Pig's name

 Patrons have to call or email us to make an appointment to pick their requests up via curbside service. Here's a recent conversation I had with one family, when the adult called to make a pickup appointment.

Me: Looks like we have 3 books ready for you.

Patron: Can you tell me: Are those all chapter books, or are some of them for little kids?

Me: I'm sorry, they're all chapter books; it looks like the early readers are still on their way. But if you have a younger kid at home, if you can tell me a little bit about them and what they like, we could pull some suggestions for you.

Patron: Oh, that would be great! He's four and he's reading level 1 or 2 readers. He likes Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig, Blaze and the Monster Machines...

Little boy (in background): Boy books!

Patron: (to kid) Girl books are good, too. (to me) No 'girl books,'  but for some reason, Peppa is fine...

Little boy: Peppa isn't a girl's name!

Patron: It's not?

Little boy: No, Peppa is a pig's name!

Storytime (again)

We have a new children's librarian so I'm not longer doing storytime every week (hooray!) but I'm still her backup so I've been acting as her assistant the last few weeks so I can learn the routine if I need to fill in. Her storytimes are super-fun and I think she's doing a great job, but here are some of the concerns she brings to me:

"I introduced a frog puppet this week and I thought the kids weren't really into him, but when I put him away, a little girl started bawling and going 'but I wanted to touch him!!!' What should I have done?!"

"We were doing 'Herman the Worm.' In the original song he eats fruits but I thought the toddlers wouldn't know what lots of the fruits were so I did animals instead, and I guess I didn't think it through because I did a dog and a cat and a parent got mad at me for singing about pets being eaten."

"We were doing a song with animals and colors and we got to blue and I couldn't think of any blue animals, so I said 'blue cow' and then this week I asked the kids what color a cow is and one of them shouted 'blue!' I think I am a bad influence."

Storytime

Our children's librarian quit and I covered the program for about a month while we hired someone new. The funniest part to me is interacting with the kids after we've finished the readalouds, rhymes, etc. because we have them do a little 'craft.' Most of our attendees are really too little for crafts, but the adults like the idea, and practicing holding crayons, glue sticks, etc. is still good for developing motor skills, so we do them anyway. I get overwhelmed by trying to pick activities when it's wide open, so I try to do a craft that's related to one of the books we read the same week.

We read The Very Hungry Caterpillar so the craft that week was gluing a series of green ovals (with a red one for the head) onto a piece of paper to make a caterpillar, then decorating with crayons. I tried to win over one little girl by telling her "nice caterpillar," and she gave me the most frustrated sigh and said "it's a spider." Oh, sorry!

The day after Halloween we read a book called Hello My Name is Tiger that features a kid who goes to school dressed in a tiger costume, and 'corrects' his name tag to say 'tiger' instead of his name, so I gave the kids each a piece of paper with a blank name tag and told them to draw themselves as their favorite animal and then have their grown-up fill in the name tag with the name of the animal. All but three kids just ignored the paper or scribbled unidentifiably on it. Of the other three, one drew a giraffe and two drew themselves as monsters, and happily told me that 'monster' was their favorite animal.

The biggest failure was when we read books about colors, so I gave each kid a color wheel and a bunch of stuff they could glue to it--pieces of pipe cleaners, feathers, sequins, etc. Not only did the kids totally fail to grasp the idea of gluing red things to the red section, green things to the green section, etc., but it was choking hazard city. I'm just glad I didn't have to perform the Heimlich Maneuver during that one.

Kids at outreach

We set up a table at a nearby elementary school's "Literacy Night" recently to talk to families about the public library. The kids were given some sort of literacy-based scavenger hunt to do for the evening, plus a bunch of sugary foods.

A pack of tween girls run at full tilt past the table. The girl in the back of the pack is complaining: "I didn't mean run literally!" 

"Are you here all the time?"

Six-year-old apparently all alone, no parent and no ID: "Hello. I'd like to sign up for the library, please." 

Different kid: Can I have a library card?
Me: If your mom or dad comes to tell me it's okay and answers a few questions--
Kid: No, I know I can't sign up for an account by myself. I just want one of the plastic cards even if it's not connected to anything. They look cool.

"Wow! I saw you before! You got me some movies!"

A young boy walks back and forth past my table a few times, each time very carefully balancing a styrofoam cup of cocoa. Then I see him skip past a little bit later, and he says, happily, "I finished my hot chocolate, so now I can run free!"

Toddlers vs. libraries

Walnut Bluff has an AWE-brand "early learning station," a.k.a. a computer designed for young kids with educational games on it. Ours is password-protected because there is sometimes some...inter-generational tension over whether to read books or play on the computer. Toddler A is sitting on the computer randomly pounding on the keyboard, but of course it's not doing anything because it's on the lock screen.
Coworker to toddler's mom: Do you need the password?
Mom: Oh, thanks. I don't know, let me check.
She walks over to her son, leans down, and has a short exchange with him. Then she laughs.
Mom to coworker: No, thank you! He says he's 'hacking.'

