Because

I'm a nice person - why can't I sit in here at one of the tables way over there and use my computer, have a conversation, sit and read?

I'm sure you are a nice person and not a pedo or anything, but this is the Children's Room and it is for children and their caregivers. 

But there's no one here right now -

This is one small part of this library.  It takes up maybe one sixth of the public space.  The Teen Center is even smaller.  And all the rest of that belongs to adults.  Why don't you explore?

I've already walked all the way down here, you know.

And we are so proud of you.  Now show us how you can walk all the way back to the front (which you'll have to do to leave anyway), hop on the elevator, and walk down to the rotunda where there are tables and chairs and you can spread out.  Also, you won't be intimidating the children.  It is unwitting, I know, but just the presence of "strange" adults will frighten some children away from a certain area - such as those nice tables over by the windows where the manipulatives and crayons are.  And those couches by the puppet theatre?  Those are for parents to watch their children put on a puppet play or play at the duplo table. 

Most children are trained to be quiet around adults when they are doing adult things (not all, so I've noticed, but you get the idea).  If you are talking to a friend and aren't obviously a parent or grandparent with a child also playing, you are an impediment to play and, therefore, learning.  And even if they don't mind, won't their boisterous play interfere with your work or conversation?  If that is the case, I will ask you to leave rather than ask them to be quiet for your sake because this is their area.

By the way, the library is not a place to come and have a conversation.  If your main intent is to talk, either use one of the small conference rooms that are available on a first-come-first-serve basis ... or go somewhere else.  Yes, there are some ladies at the couches chatting away, but you know what?  They have children playing right there.  If they are letting the children get away with screaming bloody murder, I will have a separate chat with them.  The point is that they remembered to bring their children with them.  Next time why don't you?

[Now, the hard part is to put this in the tone of voice but reduce the verbiage to, "This is the Children's Room."  Practices Great Big Smile.]

Rules, Shmules

Maybe my problem is my background, although I can't say that was my sister's problem and she was ostensibly from the same family (even if our parents were the same people, considering the years between my sister and me, they were also different ... if you catch my drift).  We'll never know what her problem was. Mom said if my sister had been born later she would have been diagnosed with ADD.  My sister seemed to enjoy breaking rules just because they were there, if my memory of her college experience is anything to go on.  Why a smoking, drinking, swearing, dancing, card-playing person would go to a small Baptist college is a question for another day.

So, I go on and off my background being my problem.  It may only have been my fear of conflict (which I swear I remember going on between my parents and my sister as far back as my term in the womb) that caused me to make sure I was doing everything right when she was being yelled at.  While my parents were against the usual Ten Commandment type stuff, they certainly didn't pay much attention to the Volstead Act.  My dad and his friends from Mechanics Institute (now RIT) made something they called Plum Brandy from sugar, yeast, prunes and raisins or they "acquired" drums of grain alcohol and with the help of a hydrometer and some juniper juice made their own gin - for their own consumption ... and that of 50 to 100 of their closest friends.

My background is second generation American from a mixed background: my father's family was from northern Germany and my mother's from southern Germany (this gets a huge laugh among Germans for some reason).   My parents lectured work ethic ("Work makes life sweet," came down to us from the grandparents ... but perhaps they meant it made the rest of life sweet by comparison) but lived it as well.  My dad didn't know what a sick day was, unless it was the headaches he got on weekends from when he wasn't at work.  He had little patience for people who had excuses about why they were late, sick, their kids sick, etc.  Vacation was the last two weeks in July that the IBM plants shut down.  Even when my dad was no longer employed directly by IBM, he worked for vendors and kept the same schedule all his working life. 

My sister worked for our father and advised me to never follow suit.  Dad expected his own kids to work harder and apparently get paid less.  And then the other workers got annoyed with her because she made too many parts and might raise the expectations of the company as to how many parts could be assembled in an hour.  Harassment from fellow workers was nothing compared to what horrors (as I recall, the word "disappointed" featured largely in these) she would face at home.  I did not follow her advice, but by the time I was old enough to do factory work, Dad was managing a much smaller factory and I worked directly under him.  Because of that, people could see that I was ridden as hard if not harder than they were.  The floor supervisor had to argue with Dad to get me a raise - and that only worked the second summer. 

