This week at the library; or, I would have preferred snakes

I have never been allowed to forget the year when I had a snake theme for Valentine's Day. Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. Snakes are cool, holidays manufactured by greeting card companies and candy makers are not. Anyways, I decided to do lots of Valentineish things. Only I sort of planned the dates wrong, I should have had Valentine themes up to Monday, not starting on Monday. Oh well.
We made Valentines for Make it and Take it. I wasn't actually there for most of the program, because my director and I went to a staff meeting at one of our elementary schools, but everything went well although only a few people showed up. Clearly, I am not the only person who thinks Valentines are boooooring.

I wasn't coming to work until noon on Tuesday, but I got an emergency call early in the morning - Miss Pattie was sick! Now, if I recall correctly, the last time Miss Pattie asked me to sub for storytime because of illness she had pneumonia and had just gotten back from the emergency room. It takes a lot to bring down Miss Pattie. Now, I have a backup toddler storytime, unfortunately I had already used it the previous Friday (Pattie was at an in-service thingy or something - we borrow her from the school district). So, I had to put something together on my way in. We did "Jumping and Counting" with Jim Gill and bells and shakers, then we read Handa's Surprise by Eileen Browne and there was much enjoyment of identifying the various animals, although some confusion over the fruits. Then we interacted over Leslie Patricelli's Yummy, Yucky board book, identifying foods that are yummy or yucky. Then we did "Five little kernels" which as you probably know involves lots of jumping up and down, and we finished up with Susan Schade's The Noisy Counting Book which involves counting and animal noises. We made gingerbread men with my giant gingerbread men die cuts, gluing on buttons and eyes, and further decorating with markers and crayons. Phew!

We are STILL having problems with our tweens and teens - we have figured out it's mainly 5th and 6th graders, with a small pocket of 7th graders. I think. Anyhow, they apparently went NUTS on Monday, and when I went up to see how Wii gaming was going.... We have a giant bulletin board which I have tried at various times to make into an art board. I had to take the paper off for the third time in as many days because of obscene language and general nastiness - kids writing nasty things about other kids, etc. Then they poofed our bean bags AGAIN. Poofing bean bags involves opening the zippers just a little, then jumping on them. At least, this appears to be what they did, as I can't think of anything else that would continually scatter small amounts of the inner packing about the floor. Then someone drew all over our nice teen table with pencil. Regards the subject of the drawings, I will only say that somewhere among our teens lurks a budding porn comics illustrator. All this apparently happened sometime on Monday. Argh!

Anyhow...I removed all the paper from the bulletin board (still haven't decided what to do with it and leaving it uncovered is problematic b/c at one point someone scratched an obscenity into the cork) I removed all the bean bags, and have decided that in the "what security should we get" discussion I am in favor of security cameras. Lots of them.

Meanwhile, after cleaning up (baby wipes gets pencil off tables in case you're wondering) I took off for kindergarten registration which started at 4pm. The idea was to issue library cards, but I had a lot of trouble accessing our system off site and ended up checking names with the librarian at reference via chat and then issuing the cards. Then I had to input them all into the system when I got back to the library around 7pm.

It was a very, very long day. So I came into work late on Wednesday. Pattie was still sick, but we just cancelled baby storytime. I don't do babies. We were doing Valentines for Messy Art Club, and it was then I realized my mistake about the dates as the kids all groaned that Valentine's Day was over. But they had fun anyways. Although I spent most of the program hovering over, you guessed it, the tweens and teens because they were out of control the minute I turned my back. Oh, and the sink in the bathroom was "mysteriously" broken. Grrr. We had a crazy evening with an event in pretty much every room - Friends meeting, Men's book club, babysitting for Friends, and knitting group. At least adult book club happened earlier that afternoon!

Thursday! Having realized the Valentine date problem and being really tired of Valentine's anyways, I did an impromptu preschool storytime to an audience of three children. I used the Noisy Counting Book and Yummy Yucky again as well as Love Splat by Rob Scotton (which I really don't like because of the "teasing equals affection/crush" issue, but parents like it) and Me Hungry by Jeremy Tankard. Then I pulled out our bead bins and pipe cleaners and we beaded with much enthusiasm.

I got some of the girls together in the afternoon - they're good if you give them something to do, I just don't have enough to keep them occupied - and had them take beans from our saggy icky bean bag and completely fill our nicer, newer bean bag. Then the bean bag went into the children's area. The teens are not getting bean bag privileges back for a looooong time. They made a huge mess, but they cleaned it all up - even vacuuming - and got a helpful candy in reward.

Pattie was back on Friday, much to the relief of all, and we had a group from Head Start for storytime and to take a look around the library. Unfortunately, I couldn't give them an official tour since I was on the desk. I did a little more organizing of the storyroom, one of my major projects right now, and then I LEFT.

Because I was working Saturday. I did have a brilliant idea whilst walking home on Friday, which will hopefully fix some of our tween and teen problems. We'll see how everyone else likes it on Monday - my director was cautiously in favor. So, on Saturday I came in around 9:30 and did a few things, lugged a bunch of stuff over to our community room, explained my BRILLIANT idea to our director, then we had the four year old birthday party. We actually had about 30 people, which was good, but I'm still thinking of doing something different for the b'day parties - for one thing, I don't like working multiple weekends. Blah. Anyways, we had a monster theme, so we had a lot of different monster masks, paper bags for monster puppets, cookies, and birthday crowns. Simple but fun. Then I went on the desk until we closed at 2 and mostly drew plans for my brilliant idea.

It was a crazy week. Other things that happened this week...

I spent over half an hour with an extremely crazy patron and was screaming in my head for a long time afterwards and we got a baby gate to close off our children's area. It works pretty well, except having to be adjusted frequently when it gets pushed or pulled and some older people tripping, so we put strips of red tape on the floor to warn people and the crack in one of our windows continues to grow at an alarming rate, but the glass that was ordered was cracked, so we continue to wait with trepidation.