Toddler B crying during a kids' craft activity where they are coloring a monster mask.
Me to family: Hi, are you guys okay?
Grandma: Don't worry, we'll be fine. He wanted me to hold his mask up in front of my face so he could see what he drew, but then he got scared. 

Toddler C to dad as dad is at the front desk checking out their books: Dad, I want a grilled cheese sandwich!
Dad: Jacob, this is a library! They don't have those here!

I see the logic

Like a lot of libraries/rec centers/etc. in working-class communities, my library participates in a program where we serve lunch to kids during the summer. The idea is to help out families who rely on free/reduced school lunch during the year and might have a rough time feeding their school-aged kids over break. These programs are funded by the department of agriculture and they have a ton of rules. In Texas, one of those rules in that the kid has to eat the lunch in the room you serve it in and can only take fruit and whole grains with them. As you can imagine, this confuses the heck out of six- and seven-year-olds. I served my first 'summer lunch' last week and had this conversation:
Kid: Can I take my cheese with me? Can I take my milk with me?
Me: Sorry, I know these rules don't make a lot of sense, but you can only take your apples with you.
Kid: Why?
Me: Well, we get our food from the government and they have a lot of rules that we have to follow.
Kid (thinks for a minute): Well, that makes sense. Milk makes a mess. If you took it with you, you might spill it on the government's stuff, and they wouldn't want that.
Me: Yeah, I'm sure that's it.

Other duties as assigned, part 2

I've mentioned before that something I love about my job is how varied the work is. I was a little worried that when I became a manager I would lose that, but it turns out that the duties I've lost are more than made up for by the new things I have gained. Here are some ways I spent work time this week:

• Helping little kids play "Pin the Hat on the Cat" during a Dr. Seuss birthday celebration (3/4 of them cheated, kids are weird)
• Attending training on how to do storytime (Less so I can do it and more because I was worried that if I wasn't in the room certain staff members I had assigned to attend would not take it seriously)
• Helping a patron who is trying to make a DACA case and wants to see if we can provide proof that he has a library card
• Counting the total number of each kind of chair we have in out building, as step 1 in a plan to convince Administration to buy us more
• Creating a little training quiz about library policies that my staff can use to meet a system requirement for "continuing learning"
• Writing a thank you note to a local business that donated a prize for us to give out during a recent program (made me feel important)
• Posting to social media about a library program we have coming up. No matter how carefully I try to make sure I include the name of the library and the address and the date and the time and the phone number and the intended age range and that no registration is required and that the program is free, it never fails that I miss one of those pieces of information and immediately someone posts a question asking about the missing piece and I feel like an idiot.
• Counting out 837 Goldfish crackers to put in a guessing jar for the Dr. Seuss program. Embarrassed that I never before considered and appreciated the work done by guessing jar creators.
• Helping a patron who heard from everybody at church that it was essential she have a LinkedIn profile for her job search, but who had no clue what LinkedIn was

This week

Bathroom issues: A man wants to permission to use the women's restroom because whoever is in the single stall in the men's room is taking ages. "If you don't let me in, I'm going to pee on myself right here!"

Later the same day a woman complains that another woman threatened her in the bathroom because she thought she was trying to look through the stall at her. The accuser is a known stirrer-upper-of-drama so I offer her the phone to call the police to report the threat. Surprisingly, police come, and speak to and calm down both ladies involved.

When is there going to be tax help at the library? times 20.

While picking up trash outside the library (I failed to escape this responsibility by transferring to Walnut Bluff) I find two empty beer cans and an empty full-size wine bottle. Yikes.

I fill in for a sick coworker at a kids' craft program. I tried bribing my other staff members (most of whom are very afraid of children) by saying that anyone who sat through the program with me as a sort of exposure therapy could go home an hour early, but no one took me up on it.

A kid at the craft program has a stuffed dog in a Superman costume.
Me: Wow, is that Superdog?
Kid: No, it's Dinodog.
Kid's mom: He has dinosaur pajamas on under the Superman outfit. It's complicated.

A Hispanic guy comes in, sees my white self and my black coworker at the desk, and immediately looks away and pretends he doesn't see us.
Me: Hi, how can we help you?
Him: Uh...no English.
Me: Oh, como podemos ayudar a usted? [Oh, how can we help you?]
Him: Whoa...[I need to print something.]
Me: [Yeah, sure, we can do that!]

My colleague spots me as I am dusting the Spanish section--"Are you trying something, or is this a hint?" Kind of both.

Different colleague is trying and failing to pull out the first wipe in a canister of Lysol wipes, but he can't reach in far enough. He says, "I wonder if this is what t-rexs felt like" and I accidentally crack up loud enough that a patron glares at me.

A really big waiting room

A toddler cried and cried today because he was convinced that the library was a doctor's office and he was going to have to get a shot. His mom kept saying "Look, look at all these books! This is a library!" but he was not buying it.

