Oh, how the children can write. Yes, I judged a Young Authors' Contest today, which consisted of me sitting in a room with an older lady and reading the fiction, nonfiction and poetry of special education students, first graders, second graders and third graders.

There was really no guidance on how to pick the first, second and third place winners. All I was told is not to look too much at the spelling and grammar because they were mostly interested in the creativity.

Seems easy enough, but there were some pretty good stories and poems to choose from! Taking Sara's advice, I eliminated anything to do with Pokemon. Since that was only one story, I expanded that to anything that had to do with television characters. I wanted some good fiction, not a repeat of a Power Rangers episode (which there was). And I'm sorry, Shawn, that also meant I had to eliminate the Spongebob story as well as the Sponge-Bob-Square-Pants poem. The poem was pretty cool, though. The story was about the narrator visiting Spongebob under the water and having a cookout, which was weird because he'd never been to an underwater cookout and also playing with Gary.

There were a few disturbing things I read, like about a deer hunting a man and promising not to kill him if the man would stop running. The man stopped running, but the deer killed him anyway. Then there was the one about a man who cut off people's hands and blood went everywhere. A lot of them were about animals going crazy and killing people. One poem was pretty depressing in its own right, and even moreso because a third grader wrote it. It discussed how sad she was and not to ask her any questions because she was so sad and maybe tomorrow she'd wake up and put on a new face, but right now she's just sad and doesn't know why.

It was depressing.

I did like the story called "My Best Friend" and it was all about the author's mom. Oh, and the one where a bear was following the narrator around the woods and picking acorns when he did and sitting down when he did, so the narrator ran home. Whe he got home, his mom noticed a zipper on the bear's costume, so she unzipped it and realized that it was the narrator's best friend! Surprise endings get me all the time.

I received a gift certificate to a coffee place around here, and I also got a nice card, where someone wrote: "Mrs. Campo, Thank you for giving up some time to help us by being a judge. We appreciate you." That's great, and when she asked if she spelled my name right (because Campo is really hard to spell), I said, "Yes! But I'm not a 'mrs.'" in a not mean way. Because, well, I'm not.

It was a great morning, but when I returned to work, I found that two of my workers are sick! That is not fun.