Category Archives: Librarianship

Cats Dogs Plants Animals, Children's literature, Librarianship

Evolution

It’s almost six months since Tuffy joined our household, and I can’t count how many times people have said to me, “You got a dog? But I thought you were a cat person!”

Well, yes, I am a cat person – a pretty good cat person, actually. Our now-retired awesome house-call cat-only vet once said to me that I “have amazing natural instincts with cats.” I get cats, and they get me, and I was more than happy with our three amazing cat sibling housemates. But – and this is a big but – I have always wanted a dog.

When I was in fifth grade, I vividly recall wanting a collie more than anything in the world. We had our Tabby cat, who was awesome, but I really, really, REALLY wanted a collie who looked just like Lassie. I was actually completely devasted when my fifth grade class gift, which was voted on by all my classmates when I was not in the room, was to give me some aluminum foil because I was so creative at making figures out of the aluminum foil in which my mother used to wrap my daily (endless) tuna fish sandwiches. Meanwhile, one of my classmates received as her gift a tiny porcelain figure of – a collie. I went home and sobbed into my pillow because I was the one who wanted a collie, not my classmate. (Now, with adult perspective, I think it’s kind of cool that my classmates thought I was that creative…but yup, I still would like that collie figurine.)

By the time I was in my twenties, I had decided that I wanted a German shepherd. I was watching the Uncle Matty television show on PBS, and I was completely sold on well-trained German shepherds as the ultimate dog companion. I was so focused on getting one that I bought a book by Matthew Margolis on how to train a German shepherd puppy so that it would be loyal and well-mannered and non-aggressive. I didn’t have the ability and opportunity to get a German shepherd puppy, so ultimately I ending up mailing that book to my sister who lived in a rural area and had a stray adult German shepherd who ended up on her property. Which is to say, I can’t produce the book as proof of my obsession, but it was real – and to this day I melt a little whenever I see a German shepherd.

And then when I was in my thirties and forties, I had fixated on golden retrievers as the ultimate dogs for our lifestyle. Jim doesn’t know this, but I used to troll the adoption sites of rescues that adopted out older goldens, since I figured that an older golden would be the perfect addition to our household. It seemed like it was extremely difficult to adopt an older golden, so I never put in an adoption application, but the dream lingered.

Fast forward to this decade of my life, and after the sadness that came of adopting Clara (part hound and part black lab), for whom we had to find a new home after seven months of terrified cats and my needing to use my inhaler four times a day, I had kind of accepted that a large dog wouldn’t fit in with our cats and most likely would be a huge source of allergy and asthma misery for me. For a couple of years after Clara moved on to her awesome new family I didn’t look at dog rescue sites too frequently…and then in the last year or so I started looking again. I found the Vintage Pet Rescue site when they were referenced by another rescue that I followed, and I started following them on Facebook. Facebook being what it is, before long the first post that would pop up in my feed each time I logged on was a Vintage Pet Rescue post, and I realized that these older small dogs were pretty awesome and would probably be a great fit with us.

And then came Tuffy. It was almost like the stars aligned and I saw his listing on VPR right after it was posted, and with Jim’s blessing applied right after I saw the post, and then three days later we were driving home from Rhode Island with this amazing, sweet, smart, cute, funny, and incredibly loyal dog in our backseat.

So, from collie to German shepherd to golden retriever to a twenty-two pound Shih Tzu/Pekingese/Pomeranian mix who now is my best canine buddy. We’re on vacation this week, a staycation as usual, and today Jim was outside burning brush and doing other yard work while I stayed indoors (all that smoke ain’t good for these lungs!). Tuffy was very worried about this man who he kept spotting through the sliding glass door (Tuffy has cataracts and can’t see as well as he’d like). At one point while I was making lunch in the kitchen, Tuffy kept barking at me, intent on getting my attention, and finally resorted to urgently nudging my leg with his nose. We’d just been outdoors for a pee break, so I knew that wasn’t the issue – and then I realized that Tuffy was incredibly worried about my safety with this man hanging out in the yard. How cool is that, I thought. This sweet little dog loves me that much – and I love him that much right back.