I, therefore, have little patience with people who can't get to work on time - a slightly watered-down version of my dad's.  If I have a fever, I stay home, regardless of how slight it is.  I will take time off for operations and recovery, and I will take a vacation any old time.  I like rules, though, rules give shape to life.  Perhaps in my sister's case rules were there to be reshaped into something more modern and free-form.  I can't ask her because she broke another rule by dying before our parents did. 

However, yesterday I was reading a response on Quora to a question about why airline boarding is such a nightmare and one responder mentioned how much more orderly Germans are about it because of their obsession with rules.  [Actually, I think I agree with the response about carry-on bags as the problem. Why anyone is in a hurry to sit in the cramped seating is beyond me.  It would be a mercy to wait until the last moment, but you never see anyone holding back until the plane is full to get on.]  If someone tells you you can't board until your section is announced, you don't queue up and get in everyone's way.  I tend to slavishly follow speed limits (a problem they don't have in Germany where they can work out their speedlust on the Autobahn - can you say Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung?  Which is almost as much fun a word as Rrrrrreibungsbeiwert.) and other traffic laws.  I've read up on wave theory to better handle traffic situations (here's a big hint: remember that "rule" about leaving one car length per ten mph between you and the car in front? Big help!).  Now these things are second nature to me.  I don't gripe about speed limits and claim that "without rules people would behave in a reasonable manner" (after getting a speeding ticket for going 40 mph in a 25 mph zone).

If I were told there was a half hour limit on computer use time, by golly I'd make a point of sticking to it!  (You knew it would get to something really petty, didn't you?)  And if I had children I would teach them to do the same.  "You get a half an hour to play.  After that you have to pick out some books, listen to the books that come with CDs, put on a puppet show at the puppet theatre, play with the blocks, color, or just chill."  I see some parents who do that.  They may even suggest books be picked out first.   Then there are others who think no one actually waiting to get on the computers is an excuse to sit there all day.  It's my job to juggle with the leeway we grant.  But if you let people stay on forever occasionally despite the clear rule, they learn that the rule doesn't mean squatola-mcsteinhammer.  And this makes me frustrated enough to want to quit.  As long as you're not causing a nuisance, you can stay in the library for hours and hours - but I don't see why you should get the idea that not all rules apply to you.

It's situations like this that make me want to retire yesterday.  And wear dirndls.

Thus Shalt Thou Do

The Many and Sundry Commandments in Reference to Those, 

the Computers of the Children's Room

If thou owest five shekels or more, thou shalt not have access to the Computers of the Children's Room nor those of the Adult Computer Lab.
Thou shalt not bear false witness by showing the Librarian in the Children's Room the library card of someone else.
If thou art below the age of 12, thou shalt have thy parent with thee when thou art on the Computers of the Children's Room.
If thou art above the age of 12, thou shalt hie thyself to the Adult Computer Lab where the limit is 2 hours.
If thou art the age of 12, thou mightest possibly remain at the Computers of the Children's Room unaccompanied, but pusheth it thou not.
Regardless of thy age, thou shalt only remain on the Computers of the Children's Room for 30 minutes, even if there be no one else in waiting for it.
If thou art finishing a report for school thou mayest stay on the Computers of the Children's Room longer than 30 minutes, so makest sure thou art working on thy report and not desporting thyself on a videogame for 30 minutes be the limit.
If thou art a parent, thou mayest make use of the laptop computers for work or school and only for one hour.
Thou shalt not allow thy children to run wild in the library whilst thou peruseth the Book of Faces or ThouTube.
If thou art applying for a job, considereth that this may take more time than thou hadst planned on and hie thee to the Adult Computer Lab where the limit is 2 hours and leaveth thy children with a neighbor or thy mother or thy mother's mother.
Thou shalt not view material inappropriate for the Children's Room.  Thinkest thou about it.
Thou shalt not view Book of Faces, for it is an abomination, and if thou art under 13 years of age, thy Book of Faces account be against the website's Terms of Service and thou hast born false witness to obtain same.
Thou shalt not view videos on ThouTube, because it sucketh bandwidth something awful and ruineth the interwebs experience for all.
Thou shalt not allow a preschooler on a Computer of the Children's Room and wander off to find books nor stoppeth to chat with thy neighbor whom thou hast not seen in ages.  For the preschooler, contrary to what thou mightest imagine, doth not use technology intuitively and doth bang the keyboard and yanketh on the mousecord and peereth curiously at the little red light therein.  Also, the preschooler diggeth into his nose with his finger and then smeareth the mucus upon the monitor.
When thou art finished with the Computers of the Children's Room, thou shalt return thy station to good order and return the sign to the monitor, but thou shalt not turn off the monitor nor the CPU, which confuseth the next person.

