Archive for the ‘children and librarians’ Category

Shameful, isn’t it?

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

Yes. I’m still alive. Barely, but I’m here. Jeff has been threatening to get rid of my blog. Finally (as you can see) his pestering paid off. Its just other people do so much better than I, so I read other blogs, like Adrienne’s, Libba’s, Samantha’s and of course, the librarians at “A Librarian’s Guide to Etiquette“. I also have to keep up on my Lumines playing on my PSP and all the kids and teens books I’m reading. Its funny, Jeff was saying that he sometimes wishes I wasn’t a Youth Services Librarian, because then I would read adult (tee hee) books.

Anyway, what’s been going on in my life? I’ll give you the brief bits and then try and go into details into other posts. Here’s the bits:

1. March 5th I found out that I was eight weeks pregnant! Wheee! I’m due on October 15th.
2. May 28th I have the ultrasound. I’d really like a girl, because I have a girl name in mind, but any child of mine will be wonderful. 🙂
3. March 30th Jack had his third birthday
4. April 5th we had our third annual Teen Book Festival
5. April 18th I turned 29 … god, my last year in the twenties.
6. April 24th – May 4th the family and I went to Disney World.
7. I managed to do all my summer reading planning right before and after the Disney vacation.

Looking at this I’ve got about four blog posts I need to put together. Of course, if I posted as things were happening, I wouldn’t have to do this, but I’m like a cat. Easily distracted.

Onto the in depth posts… now that its 11 pm? Jeeze. Past my bedtime. Pregnancy has done that to me. I’m ready to go to bed at 9:30 pm nowadays. But because I love Jeff and he’s being a pest, I’ll post about one of them. 🙂

The wii is…

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

In my possession as we speak! I got to Toys R Us at 9 am to wait in line for an hour. There had been people waiting since SEVEN AM! I don’t know why people do this. They may be crazy. I thought I was crazy waiting for an hour.
It was snowing and blowing and FREEZING! My goodness was it freezing. But I got in there. I was Wii 26 of 35. I also got Wii Play (with the extra wiimote) a nunchuk, and the charging station. After that I was warm enough to leave the store. Only to get out of the store and realize that I couldn’t see a foot in front of my face. Yuck.
I had somewhat of a cold late last week, but today I’ve felt horrible. Absolutely awful. Those patrons better appreciate how much I’ve suffered. Ah, who am I kidding? They’ll be mad that I didn’t get the right wii games.
Next week: a trek back to Toys R Us for Guitar Hero III.
Just so you guys know, even though we play a lot of games and watch Anime, I do encourage the youth to read too. Sure I do! Manga and the Halo series. Oh and thanks to Bob, my new favorite: Scott Pilgrim.

Christmas Vacation programs for kids

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t expect too many people for the programs I offered during the vacation, but this is just ridiculous!
Over the vacation I offered:

  • Wednesday
  • : Make a Gods Eye ALL DAY – ZERO PEOPLE

  • Thursday
  • : Make a Felted Bowl – Three people, included in this are the girls mother and brother, who played Uno and Chess while we made our bowls.

  • Friday Morning
  • : Holiday Storytime – ZERO PEOPLE – I don’t offer it, people complain; I do offer it, no one shows up

  • Friday Afternoon
  • : Finish up your Felted Bowl – Two people – these are different people that didn’t come on Thursday. I included the mom because she hung around to talk and read a magazine as we made our bowls.

    Monday I’m going to be doing a New Year’s Eve dance. I was going to make that punch with ginger ale, Hawaiian Punch and sherbert and get snacks. I was also going to recreate or find a video to show of the ball dropping, but now I’m wondering how much I should bother doing.

    I try not to let it bother me, but still I get frustrated. Even if I spend money on hiring out people, they often don’t draw people either. Someone did ask if we were showing a movie. Maybe if I just sit people in front of our big screen tv so that they can rot their brains, they’ll come. You know they will. Don’t shake your head.

