Library Daycare

Our library is many of our patron's own personal, free, daycare center. Why pay childcare when your child can go to the library for free and stay until you feel like picking them up?

For the past two weeks on Friday night there have been packs of children left stranded when we close at six pm. Last week there were two ten year olds who were at the library for 4-5 hours and told me that their parents worked and could not pick them up. When I inquired how they would get home they said they would walk but that it was far.

This week there was a larger group of a 7, 8, 5 and I believe a four year old who were left at the library for 3-4 hours with no adult supervision. As kids are wont to do, they were destructive and left the toddler books in complete disarray. When the library closed at six pm there was no adult coming to pick up this group of children. I asked when their parents would pick them up and they said it would be any minute. Six o'clock came and went, the staff was getting ready to go. I told the staff I would give it one more minute and then I was calling the sheriff. Just then the pack of kids darted out the door and ran off. I called after them and they yelled at me that they would walk home. Then they continued to run down the street, four year old in tow.

What do you do in a situation like that?

Food Coloring Faux Pas

Last year I had a craft with food coloring. At storytime we made marshmallow snowmen and decorated their faces with black food coloring. All was going well with this cute, sugary snowmen and the kids really enjoyed it. Then came the teens. Later that afternoon I had some supplies left over for teens to make snowmen, big mistake. The three year olds could handle the food coloring but with the teens the food coloring promptly was spilled all over the carpet. Black food coloring does not come out of carpet.

So I decided to use food coloring again in a storytime craft. You take food coloring and put dots of it on paper, fold the paper over and then get a colorful Rorschach design. It was for our 'Colors' storytime and the kids really liked it. I wasn't thinking and I didn't put anything down underneath the paper, I thought the food coloring would easily come out of the table. Turns out I was right, with the exception of pink food coloring. For some reason every color comes out of tabletops except for bright pink colors. Now there are little pink droplets on the tables. You think I would have learned my lesson the first time. The allure of food coloring was just too much.

Gorilla in the Room

Last week our children's computer was stolen. Someone simply walked through the door, unhooked the computer from the monitor and idly sauntered out the front door. Our security cameras were not aimed at the children's computers and no one on the staff remembers seeing anyone walking out with a computer.

I believe that we at the library get so used to people walking in and out of the door, carrying things, talking, asking for things etc that it would be simple if someone acted casual and simply walked out of the door like he owned the computer. Patrons would simply think he was a tech person and ignore the situation. Society gets so used to ignoring the scene around them that it takes some highly unusual disturbance to shake them out of their day to day goings on. And sometimes even that is not enough...

I heard on a talk show that people are so oblivious to the world around them that when they did a test with random subjects and put a gorilla in a normal room full of everyday things ten percent of people did not notice the gorilla. The speaker on the show said these ten percent are those that do not survive disasters.

Chocolate Fun

We had a "Chocolate Fun" activity last week with the teens. During it we had the teens make art with chocolate syrup and Q-tips. You can see some of their work above and another picture in the slide show.

Some other "chocolaty" activities we had were "Don't Eat Pete" where you can win lots of M and Ms, a cake walk with Reeses peanut butter as prizes, chocolate trivia musical chairs and a chocolate dipping station. The kids were way revved up on sugar running around and giggling with syrup smeared around their lips. One boy ran in circles yelling "I love chocolate!" and ate seven or eight chocolate cookies by himself. The kids have asked when we're going to do it again. I was telling my friend about the chocolate activity we had at work, she works in the health field bent over test tubes all day and she told me, "I can't BELIEVE you get to do that at work!" She's right, I'm pretty lucky to work at a place where I can eat chocolate dipped marshmallows and get paid for it.

Teen Violence

This week was a sad one when a boy from the local high school up the road was shot and killed by his fellow students. He was only 15 years old. The shooting was gang related. The teens that came to our library were affected in different ways. Some were subdued and in shock, putting pictures of the dead teen with "You're in our hearts" on their notebooks. Other teens from the high school thought the whole situation and the media coverage was cool and one girl told me she wished she was disappointed she didn't get to see anything because the school was in lockdown.

The reaction from some teens that "violence is cool" was the exact same kind I saw when I was in high school during the Columbine massacre. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students while wearing dark trench coats. Some students at my high school thought this was cool and started wearing dark trench coats to school to show that they were "dangerous." The trend spread and more students wore the trench coats leading the principal to institute a school-wide trench coat ban.

I guess we can't really completely blame teens for thinking "violence is cool." They are raised with their gangsta heroes glorifying shootings and movies and TV with death all the time. Let's just not hope, as in this unfortunate case, that other students realize in real life, there is nothing cool about young students dying before their time.

I'm Famous!--Not Really

I almost forgot to mention that last month a reporter came by to take pictures of my anime club for the Salt Lake Tribune. That was the time we were making anime shrinky dinks. They also asked me questions about teens in the library. They put the article in the paper a bit ago:

Here's the link: Libraries get rad for teen audiences

My pictures in there with some of my teens but after all the questions they asked me about teens they never quoted me once. Perhaps they wrote the article first and then took the pictures, or I'm just not very "quotable."

Kicking out Teens

My manager has been gone for the week and will be in and out for a while and I have been placed in charge of the library in his absence. This means that I am the official toilet unstopper and also that I am going to be the person kicking the teens out of the library. Now I have kicked many teens out of the library but my manager and a former employee have been a great help in that. Now it's up to me and this week 13 unruly kids have been booted out into the cold.

In case anyone out there has troubled teens and needs help disciplining. Do not be afraid of kicking them out of the library. Like a bad penny, they will turn up again the next day. Here is a step by step instruction for any librarian needing some help getting those teens out the door.

1. Make sure they all know the rules and which rules are "kick-out-able"; this can be done through an orientation at the beginning of each semester
2. Give them a warning first: "You are being too loud and if I have to come back here one more time you will have to leave." Some offenses like hitting don't get warnings.
3. When you kick them out be sure to let them know that they are welcome to come back the next day.
4. Escort them to the door and make sure they leave the premises. Do not let them go to the bathroom or get a book. Make them leave immediately.
5. Do all of this in a firm, clear voice but do not be condescending.

You can't catch me I'm the Gingerbread Man

I've been gone for a bit on vacation. I went to Texas to visit my family and went to the Sugarbowl. Go Utes!

This week I returned and had a storytime. It was a cookie storytime and in it I had a felt story of "The Gingerbread Man." I'm sure you all know the story of The Gingerbread Man how he jumped alive out of the oven and ran away from everyone exclaiming gleefully "you can't catch me I'm the gingerbread man." Unfortunately this sugar-coated character met his demise from the crafty fox who told the Gingerbread Man "Come here friend and hop on my snout so your feet don't get wet as we cross the river." The Gingerbread Man did so and the fox ate him up in one gulp.

I was telling the story to the children and got to the point where the fox ate the The Gingerbread Man. I concluded, "and that was the end of the Gingerbread Man." There was silence from the children. Then one small voice asked, "the Gingerbread Man's dead?" The children were distressed. No child was smiling at the end of the story. The cute little character who ran from everyone met a horrible death in the jaws of a carnivore. I had to make an awkward segue into the next book with "Okay kids, uh, let's hear more about cookies in this next book..."

This made me realize that to kids, everything's alive, talking bears, dancing dogs, running Gingerbread Man, they're all equally real to them. So the story of The Gingerbread Man is probably not a gentle bedtime story to a three year old but a tragic death of a whimsical cookie.