Goodbye

I have really enjoyed posting on this blog and maybe at some point in the future I will return to it. However, a few months ago I found some exciting news... I'm expecting! Life has gotten even more crazy than before and I hardly have time to update it. When the baby arrives I doubt I will have any more time. So I wanted to thank anyone for tuning in and maybe in the future I will return.

I still plan to stay at my job full-time, I could never leave it, I love it so much. However, with two fulltime jobs, mom and librarian, there isn't going to be a lot of "me" time. So goodbye for now and thanks for reading.

Dr Seuss

It was Dr Seuss storytime this week so it was time for my annual Dr. Seuss storytime. I read the traditional Green Eggs and Ham for the kids. However, Dr Seuss can be long for storytime so I skipped a few parts of the book. Immediately after skipped a part one little boy shouted out: "You skipped it!" I was so impressed by how well this four year old knew Dr. Seuss. I'm not sure I would have caught it.

Bleach spray T-shirts

The other week my anime club had a "Bleach" day where we made Bleach spray T-shirts. You take a 50% concentration of bleach and water and spray it over the shirt. You can make a design out of contact paper and when you spray the solution over the contact paper and then remove it, it makes as design as in the first picture where the teen cut out a dragon design.

With teens you do have to be careful with such dangerous chemicals. I had to stop one teen from trying to sniff the solution and another one from pouring so much on the shirt that it almost ate through the material. Aside from having the auditorium smell like a public pool, it was a fun and easy craft.

Storytime struggles

Started the storytime season again last week after a holiday break. This week we had a crowd bursting at the seams of the auditorium, as well as some newbie kids. Sitting quiet and listening is a skill that kids need to learn and most 3 year olds have not developed it. So usually when we get some first-timer preschoolers in the storytime, they are pretty wound up, jumping up on the stage, trying to play the piano, standing directly in front of the book in front of dozens of other kids craning their necks...etc.

Usually I can handle out of control kids, because their parents help out. This mother was either too overwhelmed with her charges or just figured the other parents of preschoolers would watch her first-timer children. While the group was doing a craft and I was frantically running around making sure there was enough supplies, one of these newbies grabbed a crayon and scribbled all over my flannel board. Crayon does not come out, it was ruined. I didn't get a sorry from the mom and she did not discipline any of her children....I wasn't happy but I will get the last laugh as these 3 preschoolers eventually turn into teenagers under her roof.

Deaf, Disgruntled Man

We have an elderly man that comes into our library almost every day. He is a little "muddled" in the head and virtually deaf. He cannot hear something unless you lean in close to his ear and almost shout it.

We have had numerous incidences where the man (believing since he can't hear anything that no one else can) will let out a stream of curse words VERY loud in the library. I remember one incident where he kept repeating "S---" and over again. Everyone can hear what he is saying and 20 heads usually turn to see where the choice words are coming from.

I dealt with him this week when trying to explain how much book sale items cost. He was confused about the "buy one get one free" deal we had going on. I told him repeatedly what the DVDs he had in his hand cost but he didn't seem to get it and people were staring as I virtually shouted at him : "Two dollars!" Not accepting the answer I gave him, he wandered off and began ranting (what he thought was under his breath) about how stupid our library was. Everyone on the staff heard it but being the professionals they are, the customer service staff brightly said to him as he checked out: "Have a good day!"

Influence of Movies

The other week was my last preschool storytime of the fall session. It was a dinosaur storytime and I had a flannel story with dinner species of dinosaurs. There was a T-Rex, diplodocus, stegosaurus, triceratops, and a brontosaurus. I asked the children what the name of the dinosaurs were when I held up their flannel counterparts. I've been surprised at the average three-year olds knowledge of dinosaurs, they love that stuff. This group could identify the T-rex and the triceratops with some prompting. When I held up the brontosaurus instead of the correct name they all shouted: "Long neck, long neck!" from the characters in Land Before Time. Even when told the proper name they continued to call the brontosaurus "long neck."

I have also never seen a child under six identify a clown fish as a clown fish. They all call them "Nemos." It goes to show how great the influence of movies are on television and how many hours they spend watching them.

Ninja for Hire

The other week we had a very special guest for anime club...a ninja! I found him online, his online ad said he was a "ninja for hire" and would do just about anything. I hired him not knowing exactly what to expect.