And then I started thinking about my career. From the time I was five years old, I wanted to be a writer. Clearly, that hasn’t happened, and isn’t likely to. But then I thought maybe I’d like to be a professor, or a high school English teacher, or an elementary school teacher. And I had many successful and happy years working as the manager of a small independent specialty toy store, which was lovely and fun and suited me well, though I always wished to have a job that had Meaning and Significance, and thus moved on from retail to get my Master’s in Children’s Literature with the thought that I could do something with that degree (honestly, I had no specific plans on what to do with my MA in Children’s Lit while I was pursuing the degree).

Somehow, though, after all those other varied career aspirations, I managed to land in the perfect profession for me: children’s librarian. I never in my wildest dreams thought of being a children’s librarian, or indeed any kind of librarian, when I was younger, or even when I was in my twenties or early thirties. But now here I am, seventeen years and counting in my job, with a newly minted MLIS, and I couldn’t be happier with my career situation.

A children’s librarian of long standing who has a wonderful sweet elderly small dog. Who knew that these were the things that would make me happy.

Graduate School, Librarianship

Honors

To be honest, I’m not really very comfortable tooting my own horn [this is where Jim would insert a giggle-ridden joke about “tooting”], but since I’ve just finished the last formal education that I plan to pursue, I figure I might as well do a little tooting [insert more giggling].

I got an email this week telling me that the faculty of SLIS have voted to invite me “to join Beta Phi Mu, the International Honor Society for Library and Information Science.” The email goes on to state that “only 35% of students with a grade point average of 3.75 or higher, and who showed promise in leadership and service, were considered for membership.”

Woo-hoo! Even at the ripe old age of whatever I am, I still show promise! I’m not being flippant here – I’m seriously delighted to be thought of as promising, as having a future and having future impact on the world. And I definitely feel energized now that I’m done with school, and I’m excited about all the projects I’m cooking up for my professional role.

And I’m seriously delighted to receive the honor of being invited to join Beta Phi Mu. A huge thank you to the faculty of SLIS for the invitation!

Graduate School, Librarianship, Life

Finished, at last, and some good press

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I turned in my final paper for my final class for my MLIS on Friday, December 16 at exactly 3:00 PM. It was a fantastic feeling to hit the “send” button on that email and to know that I was DONE. No more school ever for this girl! Two Master’s degrees is sufficient for my purposes, and I’m really happy to have my free time back. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy being in school and learning all kinds of new things, because I absolutely did, but being in school was a heck of a lot more fun before the pandemic hit. I wish I’d had more time available to really dig in and really love school this time around, but as of March 2020 it became tough to portion out my time in a satisfying way. I’m deeply grateful to my awesome professors and classmates who made learning enjoyable in the midst of pandemic pivoting at my workplace.

As of January 31, Simmons University has completed their degree audit on my classes and officially decreed that I am graduated from the MLIS program with a concentration in Libraries and Librarianship. And I’m incredibly proud to report that I graduated with a 4.0 GPA – all that hard work and sacrifice since September 2018 paid off in terms of getting a 4.0 in every single one of my twelve classes. Yay me.

And in other good news, the Trustees of the HPL asked if they could submit an announcement about the very generous scholarship that I was awarded at the end of August. The announcement was printed in yesterday’s Harvard Press, and can be seen here. The link will only work for one week (unless you have a subscription to the Press), so I’ve also taken a screen shot:

I was deeply honored to have been awarded this scholarship from the Patricia Thomas-Jeanig Fund of the Community Foundation of North Central Massachusetts. As I said in my thank-you note to the Foundation, “words truly cannot express the depth of my gratitude at this honor…it is an enormous validation of my career and life’s work as a children’s librarian.” And I added “I hope to go on to support and mentor the next generation of children’s librarians (while, of course, continuing to be a children’s librarian myself).”

I’m giving myself a little bit of grace for a month or two (or perhaps three), though, in order to catch my breath and remember what it’s like to have unscheduled time that I can use to do anything I like at all. It’s amazing to not have a voice in the back of my head reminding me of all the “have-to-dos”, and instead be thinking of the “want-to-dos”! But I’m also contemplating the ways that I can follow through on my promise to mentor the next generation of children’s librarians. It would be amazing to teach a graduate class on children’s services (not sure if that is possible without a PhD, though), but it would be equally amazing to set up an internship program at the HPL where each semester I could host a student intern and give them some real hands-on experience being a children’s librarian. We’ll see what I can cook up!