    Next year, I’m thinking of stealing Adrienne’s idea and doing a kids advisory group (she calls it “Library Club”). I think this would be a great idea to draw on the kids talents and their ideas of how they envision the library in the future.

    We shall see. Its midnight and I’m old and tired. Plus I rearranged stuff at the library in the staff area, so that it won’t effect patrons, thank goodness. They definitely can’t handle change. Of course, we occasionally have people who ask for the card catolog, and actually mean card catalog. I thought it would be best to do this while Sally was gone on vacation. Otherwise, she would find other things for me to move. 🙂 I can’t wait until she comes back so that she can see! Yippee!

    Drowning my sorrows in strawberry rice krispies treats

    Thursday, October 11th, 2007

    I’m glad that I decided to buy the Rice Krispies and strawberry marshmallows this past time I went grocery shopping. They were delicious!

    I’ve had the worst turnout for my story times. In fact my best story time turnout was 14, which included parents, and someone else had actually done it for me, because I had to work at the first tech camp in my library system. Just so you know what a tech camp might entail, I talked about DDR and Guitar Hero and encouraged libraries to make it a part of their own libraries. Anyway, I’ve had terrible time trying to get people to go to my story times. Then to make matters worse, I read this article.

    Okay, so maybe Webster is “a little bit” bigger than Hilton (2000 census – Webster 37,926 Parma 14,822). But still! Then of course, I could decide not to have story time next spring. But what would happen then? People would complain, just like they complain that I don’t have story time all year round. Ugh. I love doing story time, even if there are only two adorable little kids that I read to, but its sometimes distressing with all the preparation I have to put into each story time session I do.

    Then I made the mistake of trying to do an educational program for Columbus Day. I called it “Discovering Dewey Decimal”. I had three kids, all in one family. My one homeschooling family that comes to all my programs. I was quite proud of the program I had put together; a tour of the library, with me asking questions the whole time. Then I had the kids go through a bunch of Jack’s clothes, toys, books and food and organize them into categories and sub categories. I think the kids really enjoyed this, and it made it easier for them to understand how dewey decimal is organized. After that I had them do a dewey decimal treasure hunt. I guess all that was important was that the people that were there had a good time.

    If you look at the D&C’s website, Hilton has been getting quite a bit of publicity. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been all good. The town and village are fighting over where the library should be. Many residents want to keep it in the village. Everyone has a position and they’re all being very loud about it. Personally, I don’t care where it is, I just want there to be more space so I don’t have to continually shift books, so that I can have more programming, so that the teens have their own space with their own computers that they can feel more comfortable and adults don’t yell at me about the “hooligans”. Part of the reason people want the library in the village is so that the students can walk right to the library after school, however once they get to the library people complain because they are in the library and taking over the computers and being noisy. Recently, due to all the newspaper press, people have been coming up to me daily to tell me that we better not move out of the village. I’d love not to move out of the village, but someone better give us space to build a nice cozy (but big) library. Parma keeps growing, even if some people would rather not admit it. We need to have a library that is big enough to provide the services that a larger community expects.

