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.

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!

In addition to this change in our storytime philosophy, we’ve also started offering “Storytimes On Demand.” Quite literally, going out and offering storytimes to the people as they’re in the library. We’ve been offering story times on-demand since the beginning of 2009, so this is more or less still a relatively new service for us and I find we’re still trying to work out best practices in terms of delivery: a several stories or just one? 15 minutes or five? In its inception, I provided these services when there we had reached “critical mass” in the children’s department, sometimes giving a storytime on the fly to more than 30 people. And subsequently, the spontaneous story times were a bit longer (about 15 minutes) to compensate for the time it took to gather a decent sized crowd in one location and get all of the kids settled.

One issue we’ve come across is competition from the toy collection that we’ve recently added to each branch at MPL. Being the sort of library diva that I am, storytimes on demand usually fed my need to be centre-stage and to make babies happy, etc. but it was a little nerve-wracking to walk around to the groups of children who were happily running up and down the ramp, jumping around our story nook, playing with cars and legos, and savagely beating each other with cloth blocks and try to peddle books as a more worthwhile activity.

Imagine this if you will: It’s Saturday afternoon, the children’s department is so busy it’s become a sentient, writhing being in its own right. I grab some books and slowly shuffle up to a group of kids gleefully destroying MPL property and their oblivious parents. “Uhm, hey kids – do you want to listen to a story?” (no response.) “Hey, uh… HEYYY YOU GUYYYYSSSS.” (everyone freezes. I’m painfully reminded of my nerd-dom as a zygote). <breathes through mouth and reflexively pushes now non-existent glasses up nose> “Who … uh… who wants to read stories with me? It’ll be fun! Storytime! C’mon!”

At this point, a couple of things can happen:

1) The parents think that I will be putting on a storytime and am asking them to move out of the way and they’re confused and sometimes upset. Or the parents think that I’m asking them if they’ve come for a storytime, and they’re confused. By the time I finish explaining what it is that I’m doing and start the actual storytime, I’ve probably screwed up the break schedule back on desk.

2) The parents are absent and the kids throw blocks at me and say “NOOOOOOOO that’s BOOOORRRRRING!”

3) The parents are enthusiastic and present, but the kids are having a better time playing so they throw blocks at me and say “NOOOOOOOO that’s BOOOORRRRRING!” and then either their parents politely say “Thanks, but no thanks,” or their parents force them to listen and they cry.

4) Everyone is delighted and on board and we have a really awesome time.

Once everyone is settled, (I usually try to collect as many kinder as possible), I read one to three books and do like a “greatest hits” rhyme/song set list and say “goodbye.”

Say goodbye with your feet,

Say goodbye with your knees

Say goodbye with your bottom

Say goodbye with your tummy

Say goodbye with your elbows

Say goodbye with your hair

And say goodbye with your hands! Bye, bye, bye!

(Continued in Part 2…)