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.

The Case of the Missing Magazines

Our library has a number of free magazines we give out to the public. Among these is one devoted to the local gay scene called Q. Last week we noted that our big stack of 30 plus copies of Q were missing. Typically we have very few of this magazine taken and I highly doubt that 30 something gay people came in individually to pick up a copy. We suspect that someone not very happy that we were carrying this magazine hauled them all off.

A few days ago scattered all over the table were copies of a Creationist Christian apologetic magazine. Looking inside one of those magazines I found that you can plan your own "creation vacation" among other articles. Now I'm wondering if the same person who took our Q magazines put out the Christian magazines.

It seems that some people are all for freedom of speech when it is their speech that is heard.

Spoiling Easter

I was having a four year old girl color some Easter die-cuts for me today that I was going to put up in the children's area. While she was coloring them I asked her: "So are you looking forward to the Easter bunny coming to your house?" The little girl turned to me and looked me straight in the eye and said "There is no Easter Bunny." I was surprised that someone her age would know that this great big bunny was just a great big lie. So I asked: "How did you hear about that?" She replied "My older brothers told me."

Those pesky older siblings, always ruining childhood fantasies like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I was talking to one coworker and she said her older siblings told her to fake believing in Santa Claus so they would all get more presents from the Kris Kringle. That is probably a better tactic for these siblings than spoiling the secret. I hope this little girl still gets her Easter candy from the "fake" Easter Bunny.

How much candy is in the jar?

A very easy activity I do with the kids in the library is a "guess how much candy is in the jar?" program. It's very simple: I fill a container with lots and lots of candy, put a box next to it and print out a lot of voting sheets and let the kids guess how much candy is in it. The closest guess wins the jar. I did it last summer and for Halloween and this time I did it for Valentine's Day.

I get very strange answers for my guessing activity. This time there were 843 pieces and the guesses ranged from 4 to 10 million. I'm not sure how 10 million pieces could have fit in that jar but apparently one kid thought they could. I had about 400 votes and the closest guess was 850 and when the winner came to pick up the jar his eyes lit up like it was Christmas morning. He was so excited.

I had one very disappointed kid though. He told me that he'd pay me "100 dollars" if I would just give him the candy. I told him he could buy more candy than that for 100 dollars. He didn't seem to understand this. I wonder how he would get a hold of a 100 dollars anyways. ...What kids will do for candy.

Blissful Silence

I had a local manga artist come to my anime club last week. Now I have to explain a couple of things about my anime club. I love these kids but these kids are hyperactive maniacs. They are so revved up that they run around and scream and jump up and down every time someone mentions their favorite anime character or squeal and hug each other five times every hour. In other words, they are typical energetic teenagers just let out of school.

I warned the manga artist that these teens are a little "excitable" and that she should just talk over them and not be offended if they don't pay attention. Yet I was shocked with their reaction to her presentation. They sat...and listened...and were quiet...and even TOOK NOTES. I had never seen them so quiet...EVER! They were so into her instructions on making manga characters and they asked questions too. Of course near the end of it chaos resumed but for 30 brief shining moments, I sat down and relaxed peacefully in blissful silence as for the first time the teens actually shut up.

Teen Hackers

A couple of weeks ago we discovered a group of teens looking at porn on our catalog computers. The thing is, there should be no way they can access the internet on those computers. We clicked around the catalog and tried to figure out how they did it. Finally, we discovered that someone ELSE had figured out how to get on the internet and if you clicked on this arrow it would give up a page history. On this page history was a porn site that had been accessed by the original hackers and the word had apparently spread among the teens that this particular catalog computer had a direct line to this porn site. We still don't know how they originally got on the site. Our tech guys haven't figured it out.

I was telling my husband about this the other day and I said that no filters, banning, rules, punishments or anything will keep a teen away from porn if they truly want to get to it. This is just another example of that. In some sense you have to admire their cleverness and fortitude. If only they would apply it somewhere else.