    Another fun topic. A patron complained that we did not monitor what movies kids/teens take out, because we should not allow them to take out PG-13 or R rated movies. Now we have forms parents have to fill out before kids/teens take out movies and we put stickers on their cards to show what rating they can take out. But that’s not good enough. According to a certain member of the community, the murders in Rochester are comparable to the atrocities going on in the public library… the filth and violence we allow people to check out is deplorable… I guess we shouldn’t have the Passion of the Christ, Schindler’s List, or Saving Private Ryan. Those are all R rated movies. Shame shame on us. I’m a mother first and then a librarian, and I am OUTRAGED that they would compare us to the atrocities going on recently. I do not encourage kids to check out these kind of films. In fact, should you look at our kids collection, we have every single Elmo, Dora and Veggie Tale movie in existence. However, I have ONE child. Not 5,000. I am not going to monitor what everyone else’s child is taking out. Not only is that not my job, its also illegal. There is this thing called Intellectual Freedom. I think its important to let parents do their job. They need to take responsibility for their children’s well being. This is not to say that I don’t care what happens to these kids. If someone was trying to rape a kid, I would do what I could to stop it. However I don’t think its my place to tell kids what they can/can’t check out. I’d be pissed off if someone told my kid they couldn’t check something out. That’s why I went through the hours of labor. So when he gets home with it, I could yell at him and tell him he’s grounded. Also parents all have different limits for their kids. Some parents are okay with sex but not violence. Some are okay with swearing but not sex. Some are okay with the horror movies but realistic violence. Some don’t want their kids watching any of it. What are we supposed to do? Get rid of the DVDs? But what about the huge percentage of people that come to the library just to get movies? What are we saying to them?

    I am sure that there is going to be LOTS of arguments and bloodshed over the next few months over these two topics, and the library will not go anywhere, and the boss lady will stress out more and more until they push her over the deep end. I don’t want to see that… wait maybe I’ll video tape it and put it on youtube. 🙂

    Irondequoit may have it even worse though. Poor things. Our prayers go out to you… wait I shouldn’t pray should I? I’m evil and corrupt and the spawn of satan, or something like that.

    Irondequoit Libraries Top Ten List

    Jenny started today

    Monday, January 15th, 2007

    My sister started working for me today. It was a lot of fun working with her. She gave me quite a few ideas for the summer reading program. Plus she showed me a tool on our library catalog that I didn’t know about. How cool is that?

    I’ve decided that I’m really going to need to work her hard. I have so much to do. It’s sometimes hard to keep it all straight. I think it’ll be nice to have ideas and projects to bounce off Jenny. Sally said that I can have one of the clerks as my own. I may have to take her up on it. I could really use someone that I can have do all the actual orders once I fill out the cards, have them make all the posters (even though I really like making them) as well as any other small things. Its hard though, I like doing a lot of these things myself. Unfortunately I know that I don’t have the time. I look at calendars like Webster’s and I grow faint. Granted, I know that they have more staff, but I wish I could offer more. I wish I knew what the heck I was doing!…

    I think that I might need to try and visit a couple of Webster’s story times, because as much as I try, I don’t think I’m doing a very good job. In fact, I think I’m terrible. Sure, I’m not as bad as the hockey player that came to my library, but he didn’t plan on making story telling part of his career. Oh dear.
    On another note, I’ve tried adding a wiki to my blog, but I don’t like this one too much. Fheh. I guess I’ll have to look a little harder.

    Interesting discussion about comic books

    Sunday, January 14th, 2007

    Free Republic discussion

    I’m doing a presentation in two weeks about comic books for kids, and in researching, I found this interesting discussion about a public library carrying Gunsmith Cats in the children’s collection of their public library. This comic is published by Dark Horse Comics, which usually publishes adult comics. I highlight this because they are usually VERY adult. I may have one series from Dark Horse in my teen section, but I have stickers on them that say they are for OLDER TEENS.

    I was really horrified by the way the people discussing viewed librarians and libraries…

    “And I know a certain liberal (perverted) librarian (Hi Vicki you miserable wretch. Grow a spine witch) who despises children basically anti-family who moved to the Florida panhandle who would defend this type of kiddie porn comic book. She’s probably ordering stacks to fill her library cuz GOSH, it’s all about free speech.”
    A couple of people said that the girl should steal the book and burn it. Terrifying.

    Luckily, Conan the Librarian was there to share a librarian’s point of view.

    Then I read an article about this poor guy who worked at a comic books store in Texas, and was arrested because he sold an adult comic book to an adult. For shame.

    Story time sagas

    Friday, October 13th, 2006

    I haven’t been getting many to come to my story times. Part of my problem may be that I don’t really have a good strong core story time collection yet. A lot of the books are from the previous librarian’s collection, most of which I know I won’t use.