Owl pellets

Today I got to help the children's librarian with a very special STEM program: dissecting owl pellets. The setup was a bit involved: each kid had to be handed a paper plate, a mini-skewer, some plastic tweezers, and the owl pellet itself, so it took a while to pass everything out. There were a lot of kids because the rec center's summer camp had come over for the program, and they were getting kind of loud and fidgety, so I tried to distract them:
Me: So, where do you think we got these owl pellets from?
A kid: Amazon!
Me: basically, yeah. We ordered them from a company online and they mailed them to us. Who do you think collected the owl pellets? How would you like to be the person who has that job?
Kids: Eeeew! Nooooo! Grossssssss!
Rec center lady, with a completely deadpan face: What if I told you that that person makes a hundred thousand dollars a year?
Kids: [absolute, wide-eyed silence]

In disguise

I wish I were better at telling how old kids are, because I think it would have helped me a lot this morning.

Two little girls came in with their mom. I would have guessed they were 5 years old. They had the following interaction with one of my coworkers:

Little girls: What's your name?
Coworker: My name is Alma. What are your names?
Girls: Elmo!?
Coworker: Um, no...
Girls: Wow! Why are you in a costume!?

Then they hugged her, then they ran away. I can't tell if they were trolling or if they really thought she was somehow associated with Elmo.

Exciting and cute

It's been a rough week at Mystery Library (you can see this is becoming a bit of a theme) so it was especially pleasing to be involved in this interaction this afternoon. A little girl and her mom were checking out their books with the teen librarian, and the little girl goes "We saw a hawk when we were walking here!" so Teen Librarian says "Oh wow! What was it doing?" Little girl: "it was, it was---actually, Mom, can you show her the video?" And that's how me and Teen Librarian both got to watch a dramatic video of a hawk eating a pigeon today.

Favorite

A kid patron was disappointed because one of my coworkers was leaving the desk, and said "Nooooo! She's my favorite!" She's a regular who I have a good relationship with, so I gasp and said "What!? I'm not your favorite!?"

She responded by leaning in conspiratorially, lowering her voice, and confiding "Actually, I'm my own favorite."

Special visitors

One of my favorite patrons I helped today was a woman who came in to sign her middle-school aged daughter up for a library card. The daughter wasn't with her, but she had her school ID. The patron told me that her daughter was special and came to the library every week as part of a program, and the people in the program had told her (the patron) that it would be good for her (the daughter) to have her own library card. I could tell from the way she said "special" and the fact that the daughter came to the library as part of a program that the daughter had some kind of cognitive impairment, so I wasn't surprised to see a girl with the newly-issued card come in later today as part of a regular group of visitors--several kids who seem to be on the autism spectrum and a few adults. It was fun checking out a book to her on her new card, even though we had a brief scare where it seemed she might have already lost the card (she and one of her adults found it on the floor of the children's area).

I love seeing kids on the spectrum for a few reasons, but one is that patron interactions with neurotypical patrons can get kind of repetitive, but you never know what a kid on the spectrum might like to talk to you about. The highlight today was a kid who spent our whole transaction telling me about his plans to ride to different stations on our local light rail line, and, when prompted to thank me, shouted "Thank you, commuter!"

Other reasons I especially like seeing kids who are on the spectrum in the library:

1. I like getting to participate in teaching interactions. The adults are often using the opportunity to have the kid practice navigating common commercial social situations, and it is fun to play along with them and help out by being a bit more direct and exaggerated than I would be with another kid the same age.

2. The public library is one of the few institutions around to support people on the spectrum that they don't have to worry about aging out of or otherwise being disqualified from. I've heard--from patrons, teachers, and from a speech therapist friend (technically she is a speech and language pathologist but I don't know if people know what that is) who works with a lot of kids on the spectrum--that lots of help for people drops off between ages 16 and 21, and there is a lot less support in place for adults. However, I do see independent adults who obviously have cognitive disabilities of various kinds and use the library on a regular basis, and I really enjoy getting to see the foundation of that being set.

3. Invariably, the adults with those kids, despite how hard they are working, are always super nice and polite.

Kids

Every Saturday our children's person prepares the materials for a craft and puts them out for any kids that want to try it. Today it was an adorable octopus made by taping a piece of paper into a cylinder, cutting into one end to make separate tentacles, and adding googly eyes. I saw a small girl following her dad around the library, using the octopus as a hand puppet, and saying over and over "I'm a living creature! I'm a living creature!"

Boaty McBoatface

Like many educational institutions, my library has jumped all the way onto the S.T.E.A.M. bandwagon. We have a regular program with a different project each time, and this week I gave the kids a bunch of materials to build a boat and then we tested the boats to see how much weight they could hold before they sank or capsized. I also told them about the tradition of christening ships, and interrogated each of them about the name of their boat before I would set it in the test bucket.


Here is what the kids named their boats: Riptide, God of Water, Zeus, Lil' Cutie, Unicorn, Death Ray, Mystery Boat, and Gama Pod.