When I was sitting at my desk waiting for the ninja to show up, a policeman entered the library and asked for me. When I confirmed that I was that person, he said "There's a guy dressed in a ninja outfit with all these weapons in a car outside the library. He says he knows you. Is this true?" The policeman had a very concerned look on his face. I guess he thought the ninja was going to attack our library with his katana and shurikens. I confirmed that I did know the ninja and "Jon Ninja" came to set up.

Mr. "Jon Ninja" really did know his stuff. He knew ninja history, moves, information about weapons etc. The kids were in awe of him. For the activity I had all these cut-in-half pool noodles that they could use as swords. The ninja carefully taught the teens how to fight with them, showing them defensive moves etc. But when he let them loose they just walloped each other over the head.

Doing a lot with a little

Our library system gives each library a fixed amount of money for programming each year. I have had a lot of programs this year and found myself last month with four months to go in the year and about $200 left to spend. Some might think that was a lot but with storytimes, a teen anime club, a gaming club, after school club, teen programs, crafts, book clubs etc. that money goes fast.

I have been getting big crowds at my storytime this session. At each storytime I have a craft relating to the theme. So I have had to had to come up with crafts for 30 something kids each time for 8 weeks with practically no money. I am on the sixth week and I have successfully done it, with only spending about $20. I think that deserves an award or something. I can't even go to the grocery store to buy milk and get out spending less than $20.

The reason I'm able to do this so cheaply is simple. Preschoolers are very easy to please. You basically need paper and glue and they are happy as clams. The picture above is our last craft, a paper bear with some buttons on it I found in the back and clothes pins on the back (which are $1.50 for 50) to make the bear stand. Now if only I could entertain the teens with simple paper and glue...

Sharks and Minnows

I've learned with kids under the age of 8 you can't go wrong with pirates, (the kind with parrots on their shoulders, not the Somali kind.) This week I turned my pirate party I had in June (see June 2010) into an after school activity aimed at elementary aged. I did not have a pirate storyteller but instead included several pirate/aquatic-themed games.

One game we played was the classic "Sharks and Minnows." In this game one child is chosen as a shark and stands in the center of the room. The rest of the children are minnows and must cross to the other side of the room without being tagged by the shark. If the shark tags a minnow, that minnow becomes a shark. You play until there is one lone minnow left. I have a fairly large auditorium so I thought this game would be fun. We had about a dozen kids playing, ranging from 4-10.

Things were going fun until there were two minnows left, one tiny girl that can't have been older than five and one boy not much older than that. They were faced by ten exciting, shouting, and eager sharks. When I said "go" for the minnows to cross over to the other side, it was kind of like those nature shows where hyenas descend on a gazelle. Ten older kids jumped on these two little kids, saying "we got you", pushing them and herding them to the other side of the room. I was fearful one of them got hurt since the older kids were so excited. Fortunately no one was but I decided we were done with "Sharks and Minnows." After that we stuck to a game like Hot Potato, where it was less likely one could get run over.

Pick up the Buckets!

In some anime school dramas when a character misbehaves in school they are forced to hold up water filled buckets as punishment. Up until the 1970s teachers in Japan would discipline their students this way and it made its way into popular culture. The water bucket punishment is the equivalent to the "dunce cap" in Western cartoons.

I had my first anime club meeting this week and since my anime teens are very loud and crazy I thought a way to discipline them would be to use the bucket punishment. I brought two small buckets and filled them up with water and informed them (in a kindly manner) all at the beginning if there was misbehavior someone would have to hold the buckets. The teens thought this was very funny and immediately started competing to hold the buckets. Soon however, the girls found out the buckets were very tiring to hold and stopped but a couple of boys kept at it presumably to impress the ladies.

I only ended up using the buckets as punishment once when a girl did not get off our auditoriums piano... a big no no. I told her "pick up the buckets!" Then all the other teens picked up the chorus: "pick up the buckets!" She dutifully complied. I don't know if the water buckets had the intended effect I was looking for but they did provide some amusement.

I had a school group come in last week and I read them this book: Furious George goes Bananas by Michael Rex. It's a parody of Curious George where the "man in the hat" tortures George and makes him do all sorts of things for money. At the end of the book George throws the man into a space shuttle, jumps on the back of it and then as it blasts into space the ape parachutes down gently into the jungle. When I completed the book, one six year old girl earnestly said: "I don't think that parachute is big enough for George."