Meanwhile, it’s time to go back to my lazy Saturday morning reading a book (a book of my choosing!) by the woodstove with the four awesome varmints. No better way to spend a freezing cold February day!

Librarianship, Library events, Pandemic

Whew

I don’t know about anyone else out there, but I’m feeling pretty darn exhausted right now. Happily, as of this minute I’m on vacation (yay!), so I have big plans for doing a whole lot of nothing this coming week. By necessity this will be mixed in with a whole lot of studying for grad school – I have a big research project due on April 27 (presentation) and May 3 (paper) – but it feels like a gift to be able to focus my mental energy on One Big Thing for a week rather than the crazy mental multi-tasking that I’ve been doing regularly for two years.

I think that the challenge has been that I’ve not been able to settle down and run in auto-pilot at all since the pandemic began. There has been constant rejiggering of everything to do with my job over the last two years, from policy decisions (when to start indoor storytimes?) to publicity reboots (time to write a new description for storytime logistics again!) to how to handle patron interactions (can we be up-close-and-personal today, or do we need to keep our distance?), to which programs to offer and when. Usually in my job there are certain aspects that can counted on, and for those aspects it’s been about maintenance. For instance, for years I’ve had a weekly Game Hour program on Thursday afternoons. The only challenge with that program was making sure that I had enough teen volunteers to run it, but honestly I’ve always had so many awesome teen volunteers that it was easy to run Game Hour week after week with minimal mental effort on my part. The program description stayed the same from one week to the next, it was easy to maintain communication with the volunteers, and occasional blurbs to the elementary school newsletter guaranteed that we always had the right number of attendees. Game Hour was a great high yield, low effort program which served the community in multiple ways.

So the usual way of doing things, pre-pandemic, was to have the ongoing programs that were well-established and only required maintenance, and then my creative energies could be spent on innovation and expansion of programs and services. It’s a great model for providing continuing services that are successful while always looking ahead to the next great thing that we can provide to our patrons. And it’s incredibly energizing and exciting for me to be able to always innovate and be creative.

During the pandemic, though, there hasn’t been anything that can be taken for granted: I’ve had to constantly reevaluate how our programming is provided and also which programming is provided. And with that constant reevaluation is constant rewriting of the language used to describe programs in our calendar, newsletter, website, social media, and emails sent to patrons. Frankly, this is exhausting and also emotionally draining. I’m so sick of not being able to provide programming in the way we used to, and I really really really miss being able to push our service provision in new and interesting directions. Additionally, all of this constant rejiggering has left little mental energy for me to devote to graduate school, which just makes me very sad. I love being in school, and I love studying and expanding my educational horizons, but it’s really hard to take full advantage of these (very expensive) classes at Simmons when I arrive home completely pooped at the end of each day. Ugh.

I know I’m not the only LIS professional who is feeling this way, and from the number of new jobs being posted daily on the MBLC website it feels like a lot of LIS professionals are burnt out and leaving the profession. I also know that it’s not just LIS professionals who are reaching their limit – clearly other professions are experiencing the same kind of employee burnout and exodus. Maybe the solution is for all of us to take a nice long vacation? Or to give each other and ourselves a big helping of grace and understanding? I have faith that we can all get through this, but I also think that we need to acknowledge the reality of how tough these two years have been and to support each other unequivocally.

Meanwhile, it’s time for the first nap of my vacation…

Librarianship, Library events, Pandemic, Storytime

A Strange Anniversary

March 11, 2020 was the date of my last in-person storytime, which means that we are heading towards the one year anniversary of when library services as we knew them ceased, and library services as they are now began to evolve. Though it would seem like it’s a sad anniversary, I’m actually feeling – dare I say it? – hopeful these days. The air has that lovely damp springy feel, even on bitter cold days like yesterday, and earlier sunrises and later sunsets make everything seem better. I’m still double-masking, and I’m still trying my best to keep far apart from coworkers and library patrons, and I haven’t been into a store in months (Jim has been vaccinated for his job, so he handles the shopping), and I’ll continue to be vigilant about keeping safe, but…things are looking up? I hope?

