Archive for December 2nd, 2005

I’m slipping again…

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

I was trying so hard to keep up with my blog, and I thought that I was doing pretty well, until I received an email from another fellow librarian and blogster, Adrienne. She asked me why the heck I wasn’t posting. So just now, I finally looked and realized that I haven’t posted in almost a month. Jeeze. I do have a few posts that I started and never got to finish. I don’t know what’s taking up all my time. Hmmm. Maybe its my 8 month old baby boy. It would still be nice to have a little bit more me time. I really need some now.
In one of the posts that I started, I mention another thing that has been taking up a great deal of time. Teenagers. Although I think that they’re really not even in high school yet, so they might be those dreaded tweens. Anyway, thanks to these tweens, I have had to call the police twice, I have banned three tweens from the library for six months, I have cried a couple of times, I have been called a fat bitch. I have gotten so mad that I get pale and quiet, which was always a bad since when my mom got that mad you really knew that you were in trouble. I had to put an out of order sign in the women’s bathroom, because one of them smeared pooh in the sink. I have wanted to hide in the staff bathroom on more than one occasion and (1) not tell anyone where I was and (2) lock the door and not come out. The worst thing is that I like all these teens, and I want them to stay, if only they could be respectful. It broke my heart having to ban one of the kids from the library. I think he’s only in sixth grade. He’s really sweet, but very active and difficult to keep entertained. He looked at me when I told him that he couldn’t come back for six months like I was kidding. When I stood there waiting for him to leave, he seemed shocked. Unfortunately, I just don’t know what to do anymore.
For Adrienne, I thought I’d mention this incident, because I know that she’s going to get as mad as I was. However if anyone out there can give me ideas for how to handle this, I’d really appreciate it.
We have a mother who comes to the library all the time with her three year old and six year old. While she goes on the internet to check email or whatever, the kids go crazy through the library, running through the stacks, getting really loud, jumping in the bean bags. I have tried a couple of times to give them dinosaur books to look at, which has calmed them for a little while, but not nearly enough. Sometimes, they want to play games on the internet, and because the six year old can’t read at all, he needs help to play the games. We try to help, but we really have other things that we should be doing. We have all tried to help as much as we can but it only helps so much. Anyway, a couple of days ago, one of my co-workers saw the three year old leave the library. The mother said “Stay in here!”, but she didn’t check on them. So he left the library. To which she said, “Don’t worry, he’ll be back in a couple of seconds. More than one of my co-workers and I wanted to throttle her when she said that, but we aren’t allowed to do that.
Then today, no one saw the boy leave, so he managed to get to the parking lot, and no one knew until another patron came to the desk and said “You know that there is a child wandering in the street. ” The mother finally came to and went to check on her kids. Fortunately, it was not before one of my co-workers went out there to check on the kid. She saw him looking through the car window and duck down. So, she stuck her head in the car door, but then right at that minute, the mother came out and said something like ” what are you doing to my child” or something, but then she saw that it was my coworker, and she said “Never mind”
God. This makes me so mad, I can’t even countinue. Maybe, I’ll be okay to finish tomorrow. Plus, I’m really sleepy.