    Upon looking at the books that I REALLY like using:

    1. Don’t let the pigeon drive the bus
    2. Catalina Magdelina Hoopensteiner Wallendiner Hogan Logan Bogan is her name (BTW I didn’t even look that up I know the book so well)
    3. Winchell cuts the cheese
    4. Big Green Monster

    Well, I guess for the moment those are my core collection… I’m very sure that there are a couple others, but I can’t think of any.

    Anyway, after looking at my tiny core collection, I realized a couple of things (another list…):

    1. I really like really silly books
    2. I like books with repetition, that allow the kids to get involved
    3. I like books that are pretty short
    4. I like books with bright colors

    I realize that this is my mission now, if I want to save story time. I need to find more books like these. Last week, I read a couple books and I was afraid that the kids were going to die. I read them to myself beforehand, but it wasn’t until I started reading them that I realized they were WAY too long. They were books about food. I think one was about a giant carrot, one was about food having a food fight, and the other one was so forgettable that I’ve forgotten.

    Tonight I had ZERO kids at my story time. I was sad. (

    However my evening was brightened up when the Knit Wits (a group of knitting ladies that are my mom’s age and up) asked me to read them some picture books for them. And they loved it!

    That got me thinking… why not do story time for senior citizens? Does that sound crazy? I mean I wouldn’t hand out coloring sheets or do rhymes, but why not tell stories to senior citizens? Afterwards I could leave out tea and cookies and let them mingle.

    Of course I was thinking about this at about midnight, so I don’t know if it holds up in the morning light. Still.

    Early childhood literacy

    Monday, October 2nd, 2006

    This past week was SO busy (How busy was it?) It was so busy I can’t believe its time for a new week already!

    On of the most memorable of the events was the Early Childhood Literacy program, which I think was last Tuesday. Days blur into each other.

    The program was useful, although at certain points, I think the presenter went into too much detail about the lives of her children, grandchildren, and herself. However, she was very enthusiastic and I got caught up in the feeling.

    I was also able to spend time with Kelly, the librarian at Brockport and Xandi, a future librarian and current staff of Webster library. I think its always fun to see other people’s takes on librarianship, and the people we serve.
    The program encouraged us, as librarians, to search for ways to show parents that even their very young children could enjoy books, before they can read, before they can speak, before they can even understand human speech. Our part is to show the parents that don’t have the time or patience for their children that they need to make the time.

    Unfortunately, the people that we need to reach, do not go to libraries. We have to go out into the community and reach out to these people with our picture books and hand puppets in tow. We have to let them know that even if they can’t read very well, there are ways to share with their children.

    She discussed how children that are read to from very early on, have much more brain activity than those with limited interaction. She went on to say that even if the child only wants to eat the book, that’s okay, because they use all five senses when interacting with books.

    It got me thinking that a grant might be in order. If I could work with teenaged mothers to encourage them to read with their children. I could set up programs and make kits. It would be super!

    A few last things…

    Thursday, November 10th, 2005

    (1) I had to kick teens out of the library for being way too rowdy. I hated doing this, because it made me feel like that cranky old librarian, shushing people and running anyone who couldn’t be absolutely quiet out of this library. This is not the type of person that I am, but they were driving everyone crazy. It made me feel weird, but it had to be done.

    (2) There were two small children who insisted on yelling at each other and jumping on the new bean bags we got about a week ago. The mother did NOTHING AT ALL about it, SHHUSHing ocassionally, but never leaving her spot at the computer. After asking them not to bounce on the bean bag chairs one last time (of about literally 10 times), I noticed that they had mananged to bounce some of the bag beads right out of the bean bags. I was so mad that I had to leave, and luckily it was time for me to go anyway.