Heck Hath No Fury ...

I am absolutely furious with 1. myself and 2. the state for (2) making me provide a copy of our marriage license and most recent tax returns and (1) forgetting to mail them.

Despite my initial reaction of being insulted, I redacted financial info, printed the documents off immediately and then completely forgot to send them.  So I get a reminder that if they aren't received, health insurance benefits will be terminated for my husband, which raises my blood pressure.  I threw things, I screamed, and it isn't enough.  It's never enough.  It's just a good thing I don't believe in firearms.

Of course, I also have some niggling doubt that this will save the state any money because as far as I know (and I could be wrong), it's the county and I who pay for the insurance for the family yet someone hired by the state has to be paid to scan, shred, and maintain these tens of thousands of records (someone, no doubt, who isn't getting a raise and has to do the job of several others who left).  Will I have to submit this every year just to reassure them we're still married and alive?

 Darn all the cheese-paring tea-partiers to heck!  

I realize that the economy is troubled and things are tight, but I don't remember the last time our employees had a cost of living raise and we don't earn a whole lot to begin with. Our pay has altered mostly by tax adjustments.  I imagine the state employees are going through the same thing: no raises, no new hires, so everyone is having to do more work for less - and then this rollicking insult trickles down to us.

It does not reassure me that some "freeloaders" are going to be eliminated from the insurance heap.  It tells me that people who need health insurance are going to be without it.  This is not kids going without popsicles or adults going without the latest plasma screen.  It's about people not having health care.

It's also about Trust.  And that's where the insult comes in.  Do I claim my cats as dependents?  Would I add someone to my health plan who wasn't my child or my husband?  Wouldn't my HR people notice?  This is a small outfit and people would notice if I did anything like that - if, in fact, I would ever be so inclined.   Well, you know what?  It's lack of trust like this that makes someone as scrupulously honest as I am want to diddle the system for all it's worth.  This has created bad feeling - and anyone can tell you that's no way to run an organization.

But it's just typical, isn't it?

Why A Librarian?

Today a woman came into the Children's Room looking for reading material for her husband.  She was older than I was, so I think I can get away with calling her elderly.  Her husband had had some sort of episode that was like a stroke a year ago, but has fully recovered physically and has all his memory back.  Unfortunately, he is frustrated by his reading.  He can sound everything out - he recognizes all the phonics stuff - but the process is so agonizingly slow that by the time he finishes a paragraph, he can't remember what he read.  She was hoping that some children's books, with simpler sentences and more familiar words, would give him the practice he needed.  And he is now desperate enough to try anything.

I started by showing her the adult literacy materials we have (which still might be a bit advanced for him at this point) and then the beginning readers.  She asked about a particular book she remembered reading to her own children and a copy of that happened to be in as well.  I told her that I did storytimes and now and then could hold up a book and say, "This book is even older than Miss Marf."  We reminisced about favorite stories and I asked about Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel.  She wasn't familiar with it, but knew her husband loved that sort of stuff.  She took a sampling from each area and then asked me, "Are you always here?"  Mostly in the mornings.  She would see how this went and maybe next time she would bring her husband in.

