Here’s a brief outline of what I did each week. But “brief” I mean the craft and one of the books or rhymes… I can’t remember them all!

Week 1: Leaf necklaces (Materials needed: Leaf-shape cut outs, yarn, things to decorate with, glue)
Debuted my new song Who’s My Pretty Baby,(I learned it from Elizabeth Mitchell’s album You Are My Little Bird), with success. Goes like this:

Who’ll be my baby
Who’ll be my pretty little baby?
You’ll be my pretty little baby
Hey, hey, pretty babe

[Chorus]
Hey, hey, pretty baby
Ho, ho, pretty little baby
You’re my, my pretty little baby
Hey, hey, pretty babe.

Who’ll be my little man?
Who’ll be my nice lady
Who’ll be my funny little bunny
Hey, hey, pretty babe

[Chorus]
(lather, rinse, repeat first verse)

Week 2: Monkey paper bag puppets (Materials needed: brown paper bags, pink oval shapes for the face and brown oval shapes for the ears, glue)
The book Monkey and Me by Emily Gravett, (who I laude copiously throughout this blog), worked phenomenally well for Family Storytime! Babies enjoy the simple rhyme and pre-schoolers enjoy reading it as a “read along.” You read a line and they repeat it back. For extra fun – act out the animals!

Week 3: Butterfly straw puppets (Materials needed: Butterfly-shaped cut-outs, straws, crepe paper streamers, markers, tape)
The Baby Goes Beep by Rebecca O’Connell. I love, love, love this book. Babies enjoy the theme and the “baby’s day” aspect of it… toddlers like helping you make the onomatopoeias. It’s easy for parents to help you out – everybody wins!

Week 4: Paper plate flowers (paper plates, tissue paper or crepe paper cut into pieces, glue)
Is Your Mama a Llama (Deborah Guarino) – One little boy liked this so much he took it home with him!

At the end of the hour, several of the mothers came up to tell me how much their children enjoyed the storytime and promised to be back in the fall. In light of all of the extra administrative /off-desk and hands-off type of work I seem to be doing lately, it’s the ability to interact with customers, especially in an environment like storytime, that makes my job worthwhile.

Saturday in the Life: The Day of Good Intentions or The day where e-mail happened.

9:00: I get to work expecting a delicious day off-desk during which I will surely achieve all of the prep-work for the end of the month reports, etc.

10:00: Summer Reading Club reporting hours begin. I say hello to the volunteers and go back to e-mail.

10:00: A lovely young woman shows up for a proctoring appointment. Good news: I totally know what she’s talking about! Bad news: Between her virtual educators and the library, someone has managed to think a “9″ is a “4″ (or vice-versa) so, here she is, ready to take and exam on the 24th instead of the 29th. The study room we usually use for proctoring has been booked all day, so I put her in my manager’s office since she’s not here and it’s a really nice office. I type in the password for her online exam and she’s off!

10:20: Volunteers are bored. So, I give them project to do, then of course, that’s when people show up to report. Volunteers are un-bored.

10:30: Sit down at my email again, remember that the chess instructor needs yet another white board because the dry-erase surface on the big white board on the wall has somehow lost its capacity to … er… dry erase. Basically, it’s borked. Carry another white board upstairs. Bump into a lot of things.

10:40: E-mail.

11:15: Proctoring person says her exam crashed. I log her back in.

11:30: Prepare registration materials for all classes running in the next week…

The afternoon was really a blur. I don’t even remember what I ate for lunch. Basically, I got through my e-mail and that was my major triumph of the day. Buh. “Oh well,” I thought (foolishly), “there’s always Sunday!”

What did happen on Sunday? I should give you a little background. Shortly before I was hired, Markham Public Library created a new kind of classification system. It’s called Customer Centered Classification, or C3™ for short. It basically limits the call numbers to four fields, and arranges the books by subject headings which are, we hope, more intuitive for customers to find. The arrangement facilitates browsing and the shorter call numbers is supposed to make it easier to find, shelve, and shelf-read the books. It even won an award this year. Before anyone asks me questions, I should mention that I don’t work with C3™ since my branch hasn’t been converted yet. We’re still living in the days of Dewey, which is fine by me since I don’t know Dewey very well, yet, and it’d be nice to learn before we switch to the new system.