At this point I’ve done so many Zoom storytimes that they almost feel natural (almost, sort of…), but now that spring is coming I’m contemplating how to handle outdoor storytimes at my library. It seems like a simple thing: just move the storytime outside and keep people socially distanced. But then I start thinking about the details, and I realize how complicated this endeavor will be. My library is on a large area of land, and those grounds are well used by everyone in town. People walk their dogs there, students from the middle and high schools practice sports there, students walk through the library grounds to the library parking lot to get picked up at the end of the school day, the elementary school will probably have outdoor classrooms there again once the weather is warmer – you get the idea. I need to figure out a way to mark out a space that is just for storytimes. No dogs, no sports teams, no classes, no walkers. And that space needs to be near the electrical outlet on the historic front of the building, because I’ll need to amplify my voice. So problem one is: how do I mark out that space and keep it for storytimes only? (Note that there isn’t the possibility of having a second staff member help me with crowd control, since we are short-staffed and extremely busy with filling curbside requests.)

Next problem is how to adequately amplify my voice. I have a small amp that I use for storytimes in our large program room, but I doubt that it will be loud enough for an outdoor storytime. The Friends of the Library are short of cash at this point, since they couldn’t have their annual book sale last year, and most likely won’t have one this year. I’ve already spent a lot of my own money to purchase the camcorder setup for Zoom storytimes, so I can’t spend more of my own money. I applied twice for Cares Act Grants, but was denied both times. Surely there must be another grant that I could apply for?

Along those same lines is that I can’t hand out scarves and musical instruments during the infant storytime. In normal times, I go around the room passing out instruments to everyone, and then collect them, and then later in the storytime I do the same with scarves. Other “regular” storytime highlights are the throwing of the pig stuffed animal – where I go around the room and give each child a chance to throw the pig – and pulling the felt Humpty Dumpty off of the felt board, where children line up and take turns pulling Humpty down (a great way for young children to practice turn-taking, patience, and also supporting other by cheering them on). Clearly these things are not options right now! I had hoped to get the Cares Act Grant to purchase enough instruments, scarves, small stuffed pigs, and felt Humptys for all attendees, so that each family could have their own storytime kit that they would bring with them each time. Libraries are free to all, so I can’t really ask people to purchase a kit from me at cost. I also can’t assume that all families have these items in their homes; though it’s likely that most people could cobble together something to use, what about the families who can’t?

And then there’s the biggest issue of all – the one that I don’t have a solution for at all. I won’t be able to accommodate all my regular storytime families at these outdoor storytimes, so I’m going to have to ask people to rotate and take turns attending in person. I had thought that I could just set up my camcorder and laptop and livestream via Zoom to the families who aren’t in person on any given day…but then I started thinking about how impossible that would be to manage. I can’t moderate the Zoom waiting room and attendees while I present to and pay attention to the in person crowd while I make sure that no one walking by accidentally dumps my very expensive camcorder to the ground (I picture a happy running dog doing this!). In other words, a single staff member can’t possibly run all these things at once (see above for why another staff member can’t be spared to assist). One solution might be to run more storytimes – to do the outdoor storytime, pack everything up and then go inside to run an indoor virtual storytime for everyone else – but I literally can’t fit that into my day. I’m having a hard enough time keeping up with all of the curbside requests that need to be filled, and rarely have time to work on the essential task of collection development. Adding additional storytimes would cut into curbside fulfillment, and also pretty much eliminate my ability to do collection development (which is not only essential, but also just about my favorite part of my job).

Of course, there are other issues, too, which I won’t discuss here, including what to do if it rains, whether the group of attendees will be allowed to sing (I’ll need to talk to the local board of health), and how on earth will I be able to project my voice while wearing a mask (will my voice be too muffled for the microphone to pick it up?). And will my young patrons be upset to see me wearing a mask? And the list goes on.

All this is the long way of saying that I can’t wait to get back to some form of in-person storytimes, but there are a lot of obstacles to overcome before I can pull this off. Yikes!

Book groups, Librarianship, Library events, Pandemic, Storytime, Summer reading

Pivot

It’s been almost a year since my last post, and I can’t believe how different my work life is from one year ago. It’s not something I would ever have predicted, and, frankly, my mind is still reeling with the changes at almost nine months into pandemic restrictions.

At this time a year ago, I was just finishing my required class on technology for information professionals. The final project for that class was to create your own website on the Simmons server, which I then transferred over to my own domain. I loved having a website that actually had content and photos and that showed what I was doing in my job – it was pretty fantastic (even if my web skills are a bit amateurish). But today I had to face the fact that my website was a snapshot in time of how I did my job pre-pandemic, and that it no longer reflected the reality of my work life.