When she said that I thought to myself: So George building a skyscraper, performing on Broadway, outwitting the man in the hat and blasting off into space on the back of a shuttle didn't bother you...but the parachute..that was what did it. Sometimes the things kids say...

No Appreciation

It's been a while since I've posted. I've been taking a well-earned vacation.

This week I had a sand art activity. I ordered a sand art kit that had 50 bottles for the kids to make their own sand art bottle. I also had enough sand for them to make their own sand art picture with colored sand, markers and glue. I assumed that 50 bottles would be enough. Why would more than 50 kids descend on the library on a Thursday afternoon? Well, I was wrong. We were swamped. I ran out of bottles. I felt SO bad but how was I to expect so many. The last activity I had there were 30-something kids.

Most of the mothers were fine and gracious and happy doing the second sand art craft...except for one mom. I personally apologized to this mother and invited her to do the second craft. She refused and instead decided to rant to the reference desk about their not being enough bottles. Now I understand that if I made her pay a dollar for the bottle and it not be there for her to be that upset. But to complain about a FREE activity where she showed up 20 minutes late to I thought was unfair. How about a thank you for spending the money and time for having the activity at all?

Stealing from the Library

There is a DVD thief rampant in our library. We always have DVDs stolen but over the last couple of weeks there have been dozens taken from under our nose. We have suspicions but no suspects and so we have adjusted our security cameras to see if we can catch the culprits.

All libraries have thieves. There is not one branch that hasn't struggled with how to secure their property. I was having a conversation the other day about exactly WHY this happens. I think it's due to people's mindset about libraries. I think the people who will steal a dozen DVDs from a library would not even consider stealing them from Blockbuster. To them, stealing from a library is not really stealing because everything in the library is free. They are essentially permanently "borrowing" them.

I personally think stealing from a library is 10x worse than stealing from a Blockbuster. When you steal from a video store you are stealing from a massive corporation. When you steal from a library you steal from your neighbors who contributed the taxes to pay for that library. Everyone gets hurt when you steal from a library. I wish people could understand this, then we would have fewer thefts.

Pirate Party!

A couple of days ago I had a "Pirate Party" to celebrate our Summer Reading Program's theme of "Make a Splash" at your library. Kids love pirates, of course their idea of pirates are the Pirates of the Caribbean type not the Somali type but nonetheless they love them. I had a whole passel of kids, mostly boys out to the library and I had pirate names for each of them on name tags. I found a pirate name generator to come up with the names but I had to edit them because many of the pirate names it came up with were naughty like "Bessie Slovenly Wench."

First we had a pirate storyteller come out, Pamela Hanks, you can find her at this site. She dressed in full pirate regalia and had the pirate "accent" down.

Then we divided the group in half and half went on a treasure hunt around the library and the other half made pirate crafts. I made six different treasure hunts around the library leading the kids from clue to clue until they got a word which they would take to the Reference desk to get a bag full of goodies. Of course this led to kids running around yelling "there's the next clue!" and dragging their parents along. Devising 6 separate hunts with 9 different clues was quite a task and I don't plan on doing a treasure hunt again in the near future. The party was fun but I think this "Admiral Slovenly Wench" is going to take a break for a bit.

Bawling Babies

The library is supposed to be a quiet, serene, place. Not so. A day does not pass in my library where one child does not sit down in the middle of the floor and start screaming its head off. The screams of these children and babies are more than fits they are temper tantrums, angry bawlings and yellings that always happen to take place right in the middle of the library. This week I was sitting back in the staff room, far away from the main floor when I heard a piercing scream from behind the door. It sounded as if a tiger was mauling a young child. The screaming continued, increasing in intensity. Upon further questioning from my coworkers the incident started because a marker was taken away from this one toddler.

I understand that children and babies cry. It's in their nature. What I do not have tolerance for is their parents who sit with them for several minutes while they cry and cry trying to soothe them. It is clearly obvious to the dozens of people in the library that the parents soothing does not help the child as the screams become ever piercing. But the parent does not seem to understand this and thinks that if they just say the "right" words their child will turn into an angel again. What I want parents to do is as soon as their child starts screaming to take them OUTSIDE the library and then calm them down. It will make the library experience better for everyone. I wish I could make a sign that says this and every time a child starts screaming I could just point to it and motion to the door.