I mention all this because my main activity on Sunday was to conduct some testing with Dewey using some volunteers from the Teen Advisory Group. I can’t really get into the nature of the tests, but at 9:59 am, I realized that I needed to select about 90 more random titles for volunteers to work with. This involved pulling all of the books, writing down their titles and call numbers and re-shelving them. And the volunteers were due at 11:00. I’m happy to say that I can re-shelve 90 books in 20 minutes never having worked as a page, but by the time we were ready to begin, it was 11:20. I did bring them Timbits, so I was mostly forgiven. As I’ve mentioned – I can’t describe the tests, but I will say that after I told the volunteers what they would be doing, they looked a little bleak. “This, uh, sounded much more fun in the e-mail.” one of them said.

Flash forward to 2:30 p.m. The volunteers have left, shakily agreeing to take part in the second part of this test. I sit down to type up their response sheets and I realize – I’ve forgotten to have them do the last part of the test. Ah, well. They didn’t have it in them to get up on the Dewey Decimal System for 4 hours straight, anyway and really neither did I.

2:30 pm: Oh right, lunch. I should mention that Sunday was the Deli Duel, where several awesome local delis faced off to win the title of best smoked meat sandwich. Several of my friends attended to eat various sammiches. I was… not there. I had cold pizza.

3:00 p.m.: I now find I’ve lost the will to do any actual, thinking work. So, I turn to my crafts for storytime, which I had originally been saving for the volunteers on Monday. I am making snake puppets. After tracing about 35 of them, I realized they look distinctly sperm-like. Hopefully the parents won’t be offended…

5:00 p.m.: Stumble out of the building, into my car and make it home in time for the 6:20 show of Inception. Which was spectacular.

9:30 a.m.: Hunker down with the final throes of the FLD report – make it coherent, add some pictures and send. ZOOM…

10:03 a.m.: Month end-report and statistics. This requires looking at calendars and spreadsheets. I … do not like this. I manage to get all of the programs entered (20 or so to Teens 1 and Adults 3… jeesh) and start tabulating the stats. I also get the main points of my month end report bulleted. Sound-proofing, Cabinet Security and Winter 2010 registration and programs… it’s going to be a scorchin’ good read!

11:10 a.m.: All that staring at spreadsheets and now I have to get my storytime ready for Ontario Early Years in… 4 minutes!

My what? Oh right – break it down:

So we have a partnership w/ Ontario Early Years (OEY) so they offer a drop-in play based program for children 0-5 years and their caregivers. They provide a wealth of information about child care, health, development, literacy, etc. We provide the space and a liaison (yours truly) to lead circle time for 15 minutes every Wednesday. This is a pretty sweet deal as far as I’m concerned, but it’s incredibly difficult to entertain many children that literally range from lap babies to JK’ers looking for a fun day out of school. It’s also my number one source of baby hugs!

11:15 a.m.: Go into OEY and rock their little socks off! A good time was had by all.
We read:
On the First Day of Winter by Denise Fleming
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
10 Rubber Ducks
(oh yes, they’re learning about numbers).

11:30 a.m.: Baby-hugged and back at statistics and emails. Which are far less interesting.

12:00 p.m. Lunchtime!

1:00 p.m.: Information Desk time! I spent a good 10-15 minutes on the phone trying to direct a customer how to access a downloadable audiobook on our website – really difficult to coordinate over the phone! She finally gets to where she needs to be – literally clicking “Click here to Download”, but then her computer has some kind of connectivity error?! Yeargh.

3:05 p.m.: Back to the safety of my office where I have the BEST intentions of hunkering down and finishing my month-end report but then, but then BUT THEN I see that the Summer 2010 (yes we program this early) draft has come out. And proofreading is due soon! This means looking at more and further spreadsheets. Both computer generated, and human-inputted (word? ohwell) So in order to proofread I have to look at the information generated by our online-registeration system, a spreadsheet that the librarians all over the system use to schedule programs, and the Outlook Room Booking calendar for our branch.