Maybe next time we can look at the children's book kits - the ones that come with the cd.  I wonder if they have a cd player in the home.  I know they don't have one in the car.  We were looking for books on cassette in the adult audios.  She went away very pleased.

Moments like this make me very happy in my job.  Moments like this show how much more useful a librarian is than a computer.

And Another Thing ...

Let's have a frank talk about Dewey decimals (yes, another one).  And let me head off any dispute by saying, "Yes, it does matter."  I'd rather starve to death (after working my way through all my savings at various Indian and Thai restaurants, perhaps) than work in a place where fundamentals like how Dewey decimal works does not matter.
I just spent an hour or more reading the non-fiction shelves in the Children's Room.  I know things cannot be perfect here.  Kids yank a book off a shelf and do one of the following:

• Just jam it back anywhere
• Just jam it back at the front/back of the line of books
• Just leave it lying somewhere
• Just jam it back in spine-first.

I was guilty of all of these as a child.  I clearly remember my sister explaining to me how the spine was supposed to face out.  This made no sense at the time because if you jam books back in pages-first, you inevitably imbed another book inside them and crumple the pages. 
So, when I see J 398.209H shelved between J 398.2H and another J 398.2H, I suspect an adult was responsible.  Let's not get into why we have 398s, 398.2s, 398.209s, and 398.21-256s.  Let's just accept that we have them and if 398.209 is mixed in with the 398.2s, then it's two whole stands of shelves away from where someone would be looking for it.  Yes, we have a lot of books of folklore.  It's a Children's Room.  But the system works the same from 001 to 999.  So let's learn it, shall we?
Imagine you have money (this may take some doing if you work in a public library).  You have $1.20 and I have $1.25.  Who has more?  Imagine you made interest on this money in a bank (cue hollow laughter) and at the current lousy rate (1%) you ended up with $1.212.  Who has more?  If you're shelving in our library, I bet you'd be wrong. 
How can you tell?  It's simple.  You add some extra zeros to the end to make both numbers contain the same number of digits after the decimal point then compare them: $1.250 versus $1.212.  Now which one is more?  Easy-peasy.
There now.  Do I feel better for venting?

Anatomy of a One-man Puppet Show

[by request]

The Show:

Act I: Dog's Sleepless Night (based on Little Bunny's Sleepless Night by Carol Roth) wherein Dog (a recurring character in the shows) visits one friend after another in an effort to get to sleep.  Squirrel eats noisy nuts in bed; Skunk accidentally "sprays" (this calls for some horrid "air freshener" aerosol for artistic verisimilitude); etc.

Act II: The Eye of the Needle (based on the Yupik tale retold by Teri Sloat) wherein Amik's grandmother sends him out to hunt and he's so hungry that he eats all the catch (including a walrus and a whale) and drinks up half the ocean. When he returns to the hut, he's too big to get in, but his grandmother brings him in "through the eye of [her] ivory needle."  Consequently, everything he has drunk or eaten is squished out and floods the hut.  This requires a squirt bottle that can shoot a thin stream of water a good ten feet [a dish detergent bottle is perfect for this] for optimal squealing of delighted children.  I don't think I've ever done a puppet show without this.  I highly recommend it.  The fish gush out as well and for that I used the fish die-cut to make many many many colorful tissue paper fish.  I grabbed a handful and as I let go, I beat the air with a handfan to spread them out.  They didn't go as far as I'd hoped, but the effect was good enough.   And then the whale belches up more water and more fish, so I got to repeat it for more squealing.
This episode in the show was a logistics nightmare because of Amik's parka.  The velcro fastener decided to attach itself to everything on Amik except the other side of the parka.  It drove me mad.

Sing-Along: Molly Malone (continuing on the fish theme).  I had the lyrics printed off onto a poster and posted to the side of the theatre.  In the pause before it, while children were scrabbling to get fistfuls of tissue fish, I told them to hold onto those fish for the last story.
No one sang. Oh well.

