This week at the library; Or, My Brain Freezes

Programs

• Lakeland School visit
• Tiny Tots (Pattie)
• Toddlers 'n' Books (2 sessions) (sub for Pattie)
• Preschool Interactive: Build it! with Animals!
• Books 'n' Babies (Pattie)
• Mad Scientists Club: Magnet Power
• Teens on Screen: Now is good (Lindsay)
• Family Game Night (Pattie)
• Dr. Seuss Celebration

Random Commentary

• WHY IS IT SO COLD?? I leave my window open for a few minutes and it freezes that way. *whimpers*
• My director is gone for the next two weeks, but so far nothing too drastic has gone wrong...and the other staff have been very firm about me not doing anything to surprise her when she comes back *pout*
• Finally got my second school visit rescheduled - this is the county special education school, so it was a small group but after some initial disinterest they really got into the books and then enjoyed browsing. What will fat cat sit on? continues to be extremely popular!
• Met with Pattie and started planning our giant collaborative April program, celebrating National Library Week and Week of the young child. We take over pretty much the whole library and around 200 people come (this is a total guess). It's pure chaos and extreme awesomeness! Most of our meeting was Pattie presenting ideas and me being the grouchy librarian and saying no. I did approve sno-cones though!
• Pattie was gone so I covered Toddlers 'n' Books for her. Which led to stress b/c in the past I've had kids cry (and parents not too far behind) when Pattie wasn't there! Thinking about service to working families to distract myself....finally time for storytime, I thought too many people wouldn't come because it was freezing cold and people seem to have a psychic sense that Pattie isn't there, but there was a pretty large group for both storytimes. I did a Quiet/Loud storytime and it wasn't bad. Nobody really cried...anyways, it's over. Phew. Glad that trauma is over. A few more days to obsess about it and I will move on. Overall not a particularly fun day, especially since it ended with a spate of reference questions I was unable to answer (mainly due to lack of the materials requested).
• I'm starting our Neighborhoods project, so I put a lot of work into that, and then programs and various crisis, spent most of Friday morning at Walmart looking for ingredients for our next Mad Scientists Club and ended up buying enough borax for 20 years of slime. Oh well.
• For some reason I've been completely exhausted and just really down these past few weeks. I blame the winter, being out of oranges, my director being out of town...could be anything, really. Then I was looking for something and ended up reading back through my This Week at the Library posts in 2011, the first year I ran this blog series. Wow. That was a...horrible year. Some really amazing highs and some really awful lows. This year is not so bad in comparison.