3:58 p.m.: It appears as though someone has changed the curriculum-based (ohgod I will explain that later) programs around for our branch and the person all happens to be “not me.” This being the case, I’m not quite sure how I’m expected to proof-read, since I don’t know which way is up or down or where my butt is. Will have to figure this out. But the good news is – the programs I’ve contracted are looking good. FTW.

4:02 p.m.: SPREADSHEETS. SO MANY SPREADSHEETS. I’m trying to make all of them match what we have on the online-registration document. This is “tedious” to say the least.

4:48 p.m.: Finally have located and identified my programming ass from my programming elbows. It’s all looking good up in my various spreadsheets. I turn back to Month End Report and other spreadsheets… but … nope. It’s too late. I’m out!

Well that was my fairly boring, administratively laden and tedious day. Now I have to go back and blog about yesterday!

I had the good fortune of being off-desk all day (I know, I know, practically unheard of in public libraries!) so I tried to take advantage of that and try to finish things that need doing so I could try to relax the rest of the week. So this was my to-do list for the day:

• Call about preschool about class visit (52 kids!) on Friday. Incidentally, I got an email saying that they aren’t coming due to “rescheduling.” Considering that they said they were coming last, oh Thursday and could we have a room and program for them, I’m considering it a good thing. Even though I like the preschool set… jeesh. Short notice and a whoooole lot of munchkins. I wonder what the collective noun for that would be?
• Call doctoral student about workshop re: infant speech development and infant/caregiver communication. If you’re in the GTA and interested, I can pass on some information.
• Write report for Family Literacy Day events and Month-End report.
• Tabulate programming and display statistics
• Make a list of partnership opportunities for programming in my catchment of Markham.
• Storytime rhymes/songs for Week 3: Phonological Awareness
• Make subject headings for Kid’s Databases
• March break publicity
• Outreach materials for this week: Info on Tumblebooks for parents and teachers. I have 2 outreach visits for Family Literacy Day, which is January 27, 2010.

So I’m not going to lie – some things came up. I got through… well, I got through everything that was truly going-to-come-down-on-my-head-tomorrow kind of urgent, but otherwise… FTF, to do list. I’m disappointed because my kick-off for round 4 is totally a “Let me tell you about how I didn’t do anything!” entry, but this week’ll be exciting! I promise. I have 3 storytimes, 2 outreach visits, and I’m planning to retro-blog (is that even a word? Well now it is…) about Saturday and Sunday because – hey – that’s when my week began. And as a result, I’m a bit fried. Oh! But there was a fire alarm today. And we had to evacuate alllllll of the students out of the library. They were… not so pleased to go outside. Because it’s finals week. Fortunately, (or unfortunately as the case may be), the alarm stopped just as we had told about 1/3 of the lower level to leave. Then we had to go around and tell them “Just kiddin’ guys!” Which I always love, because you look like an alarmist and next time chances are they won’t leave…

Me to Disgruntled Student (avec sheepish grin): “Err, sorry. It’s all clear. Carry on, guys.”
Disgruntled Student: “Man. Seriously?! I don’t even WANNA carry on, now!”

Me neither, buddy, me neither…

More tomorrow! With added and further energy!

1:00 – 5:00 p.m.:

• Sent off emails regarding drama drama.
• Worked on Story Time project assignments – ensuring the babies of Markham Public Library get all their 6 early literacy skill goodness per 8-week story time serving
• Children’s Department Meeting – first one since… last year. A lot of minutiae to cover.

Dinner – fritatta and veggies, which in turn made me all bloaty.

6:00 p.m.: Begin my stint at the infodesk upstairs.
7:05 p.m.: Tweenage gamers take over all the computers up here and are engaged in an epic battle on the interwebs.

Other than the epic battle – my infodesk experience was relatively uneventful. Surreptitiously work on email and Winter programming. Stress about Winter Programming. Attempt to alleviate stress by social networking.

8:55 p.m.: Antsy because it is five minutes to close, I have a party to get to in Toronto and I work tomorrow morning.

9:00 p.m.: Get out of Markham like a bat out of hell.

9:00 a.m.: Mercifully short atrium meeting followed by the realization that there the only two people scheduled this morning, (as far as info staff goes), are Catherine and myself.

9:30 a.m.: Library opens   x . x <- the emoticon for f#@$ed.