Act III: Have You Got My Purr? (based on the book by Judy West and if I'd had my act together, I would have pulled these books to show to the audience and talk about them before I started) wherein Kitten goes to each animal at the farm in turn to ask them if they have her purr.  Even when two people are doing this, there was not a whole lot of time to change puppets.  This was the fault of the recording (all the shows are pre-recorded and mixed with sound effects and introductory music on a professional grade Akai mixing board that just happens to be lying around our house - ahem) and there was nothing I could do about that short of stopping the tape, but I'd still need a third arm for that.  At the last minute I decided that Kitten would just not have a hand up her bottom so that I'd have a free hand to put the next puppet on.  Mind you, this is all visible to the audience, but I wore black and explained before I started that the black meant they weren't supposed to see me; they should just pretend I'm not there.

Act IV: Hot Hippo (based on the book by Mwenye Hadithi) wherein Hippo goes to ask the god Ngai to let him live in the water where it will be cooler.  I stopped the tape and told them that when Ngai mentioned his "little fishes" and the bell tinkled, they should wave their tissue fishes or toss them in the air.  Ngai grants permission on condition that Hippo come out at night and Hippo offers to show his mouth is empty and stir up the water with his tail to show he hasn't hidden any bones.  He happily runs back to the water (blue tissue paper with cuts to give it shape stretched across the stage floor which was also used for the shore where Amik caught fish and that vanished bit by bit as he drank up the ocean) and jumps in with a mighty splash that requires one last squirt of water.  Hippo dances happily and I pointed at his bottom when the tape said "The End!" to much laughter from the adults.

Recessional (to get the audience up and moving out): Choo-Choo Boogaloo (love that Music for Little People stuff!)

Special effects: Anything that will reach out from the theatre into the audience will delight them.  The squirt bottle is a must.  The air-freshener for skunk spray is a crowd pleaser, although it takes a few seconds before the scent actually reaches them.  Some type of confetti fanned out (snow, flowers, bugs, the fish) is popular, but messy.  The fish - well, the children were delighted to pick them up and even throw them away for me!  Will use that more.

I know not everyone has a huge mixing board or a computer program that will mix layers of sound and then burn it to a cd.  However, I achieved similar effects years ago by using two tape recorders.  I'd put the sound effects (or dialog that would be going on at the same time as other dialog, as in an argument for example) on a tape and then play it back while I was recording the main dialog.  It's not as clear and timing is fiddly, but it works.  Always keep in mind while recording the amount of time it takes to change scenes (cover with music) or to change puppets (imagine going through the motions in your head ... then add a bit).

Voices: Dog was the first puppet I bought.  He got on my hand and wouldn't get off.  I came up with a voice for him and I can only use that voice for Dog (it's based on a co-worker from Boston).  Some puppets are like that.  Cat, purchased at the same time as Dog, just has a cat nasal drawl.  Skunk has a French accent while Hedgehog was English.  Hippo and Bear sound a bit too much alike, but being in different "plays" no one notices.  Pig sounds like Ronald Colman, sort of, and Cow like Marilyn Monroe (which I key into before recording by singing "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" and Pig has "'Tis a faa, faa bettah thing I do than I have evah done").  Fox wasn't in this show, but when he appears, he sounds like Bob Dylan.  Come to think of it, most of them sound like Bob Dylan.  I'm sure you know people with distinctive speech/accents you could harvest for characterization.

Theatres:

We have this beautiful dedicated theatre now.

The Purple Stage

We started with a stage made from two stepladders and two one-by-six planks.  It was "portable" if you had a full-size station wagon.  My Corolla station wagon was too short.  We staple-gunned velcro around the edges of the planks and sewed the corresponding velcro to the purple cloth (which was on sale apparently)  The cloth on the upper plank only goes down as far as the next plank and should be made of thinner material so you can see through it.  As long as there is more light on the stage side, you won't be seen.

