floca and Simon & Schuster for this print. It’s beautiful. And a great souvenir of my time on the Caldecott committee.

The moral of this story is, no matter the circumstances, never, ever move.

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