Under the “projects” page on my website, I talked about all the great things that I had as goals for myself for 2020: applying for an LSTA Mind in the Making grant to upgrade the children’s room playspaces; adding great new stations to the once-monthly sensory playtimes; and coming up with descriptive materials in multiple languages to better serve storytime attendees who are not native speakers of English.

And now? There are no children in the children’s room, not since March 13, and thus no need to upgrade playspaces. Indeed, when we reopen (and who knows when that will be) there won’t be any play materials out in order to limit surfaces that need cleaning and to help everyone maintain social distancing.

Sensory playtimes feel like a sweet memory of an innocent time when parents and children from multiple families could be in an enclosed space together (the story room), playing with shared materials like rice tubs and water tables and oobleck. Sensory playtimes were hip and happening a year ago, and there were so many awesome new stations that I looked forward to adding to that program; now, though, I don’t anticipate being able to run a sensory playtime again for a very long time, if ever.

And the goal of making in-person storytimes more accessible to all attendees also seems like something from a more innocent past. The sad fact of the virtual storytimes that I now offer is that they are actually more limiting and less accessible to all: children with hearing impairments, for instance, are not well-served by a storytime on video. Those young children can’t read captions, and I can’t wear the teacher microphone that connects to the child’s hearing aid or cochlear implant. Parents who are non-native speakers of English cannot be provided with handouts at the time of the storytime that explain the order of the lesson and the purpose of each lesson part. Nor, frankly, do I have the time right now to come up with such handouts, since my workload has at least doubled, if not tripled, with the addition of curbside service provision.

There have been so many pivots in my job in the last nine months that I feel a bit dizzy. There’s the technology I’ve had to master: Zoom, Facebook Premiere, YouTube, Screencast-o-Matic, Adobe, Canva, Beanstack, Google Forms, and I know there are others that I’m forgetting to list. I’ve had to first learn how to do storytime in a virtual format, and then how to use a camcorder and HDMI converter to live stream a higher quality of video (it took a surprisingly long time for me to figure out the camcorder dilemma). Summer reading had to become a completely virtual experience, with curbside pickup of the limited prizes that we could afford. To save money on prizes, I had to learn how to make giant lawn pinwheels, and then spent hours this summer assembling 114 of those pinwheels. Book groups have gone virtual, and have expanded to include 1st and 2nd graders and adults. Other programs have fallen by the wayside, like the weekly game hour, because those programs don’t translate well to a virtual format.

And almost all of my patron interactions now take place via email, rather than in person. Where I used to walk around the room with a child reader recommending books by putting the books into their hands for them to assess – now I fill paper curbside bags with books that I hope they’ll like, and then set the bags out for pickup. Some parents will send me photos or anecdotes about their children’s reactions to the books in the bags, which brightens my days but isn’t quite the same as talking to a child in person. The best parts of my days used to be interacting with kids and their caregivers; now I work in a very lonely isolation in an empty, joyless children’s room. Though I’m technically an introvert, I also thrive on human interactions (I think of myself as a workplace extrovert), and I’m finding that there is nothing sadder for me than a children’s room with no one in it but me. It’s just a room now, not a children’s room.

And this doesn’t even touch on the misery of wearing a mask forty hours a week, nor the stress of doing curbside duty each day when there is always at least one patron (usually more) who will come up to me without a mask on. Talk about feeling powerless and vulnerable.

I know I’m not alone in feeling blue right now, and I know that things are far, far worse for many people – for those who have lost a loved one, those who are suffering from long-term effects of COVID-19, those who have lost their jobs, their homes, their livelihood, those who have fallen into depression, those who are trying to juggle working from home and supporting their children who are doing remote learning…the list goes on and on and on.

All I can do for now is to continue to try to do my job as best I can, and to try to support others who are struggling as best I can. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Children, Feltboard, Librarianship, Storytime

Another reason I love my job

File this one under the category of “Why I love my job.” (It’s a very full file, for the record!)

One of my storytime regulars, who is not yet two years old, renamed me today – I am now Humpty Dumpty.  This verbal little cutie kept chattering away before storytime: “Humpty Dumpty taking sweater off”  “Humpty Dumpty drink water”  “Humpty Dumpty sing now?”

And then when storytime was over:  “Abby play trains now?”