10:06 a.m.: A group of waterlogged 2-3 year olds with 4 harried-looking camp counselors come in to the library and ask if they can have a room. All of our rooms are booked. They head for the children’s area. They are awfully cute.

10: 13 a.m.: A group of waterlogged 2-3 year olds with 4 harried-looking camp counselors come in to the library and ask if they can have a room. All of our rooms are booked. They head for the children’s area. They are awfully cute.

That was not a typo.

10:17 a.m.: A brief walk around the children’s department reveals that unbeknownst to me yet another group of older campers from the community centre has also snuck in, bored teen counselors in tow. They are hunkered down in the story nook playing with texture toys meant for babies. I see that the baskets that I bought to contain said toys yesterday are already broken. Note to self: Never go to the dollar store for things that need to stand up to a department full of kids.

10:30 a.m.: Thankfully our Musical Theatre camp instructor, Crystal, says that the teeny-tiny people can use the meeting room for their lunch 11:30. Otherwise they were going to eat in the children’s department, which would most likely have resulted in a good solid talking-to from maintenance.

11:30 a.m.: Crystal seems to have forgotten our agreement.

(It’s okay – she’s directing a cast of 20 children in a production of Mamma Mia! by herself. She’s allowed. )

11:32 a.m.: I reconcile the room situation and stall for time so the room can be cleaned up. To do this means a story time for 54 children. We read Wiggle, by Doreen Cronin (one of my all-time favourite large-group-zomg story time books)  and Let’s Go Visiting by Sue Williams (sequel to I Went Walking). The former is extensible from age 2 until 6 years at the outside. The latter two books are for younger children (I’d say 5 and under, depending on how you read them). I opened, as I usually do, with “Shake Your Sillies Out” and closed with “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” The sound of 54 small children shouting “HOORAY” is really quite something… In addition, because it was raining, I sang “Mr. Sun” and another song about rain. It’s a good one because it allows kids to make noise, even if they don’t want to sing along. Goes like this:

A Little Drop of Rain
(To the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”)
A little drop of rain hits the ground      (slap thigh or ground w/ one hand)
Then another drop of rain hits the ground      (slap thigh or ground w/ other hand)
Then another and another and another and another
(Slap ground w/ alternating hands as fast as you can in time with “anothers”)
And another drop of rain hits the ground!
SPLASH! (Slap ground with both hands)

11:40 a.m.: Kidlets into lunch. Whew.

11:50 a.m.: Realize that I’ve been scheduled for lunch at 1:00 and have story time at 1:30. Catherine will be alone for an hour if I go for lunch at 12:00. She says it’s okay. I don’t think she is serious.

11:53 p.m.: Go in the borrower’s services (that’s Markham-ese for “circ”) department’s workspace and see the veritable Fort Knox of courier boxes that have come in. I briefly wish for an iPhone and a twitpic account.

12:00 p.m.: Standard reference (haha) lunch.

1:00 p.m.: Start cleaning up for Baby Goose.

1:30 p.m.: My last Wednesday afternoon Baby Goose of the summer – and possibly ever. In the fall we’ll be doing Baby Goose in the mornings only, which is not the most convenient thing in the world. My little guys Ryan, Alex, and Vincent showed up to the story time! They’ve also been coming to the story time since they were about 3 months old. Now they’re all starting to crawl and sit up and babble. Awww  …

2:00 p.m.: I admit our discontinuation of afternoon Baby Goose to parents and get complaints, albeit understanding complaints. More evals this time – continuous comments about the space – I’ve been consistently getting numbers of over 60 for Wednesday afternoons. It’s a squeeze.

4:10 p.m.: More cute kids from Stonebridge P.S. recognize me from Summer Reading Club promotions. Vincent and Raymond (grade 3 and 4, respectively) kind of act like I’m a rockstar… and subsequently feed my ego and re-affirm my belief in the importance of what I do. Now if they could just stop in every day 50 min. before I leave and 5 seconds before I go off the deep end, I’ll be set! Maybe I could pay them in stickers…

5:20 p.m.: Run screaming from the building.

Make record time home (I <3 the 407.), begin blogging, and pick up husbandito from the train.

