This week at the library; or, Acrylic paint is NOT washable! But we knew that already.

Monday

• I was so crazy busy Monday morning I can't remember everything I did. But I was very busy.
• We had a hasty staff meeting, which I had to leave to go do my program. How do you deal with overdues at your library? Specifically items which are overdue for 6 or more months but have not accrued enough fines to be sent to the police? Lots of interesting stuff from WAPL (a name which makes me giggle) from our adult svs librarian.
• Our Make it and Take it project was to paint the clay projects we made last week. Of course, as always happens in these two-part programs, several kids who made stuff didn't show up - and several kids who hadn't made stuff did. I had the brilliant idea of lugging out the extra wooden snakes from an earlier project for them to paint. Sadly, I didn't have this brilliant idea until some disappointed kids had already left or we would have had at least 20! But 15 wasn't anything to sneeze at. Lots of chick handling, acrylic paint everywhere, and I finally got home well past five.

Tuesday

• Decided to come in at 8am to put together a teen summer promotional bookmark and got those taken to the middle school and high school. I don't visit any classes over 6th grade and I'd like to get more teens signed up for summer reading - and participating - and we have some actual teen programs this summer!
• Much discussion of chicks, eggs, and potential ducklings.
• Went home briefly for lunch. Yuck, it's up to 80 degrees and my car has no A/C. Maybe I should move to Canada.
• Had a handful of kids for Wii - we've decided to cancel this for the summer until we get the whole shebang working more smoothly. I did have a nice big group of volunteer kids come to paint the hot air balloons I'm using for decoration. They were very well-behaved despite no supervision. I limited it to about 5 kids (only one girl decided to put the paint all over her hands...I should have more fingerpaint programs, the tweens and teens are obssessed with it!) While we were cleaning up, I found a spot of red paint on the carpet, left over from Monday! Acrylic paint is like superglue, I finally got one of the girls with long nails to pick it off bit by bit.

Wednesday

• We made suncatchers for Messy Art Club. Not really messy, unless you count the tissue scraps all over the floor...a couple sources had suggested using contact paper, instead of a million bits of tape to stick the pieces on and everyone really liked that! They liked hanging them around their necks too...

Thursday

• Some of our regulars we've been missing came back to storytime and we have some new folks, so yay! I had storytimes planned through the end of May, but with preschool visits in April and other stuff going on everything got kind of mixed up...so we sort of did sheep/farm. We opened with Jim Gill, read Here Comes the Big Mean Dust Bunny by Jan Thomas, Can't Sleep Without Sheep, which fell a little flat b/c none of the kids understood the concept of counting sheep to go to sleep, and the Gobble Gobble Mooo Tractor Book by Jez Alborough. I meant to do a farm song with actions, but about two seconds after we started singing Down on Grandpa's Farm, I remembered that's animal noises and I had meant to sing a version of The Wheels on the Bus. Oh well. We read Sneaky Sheep too, because some of the older kids wanted another story. Then we all made suncatchers. I have lots of plans for changing preschool storytime for the summer, but we've only got a couple storytimes left and they're...not as organized as the could be.

Friday

• The ducks haven't hatched and I wish we had only done chickens - ducks as well is rather overload. Oh well. Got all my begging letters for teen drawing prizes off...

Saturday

• It was busy. It's cold again. Funny how the beginning of the week always seems years away by the time Saturday comes...we had a big book drive today and it went pretty well.