So I guess I’m back to being Abby, but it was kind of fun being Humpty Dumpty…  🙂

(Pictured here is the Humpty Dumpty felt piece that we use at the conclusion of each Mother Goose on the Loose storytime…)
Librarianship, Storytime

A Day (or Two) in the Life of a Children’s Librarian

I always get a good giggle when someone I don’t know very well says to me, “Oh, you’re a children’s librarian? How sweet. That’s a pretty sedentary job, isn’t it?”  [Yes, doctors in particular like to say that to me, as they assess how active I am.]   Or, “You’re a children’s librarian?  That must be such a nice quiet job!”  Or, “It must be nice to read books all day!”

Before I go any further with this post, let me make it abundantly clear that I would hate to have a job that was sedentary or quiet or even a job where I got to read books all day.  I actually love the frenetic craziness of my work world, and I love the absolute unpredictability of each work day.  

Having said that, there are certain weeks like this one where even I cannot believe how busy I am.  So, for the sake of posterity, and for the sake of busy children’s librarians everywhere, here is a glimpse of this week at my job…

Yesterday (Monday) started off with discovering that the group who used the large program room on Saturday night had left all the chairs out, and also had forgotten to sweep and get rid of the trash (we have a big mouse problem in our building – old buildings in the country tend to be that way!). So before I could set up for storytime I had to stack fifty chairs in short order, sweep the floor, and ask Pete (former Trustee and current amazing volunteer) if he could take down and put away the speakers. Thank goodness Pete was there to do that, since I actually don’t know how to maneuver those heavy speakers down off their stands.

Then, fifteen minutes later (I stack chairs and clean quickly!), I set up for storytime and ran an absolutely lovely Mother Goose on the Loose program for a wonderful group of dedicated attendees. There is no better way to start a Monday, in my opinion, than to sing to and interact with a group of the youngest children and their caregivers – it is completely soul-affirming and rejuvenating.

Once storytime was over, I looked at the library website on my phone to see whether I could set up for my Tuesday afternoon program, which would be a lovely and efficient treat, since our program room is heavily used, and also very far away from the children’s room, so that it is hard for me to get up there to prep the room for my programs. It looked hopeful, so I went downstairs to check with my director about the state of the calendar.

She checked, and indeed it was hopeful: the R—- group had cancelled their Monday night room reservation, which left only the W—- book group with a Tuesday noontime reservation. We agreed that I could set up most of the room for my program, and just leave three tables and twelve chairs set up for the book group on the side with a view of the pond.

Back upstairs to unstack those fifty chairs, and then to arrange all eighty-nine chairs in a configuration that worked for the book group and for me. My Tuesday program (a presentation on Birds of Prey) also needs three six-foot tables, so I brought those out and arranged them. Done!

Back downstairs, where I first put away the Mother Goose accoutrements and then finalized planning for the 1:30 Art & Stories for 4’s & 5’s. Feltboard story: Froggy Gets Dressed by Jonathan London (felt pieces by me), check. Musical instruments: mini maracas, check. Music to play: Jim Gill’s Sneezing Song album, check. Pre-read the books for the day, including one of my absolute favorites, A Visitor for Bear by Bonny Becker, check. Set up the art project (Chalk Dip from MaryAnn Kohl’s Preschool Art), check. Then into the story room to pull out the small art tables, the feltboard easel, and the carpet pieces, check.

[ As you can see, by midday I haven’t had a sedentary moment yet! 😉 ]

Just as I sat down to check email, my boss called down to tell me that the book group had cancelled for tomorrow, and that she and one of the reference librarians were going up to the program room to take away the tables and reestablish the auditorium style seating that I would need on Tuesday. I said, “I’ll be right there to help you!” and bounced up two flights of stairs (but really the equivalent of four flights) and together the three of us finished setting up the room for my Tuesday program. Teamwork!

Then back downstairs to catch my breath and finally check my email at 1:00. Several emails needed my attention, so I quickly typed replies before the four- and five-year-olds arrived for storytime.

Storytime was wonderful – this group is so much fun to be with, so full of positive energy and giggles and creativity. We all loved the stories, and the mini maracas were a huge hit. And the feltboard story went over SO well that I realized that I should really make some additional felt stories for this group while I’m on break from school (over the years I’ve made at least fifty felt stories, but for my own sanity it’s time for some new ones!).