9:25 a.m.: Courier box mystery solved. No comment on Summer Camp communication <grumble grumble>…

10:30 a.m.: Last Tuesday morning Baby Goose story time of the summer! <sniff sniff> Also last Baby Goose time EVER for some of my bébés due to maternity leaves ending. I took a picture with Hannah, who’s been coming to Baby Goose since she was 3 months (or so) old! I can’t believe how much she’s grown since January. It’s sad that I won’t be able to accommodate an evening BG in my schedule to keep kids like her coming to the library for story time. Her mom actually writes a really awesome blog about all kinds of parenting. It’s very organized and well-written and focuses on every aspect of baby-dom: food, toys, books of course, and even diapers!  While I’m not ready to personally use any of her wonderful advice (my husbandito just breathed a sigh of relief) I find it really useful to stay up to date on parenting issues as the main purveyor of baby time at the library.

11:00 a.m.: Reading my comment forms from Baby Goose all 4 of them out of 60 – who the hell gave me a 3 in all categories???

11:30 a.m.: TRIUMPHED over the drama drama for Winter 2010 situation! Whoo! I now can rest slightly easier knowing that kids in Markham will be able to take drama classes this winter. Also it was the only responsibility I had for W10, so it would have been a total FAIL if I had come up empty-handed.

12:00 p.m.: Totally typical lunch of cucumber/cream cheese bagel

1:00 – 5:00 p.m.: Refdesk.

Drive home and run.

Today was basically like being stuck in the doldrums on the open sea of the library.

I had a few things that I really needed to do today – the most arduous of which is to seek out a drama program for the Winter 2010 season (yes we’re planning already). But none of those things got accomplished due to some last minute trouble-shooting regarding room set-ups for Musical Theatre summer camp, mysterious lingering courier boxes that may be essential to running camps next week, and… other stuff. I also had a program to do tonight: “Spy Kids Week” for the Summer Reading Club. So I just forgot about doing all of the “grown-up stuff” (how I think of administrative work) and got straight to the emergencies and Spy Kids. Basically I had planned for kids to make code wheels, invisible ink, and “spy-dentity” cards. Originally it started off as a one-hour sit-down program, but I modified it to a drop-in program at the last minute because most of the other branches are using volunteers to run the program. The following are lessons learned:

1) There are 3 kinds of ways to make invisible ink. Lemon juice, Lemon juice and baking soda, and baking soda and water. Lemon juice works the best, but lemon juice and baking soda gets the best reaction. However since the kids had done it before, they remained unimpressed. Especially because I refused to use a “heat source” to develop the ink and went for the less library-liable version of painting over the dried ink with grape juice. Some kids said they would have preferred to drink the grape juice. I would have let them, except that I bought it over 3 weeks ago and it had been opened and possibly fermented. Or maybe I should’ve let them drink it… hm. Either way, next time I will bring in a hair dryer or something.

2) For some reason, I find that explaining the concept of code-wheels to other people is next to impossible. Go ahead and try it! I either end up sounding like it’s quantum physics or just sound like an idiot. I should have guessed when a librarian from another branch called me to ask me how to put it together and “what it was supposed to do” and I couldn’t really explain it to her. Blank stares ensued tonight… They did like the fact that it spun, though…one little boy thought it was a clock. With letters. I did not correct him, but hey, he was 4 and by far my most enthusiastic participant. Code wheels will not survive this iteration of the program, although I do love the idea of making your own code…

3) Kids do not understand what “Alias” means. They do not understand what “Agent number” means. I said “Just make it up!” They looked at me like I was a lunatic. Or like they were humouring me. Except for the little 4-year-old boy who said “I’m SPIDERMAN!” He was pretty awesome. Some kids even asked me what they were supposed to put for “Name.” Next time I make an identity card project I will just put their pictures next to a fancy seal and call it a day.

Meanwhile, back at the info desk – the entire library was being staffed by two people. So when all this was said and done we all looked like info-zombies. I suggested that we close the library due to the fact that none of the librarians could think straight. Somehow we muddled through the last half hour, eyes slightly glazed. Think I also got the courier boxes straightened out, but only time will tell. Why ARE there mysterious courier boxes in the program room closet?!?! The saga continues…