i am not cute

okay, we all know this is a lie. dare i say, i am damned cute. i was just trying to get your attention. but here's what i meant by it ...

yesterday i went to a "mother goose training" in which a bunch of librarians are taught how to do storytimes for children under the age of two. it was all about singing songs and reciting rhymes and doing fingerplays and yada yada yada. now, i LOVE working with the kids i work with. most of them are ages eight to eleven. sometimes i will get the stray six or seven year old, but children under two?! i don't think so. i don't translate well to the under two crowd. with four and five year olds i can fake it, they kind of dig my cynicism. it seems amusing to them. but this? oh no.

so the leader of this training was going through a "sample" program, showing us how to do all this. first there was a "hello song." and i can honestly say, you lost me at hello. so all of a sudden a room full of librarians are singing a song about saying hello. then we do a bunch of fingerplays pretending we are holding our babies. we also had to give names to our fictitious babies during the hello song. i was going to name my baby joshua, but then the girl ahead of me stole that name and i had to settle for george at the last second. grrrr.

anyway! this whole process was very painful for me and i was wincing the entire time and the only thing that got me through it was the knowledge that no mothers would ever be bringing their small children to library-in-the-hood. so that was a relief. but then ... oh, then ... then the bomb was dropped on me ....

in two weeks we have "mother goose training part 2," apparently three hours of this is not enough. and in two weeks i must present my OWN mother goose program to the group. grrrrrr. i really despise the idea of being all sing-songy and cute and fake in front of a bunch of small children. but what is worse than that is being all sing-songy and cute and fake in front of a bunch of librarians pretending to be children.

how can i escape this terrible fate?