This past week was a very long one, since I’ve been battling the silly cold I mentioned a couple of posts back.  It’s a head cold, and has mostly been tough on my voice (some days I was down to almost no voice at all), which may not matter in some professions, but really makes a difference if you’re a children’s librarian.

So here is the valuable lesson that I have learned:  I’ve now created a head cold-friendly Mother Goose on the Loose storytime plan.  This storytime plan uses as little singing as possible, and incorporates a lot of finger plays and action rhymes that are so familiar to me, so ingrained in my subconscious, that I don’t have to think too hard to present them to the group.  When I used this storytime on Tuesday, it worked beautifully: I was able to make the storytime fun for the participants while I was inwardly suffering.  No need for the group to know just how miserable I was.  All they needed to know was that I’d been sick for a week and a half (so probably not contagious anymore) and that they’d need to help me out with the few songs that were in the storytime.  All of those songs are used every week in MGOL (“I Went to Visit a Farm Today,” “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” “Wind oh Wind,” and “We Ring Our Bells Together”), and there were enough regular attendees on Tuesday to make the songs work.  On Wednesday, there were a lot of brand new attendees to MGOL, so I simply skipped the animal songs and reassured myself that no permanent damage would be done by eliminating a portion of the storytime for this one week.

I’ve marked this Mother Goose on the Loose storytime in my files as “Head Cold Friendly,” so that it will be easy to find next time I need it.  Next time I’ve got a persistent cold, I won’t have to scramble to create anything, I can simply use this plan that has been proven to work.  Lesson learned!  Plan created!

In addition, this week’s Toddler Storytime just happened to be song-free, which was a huge boon to my voice, and this week’s Preschool Storytime was an “art week” storytime, so I only read two stories to the kids, then we all did an art project together.  Much easier on the voice.  In all, I was able to stumble through a total of five storytimes in four days.

And two other valuable lessons I learned this week:  don’t be afraid to let the storytime participants know that your voice is a bit rough and you can’t push it too much, and keep a thermos of honey-laced tea next to you during the storytime.  No one cared that I took a moment here and there to sip the tea, and it helped enormously.

But the biggest lesson I learned was that anyone who attends a storytime with their child is there to enjoy themselves and partake in a group experience.  They didn’t really care that I wasn’t as fabulous as usual, especially since I kept smiling and used humor throughout the storytimes.  Ultimately, we all had fun, and that’s the single most important ingredient for a successful storytime.  And, ultimately, this was only one week out of fifty-two, so it’s all ok.