You can also purchase lightweight portable theatres.  I was looking for the one we had to share a link, but I can't find it.  It is made of the fat PVC piping used in plumbing and fits in the artificial Christmas tree storage bag I found on sale.  To me, the important part is the stage level.  I don't want to have to hold my arms over my head.  I prefer a stage at elbow level.  What I liked about the purple stage that I couldn't say about the portable one was that the planks were flat and sturdy and held props and tired arms.  You don't get that with PVC.  I had to adapt props for a rounded stage base by attaching strips of paper that drape over the rounded pipe and are weighted on the other side by something equivalent.  Oatmeal boxes were great for this.  They not only provided ballast, but you could put additional props in them that made it look like they were in the actual prop.

Never go on the road without a long extension cord.  Never do puppet shows outside.  Forget it.  You would need a professional PA system instead of a nice, cheap boombox and the outdoors will still swallow the sound.  And I can tell you from experience that outdoors is just plain hazardous.  I've had pinecones drop on my head.  And don't even mention bugs or heat.

Happy puppetry!

Stepping Out of the Comfort Zone

It was probably five years ago I resolved to add more music to my storytimes.  I'd done the "add more puppets" and the "add more creative dramatics" but I wanted to add music.  And I didn't just want to give the boom box more to do.  I had purchased for the library some rhythm sticks, enough to handle 30 kids, each with two hands.  Yep, that's a lotta rhythm sticks.  I acquired research material (Musical Story Hours: Using Music With Storytelling and Puppetry by William M. Painter) and presumably read it.

Last year, around January, I apologetically announced to my brilliant fingerstyle guitarist husband, Husbob, that I had ordered a ukulele.*  It was my plan to learn to play it a bit and use it in programming.  So far I've learned "Lola" by the Kinks and a bucketload of Beatles' tunes.**  I like to think my storytimes are slightly subversive, but I can't see a "Lola" singalong.

But today I launched the first in a month-long string of storytimes where I will put weapons and noisemakers in the hands of small children.  It wasn't half bad.

 

There was a bit of the Kodo drummers playing on the boom box as a processional.  I started with the "If you're happy and you know it" song, because I always do and this year I am finishing with the "MackChicken Dance" by Greg and Steve - because I like to have something familiar to open and close.  I chose three books, and augmented one with items for the flannelboard (for my pre-school walk-ins who like to put things on and take things off the flannelboard): Bring on that beat by Rachel Isadora, The cha-cha chimps by Julia Durango, and Max found two sticks by Brian Pinkney.  I printed off some little chimp faces from clip art and then one larger one I stuck a bow and some lips on for the momma chimp.

After the Brian Pinkney book, I got out the basket of rhythm sticks and began with the warning that We Do Not Hit Other People with them.  We did "This is the way we tap our sticks," "She'll be tappin' round the mountain," and "The sticks on the bus go tap-tap-tap."  Then I put the Kodo drummers back on for some freestylin'.  No one hit anyone else and they were all happy to put the sticks back in the basket.  I sent them away with 2 popsicle sticks each (a quieter version) and their teachers said that they would decorate them when they got back to their class.

I was thrilled to hear that.  I hand out stuff to other groups that come to storytime and they just send it home with the rest of the stuff they've accumulated during the day.  They are definitely going to get better than hand-out sheets if I'm doing something more elaborate with the walk-ins.

I had time constraints, but we got out early enough for my co-worker to set up for her baby storytime and they looked like they were having fun.  Next week I'm going to add some jinglers and shakers and we'll make jinglers with jingle bells and chenille stems and shakers with cups, rice (maybe), duct tape, and stickers.  And the moms will hate me.  Yaaay!

Here is a link to Richard G's Uke website which has a great selection of ukulele songs, including some Jefferson Airplane. Woot!  "Teddy bear's picnic" and the like can be found on Dr. Uke's site.  The ukulele came from Music for Little People, which has terrific kid cds and occasional deals on instruments for kids but I'm currently annoyed with them and the company that does their fulfillment. 

 *Oh, look!  That's him on the left in the video bar!
**Okay, and also "Inch by inch: the garden song" and "Teddy bear's picnic."  And I can do the opening chords to "Smoke on the water" - which people my age recognize and find hilarious.