After this long blog hiatus, I’m finally feeling like I’m reapproaching normal (though I’m sure my two siblings will argue that I’ve never been normal…), and it seems like a new blog entry is in order. 

August and early September were a bit tough for me, and that’s all that I’ll say here, but since returning to work on September 7 I’ve been working hard and getting myself caught up.  I have lots of goals for myself this year, some of them my “official” goals for my annual review, others just things that I’d personally like to accomplish:

• I’ve been creating all new lesson plans and feltboard stories for my Toddler Storytime, so that I can feel more excited about the storytime myself, and hopefully pass that excitement on to the kids and their parents.  I’ve also renamed this storytime, since it turns out that the word “toddler” has negative connotations for parents of three-year-olds; by the time a child is three, a parent no longer thinks of him or her as a toddler, though the age combination of two and three year olds in this storytime has been fantastic.  The two year olds are just learning the drill, the three year olds are serving as role models for the younger kids while gaining in confidence themselves.  It’s a really wonderful age grouping, and I decided that the name of the storytime needed to be less limiting – so it has been renamed, rather blandly perhaps, but descriptively, the “Storytime for 2’s & 3’s.”
• All those new lesson plans for the Storytime for 2’s & 3’s have inspired me to create some new feltboard stories for exclusive use in the Preschool/Pre-K storytime.  These kids LOVE feltboard stories, and I realized that I need to be using feltboard stories every week with them, rather than every third week as I had been doing.  And, while the feltboard stories that I use for the younger group serve well for the kids ages four and up, the older kids deserve to have some feltboard stories of their very own.  I’ve created a list of books that will translate well to felt, and now I’m going to chip away at creating new feltboard stories on the weekend (as always, in my own time, with my own materials, so that the feltboard creations belong to me and not the library). 
• With my library director’s enthusiastic blessing, I’ve created a new once-monthly Scrabble Club, inspired by the many, many other libraries in the country who already run successful Scrabble Clubs.  Our first meeting is on a Saturday afternoon in mid-October, open to all ages and all ability levels, and I’m really, really excited about it.  Hopefully there are enough Scrabble enthusiasts in town to get this program rolling, and to sustain it for a long time.
• Jennifer and I got inspired recently, and rearranged the children’s room, moving the Advanced Reader collection (for grades 5 & 6 and up) to a corner location in the high-stacks section of the children’s room.  This collection was starting to outgrow its original spot in the center, low-stacks portion of the children’s room, so a move was necessary, though labor and sneeze intensive.  A nice side benefit of this move is that the Juvenile fiction collection, now located in that center section, is receiving more attention and more traffic that it did previously.  And another nice side benefit was that a lot of shelves got dusted in the course of the shift.  (We won’t talk about the asthma attack that came later…dust mask next time!)

Of course, these four items are but a few of the things that I’ve been working on this past month, but they are the most interesting and notable.  On this weekend’s schedule:  re-reading Tuesday’s Teen Book Group Book, Mortal Engine by Philip Reeve, making a feltboard story for the “Playing” storytime, and enjoying the gorgeous weather that they say is coming for the weekend.  And maybe a blog entry or two, to get me back on schedule with my blogging…