    (3) I have decided that because of this, I am going to ask Sally (the director) if we can put some “rules” up. I think I want them to go something like this…

    RESPECT…(1)Each Other
    No yelling, screaming or fighting in the library
    (2) the Library
    Throw away your garbage, don’t jump or put your feet on the furniture
    or in anyway purposely try to damage the furniture.
    (3) Yourself
    Don’t act in a way that you know is inappropriate,
    you are only disrespecting yourself by doing these things.
    (4) Library Staff
    Treat us as you would want to be treated, we are only here to help.
    Thank you!

    Okay, Adrienne. You asked for it…

    Wednesday, September 14th, 2005

    (Damnit! My computer died and I lost my post. Now I have to remember what the heck I was writing. Feh)
    Once a month all the j librarians in my library system meet for “discussion”. I try to keep up, but mostly I like to listen to them spout their beautiful and maniacal mouth music. Today, I was lucky enough to sit near the uber-librarian, Adrienne, who has a blog of her own. I think that at once point, I decided that I would much rather live vicariously through her blog than write in my own, disappointing blog (and in turn, life.) Anywho, it turns out that sometimes she looks at my blog. Needless to say, she was a little disappointed in me because I hadn’t posted anything since coming back from California. I did try though! Last night I stared at my computer, asking it what there was that I could write about my trivial and boring life… Obviously, by the lack of a post last night, my computer was little help. I’ve recently been physically sick and thinking that compared to all those poor souls in New Orleans, I’ve got nothing to complain about. I’d actually been meaning to muse about my personal feelings towards New Orleans, but I haven’t decided how to put my thoughts together. (Don’t worry Adrienne, there will be a post!) I’d also thought that maybe I’d write about how I wanted to buy a Play Station, two dance pads and Dance Dance Revolution for the library.

    All those thoughts went out the window, when I came home and smelled poop (so strong that I could smell it immediately, even though I’ve got a cold and can’t smell a damned thing).

    We put our dog Buster in his crate when we aren’t at home, because if we don’t, he has a tendency to eat books, Jack’s clothes and toys, video tapes and DVDs, or anything else he can get his lips around. At first we tried to let him stay out on his own, because we thought it might be a little cruel, but our greyhound group explained to us that they spend quite a bit of time in their crates, and feel safest in their crate. Please try telling that to Buster. He hides upstairs when we try and get him to go in his crate. He howls when we are coming home. He is not a happy dog, one way or another.
    This is where the poop comes in, he has no qualms about pooping and peeing in his crate. This is a weird thing because it would be like you pooping (on purpose!) in your bed. So tonight, we came home and he had pooped and peed in his crate, then sat in it and got the poop nice and deep into his back paws. I really don’t know anymore.
    After all this, plus having Jack who is only about 6 months old, plus a cat that likes to vomit everywhere, plus having a job that causes me to run about like a chicken with its head cut off quite a bit, I don’t know if I can handle the whole dog thing. I really don’t know if Jeff and I have a life that supports a dog, especially such a high-maintenance drama queen kind of dog such as we have. I’m really at the point where I think we need to give him up back to the group, where he can go to a family that deserves him more. Unfortunately, part of me is really concerned with what other people think of us. I know it seems pretty shallow, but I don’t want people to think that I’m shit. But then, I really want him to be somewhere he would be happy. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO FREAKING DO! We’ve already agreed that we are never ever getting another dog, but other than that… I’m sad. Now he cringes and whines when we try and pet him, plus he puts his tail between his legs ALL THE TIME (like now).
    OKAY explain this to me. He poops in his crate when we aren’t home. This says to me that he DOESN’T like his crate. Then, when we’re home, he keeps going into his crate. This says to me that he DOES like his crate. ARGH! What the hell!
    Cats, I understand. They come to you when they want to be petted or want food. They piss in front of the litter box when they want the litterbox cleaned. Thats about it. Dogs, I don’t understand. I think that they might be too complex for me.
    Okay, Adrienne. You wanted me to post in my blog. PLEASE HELP ME! I promise that my next post will be happier… or at least more entertaining.