Verbal Judo

This week I attended a library conference down south where I presented two programs. One of them I co-presented with a colleague and friend of mine on the topic "Managing Teen Behavior." This is a subject that comes more and more into play nowadays with librarians dealing with teens adopting the library as a hang out place, and a place where they are left for hours until their parents come home. These teens are restless and bored and often cause problems for staff.

In our presentation we covered verbal judo, a tactical communication style used to generate compliance. Among the topics covered in verbal judo was "things never to say to a teen." Among them are "Calm Down", "You Never... or You Always...," "What's your problem?" and in my opinion one of the most used and awful of them all: "Because I said so." I am guilty of the "Because I said so" statement probably because it has been used on me. Whenever this statement is uttered the first response from a teen will be "why?" When you say "because I said so" you are not supporting your rules with logic and reason and thus will not gain any respect. After I studied these verbal judo techniques I made a promise to keep out "because I said so" from my vocabulary no matter how easy it is to say to an unruly teen.

Male v. Female Presence

Last week my anime club had its annual sushi activity. This year I invited the local high school's Japanese teacher, Cook Sensei, to show the kids how to make their own maki rolls and some bean curd thing that I cannot begin to spell. The kids were delighted and there were over 30 of them jumping and bouncing around, high on wasabi.

The noise level increased to a roar and after attempts to quiet them down with more reasonable tones I raised my voice to a loud shout above the din asking them all to listen to the sushi instructions. This quieted them down for like two minutes and then the roar increased to school lunchroom levels. Cook Sensei had had enough and with a huge, deep MASCULINE voice he said the same thing I did. This shut them up immediately and they stayed quiet.

I have noticed this same kind of reaction with the teens with my male manager. I will say the exact same thing to the teens, in the exact same tone but their response to my FEMININE presence is different than my manager's masculine one. The teens reacted to Cook Sensei the same way. People don't respond to female authority figures the same way men do. That's why no matter what I say to the teens I just won't get the same response.

Extravagant Mess

Last Friday I had my annual "Earth Day Extravaganza" where I have the kids essentially make things out of my trash. I have collected my toilet paper rolls, milk cartons and egg cartons for like the last six months for this thing and Friday over sixty kids descended to make some lovely crafts out of them and bottle caps and old magazines.

For one of the crafts we made bird feeders out of old milk jugs. Stupidly I kept out a big bag of bird feed for the kids to dump into their feeders. Of course you can imagine what happened: bird feed got everywhere. And bird feed does not come out of the carpet very well. One kid excitedly spilled bird feed in other parts of the library and my unhappy coworkers had to clean it up with a broom.

The place was an absolute disaster area after the more than sixty kids came to do their crafts. It took me, a coworker, a mother and three little helpers an hour to clean it all up. One thing I have observed in all the numerous activities I've done and the many messes I've made is that at the end of all these activities the white mothers and kids rapidly disperse with their crafts. However, it's the Hispanic mothers and children that stay to clean up. After the Earth Day Extravaganza a Hispanic mother and her three children, one toddler aged, stayed after a whole hour to help make the room spotless. I did not even ask her too, actually I repeatedly told her she did not have to help. If all kids were taught to help clean up like these children, messes like these would be cleaned up in ten minutes.

What was he thinking?

I do a baby/toddler storytime each week for caregivers and their little ones. It's a highly interactive experience where the attendees can't be afraid to sing along and look a little silly. Once in a blue moon I get a Dad to participate in these storytimes and I'm always happy to have them. However, I wasn't so sure about the Dad that showed up this week at my storytime.

He walked in, all tatooed, and on his shirt proclaimed the slogan: "Watch midget porn: it will make you feel larger." The mothers with their babies looked at this Dad warily out of the corners of their eyes and shifted in their seats. I think I saw one grip her toddler a little tighter. Now this Dad was great during the storytime and there were no further incidents.

However, afterwards, I asked myself: "What was he thinking?" When he was picking out his clothes in the morning did he say to himself: "Okay, well I'm going to a baby storytime, perhaps the midget porn T-shirt is most appropriate." I don't know what his thought processes were, I'm just glad none of the babies can read yet.

Draco!

Here is our library pet Draco hanging from his cage. I think he was doing some pull ups or something. He's a Chinese water dragon and all the kids that come in the library love to see him. He's so popular he even has his own Facebook page. (But then again, at this point who doesn't?) When he's not hanging from his cage Draco's favorite thing to do is eat crickets and sit around in his water bowl.