After cleaning up from storytime, it was time to swap out the small art tables for the large six-foot full height tables for the 3:30 GraviTrax program. Feltboard safely stowed away, chairs tucked into the closet, then I brought out the GraviTrax sets and set up the pieces on the tables so that the two teams would have equal “special” pieces and that the common building pieces would be on the middle table accessible to both teams. [Find out more about GraviTrax here.]

This brought me to 2:45…and I realized that I could actually have a bite to eat if I was quick. So off to the staff room I went, and got to chat with the electricians who are upgrading our lighting while I quickly ate my yogurt and banana. There were some tempting cookies on the table, and of course I took one, and S—-, the head electrician, said “Hey, no eating cookies!” To which I replied, with a wink, “I think I’ve earned it!”

By 3:15 my highschool senior volunteers for the GraviTrax program had arrived, which was great because it gave me time to give the new volunteer an overview of how the program works. It’s wonderful having such mature, awesome volunteers in whom I have complete and total trust! GraviTrax was a hit, as it always is, and the volunteers and I were hard-pressed to get the kids to finish up their construction by 4:30. (If you haven’t had the chance to witness GraviTrax in action, it is an amazing way for kids to learn about force and motion and gravity while having a really, really fun time.)

Then it was time to put away all the GraviTrax pieces, and to put away the six-foot tables and bring back out the art tables, and to set the story room up for the 6:30 evening program, a Polar Express Storytime run by the senior Girl Scout troop.

In the midst of this cleanup, my boss came downstairs with a woeful, apologetic look on her face, and with the bad news that the R—- group who had cancelled their Monday night reservation for the large program room hadn’t actually meant to cancel, and that they were coming after all…which means that I need to go in early this morning to set up the large program room for the afternoon Birds of Prey program before the first of four 5th grade classes arrives at 10:00 today for their research instruction.

Having reminded myself of that, I think I’d best continue this “day in the life” post sometime in the future, and get myself to work right now to set up for today, Tuesday! 🙂

Children's literature, Librarianship, Reading, Spare time - Culture

Snow Day

There’s nothing like the gift of a snow day, but the first snow day of the winter is especially wonderful.  The superintendent of schools in the town where I work called a snow day yesterday, in the early evening, which meant that I knew early on that I could stay up late and sleep in a bit.  

First up for the evening was to work on my final project for school, making some final tweaks to my website.  And then the Patriots game: usually an 8:20 Patriots game is stressful, since usually I have to be up early the next morning and full of energy for storytime, but with a snow day ahead at least I could watch the game without worrying about exhaustion.

After suffering through most of the Patriots game my husband and I decided to give up on the game when it was clear that the Pats were going to lose.  (There’s only so much anguish a true Pats fan can endure, and last night’s game was a test.)  My husband decided to call it a night, and I said that I’d stay up reading just for a bit to calm my frayed nerves.

And then a magical thing happened: I got sucked into a book in a way that hasn’t happened in a very very long time.  It wasn’t that the book was amazingly awesome, but rather that I actually had the space to read, and that outside the snowy world was magically time-resistant.  I kept reading, and reading, and reading, and when I finished the book I realized that it was one in the morning (way past my usual bedtime).  

I looked out the window to the beautiful snow scene outside (and took the picture you see below) and felt the happiest that I’ve felt in a very long time.  If ever there was proof of the magic of reading, this was it.  

 

I was actually stunned by how happy I felt as I went to bed, and it reminded me of the joy that I used to get from reading when I was a child. The book I read last night, of course, was a children’s book, which might have added to the happiness, but honestly I think that any book would have filled the bill for me last night. Last night was about having that moment for reading without obligations or guilt or exhaustion or any of the other daily demands that can detract from our reading. The gift of the first snow day of the winter.

And then an additional gift today: all town offices are closed for the entire day! There might be more reading in my future today…

Children, Graduate School, Librarianship

Resources for Parents and Caregivers

I realized last evening that I had never shared the link on this blog for the class project that I created last year (fall semester 2018) for the class I took that term, Information Sources and Services. The assignment was to create a LibGuide on a topic of our choosing, so of course I chose a topic that would be of use to me in my daily tasks at the library in which I work: Resources for Parents & Caregivers of Preschoolers.

Here is the link to my LibGuide. Please let me know if it is of use or interest to you!