indoor playground: day 3

today was yet another successful day of indoor playground. again, masking tape is a beautiful thing. this time, i taped off two lanes and then set up 5 empty soda bottles at one end. (notice how i have separated the lanes with an aisle of the miniscule chairs! oh you never know when the miniscule chairs will pop up!) anyway, we had 16 kids in total. they were all cheering and clapping and having a grand old time. our top three scorers on each team won prizes, and all the other kids got bug stickers for participating. a fun time was had by all.

those pesky kids and our miniscule chairs

when we opened today at 10 am, a mother came in with four kids. she said she wanted her son to read down his fines. turns out he owes about $70. so i got them all set up and she said to the oldest kid who is probably in 5th or 6th grade that he needed to watch them and make sure they behave. now, i often see mothers leaving their kids here. and usually they are even younger than these kids. sometimes they are as young as 6 or 7. so i am not too bothered by these kids being left here, as this situation is better than most drop off situations i encounter.
so one kid asks me for books on martin luther king, another asks for easy books (he is in second grade but not really reading up to his level) and the youngest kid asks for books on motorcycles. they are very well-mannered children, saying their pleases and thankyous. the youngest kid said that these were the best books on motorcycles ever.
so they take their books and they sit at one of the adult tables. please note that there are no adults in the adult area at this time.
within a few minutes the head clerk has sent over my nice friend to kick the children out of the adult area. now, these kids were not being loud or disruptive or anything. they weren't even talking to each other. they were all reading. but according to the head clerk they are not allowed to be in the adult area. they can only be in the children's room. i am pretty sure this is not a real rule. maybe they didn't want to sit on our miniscule chairs (shown above. please note that the chairs can actually fit under the table)
so the children are then banished to the children's room and our miniscule chairs for no reason. they continue to read quietly, then a few of them ask me for crayons. this is all typical stuff. not a problem.
so the head clerk comes up to me and asks me where their mother is. i say she left. then she starts saying how we are not a babysitting service and that kids can't be left here. so i say, "but kids are left here all the time." then she explains that it is somehow ok to abandon your child here on weekdays, but leaving your child here on a saturday is a no-no. "but they are sitting quietly reading," i tell her, "and they're older." (i had an instance recently with a kindergartener being left here and being very disruptive and i had to tell the mom she couldn't be left here alone. so i'm not a pushover or anything) anyway. i continue, "they're not doing anything wrong." she grumbles about how they can't be left here and blah blah blah mothers can't use us as a babysitting service. i tell her i just don't see what the problem is. this is totally status quo for this library. if anything i am happy that they are under the care of an older sibling. and they are being quiet angelic children! seeing that she is making no headway with me and that i will not be outraged by the presence of children in the children's room, she just walks away.
on a side note, i would just like to add that if i had to hazard a guess i would say that at any given time 95%-100% of the kids under the age of 16 who hang out in this library are here without any adult supervision.

where is the love?

you probably thought i forgot about you. well, i didn't. i could go into the long list of excuses as to why i have not posted lately, but i won't. so there!

anyway, there has been an interesting turn of events here ... we now have a assistant manager, and ABM if you will, because librarians love acronyms (assistant branch manager). so this abm has noticed that i am a good librarian. imagine that! he says stuff like, "you're a really good librarian." and "the kids really respond to you. you're very good with them" and my favorite, "you're a very good children's librarian." go figure.

but even though the abm is now my immediate supervisor, i still do not have to option of changing stupid archaic rules like 'no game playing on the computer' and 'only 4 people to a table' and 'no moving the miniscule chairs.'

did i tell you? they replaced about half the miniscule chairs with normal sized chairs. of course, they didn't bother to count how many chairs we actually needed. so every night when the pages try to put the chairs back neatly they fight amongst themselves about where the miniscule chairs go versus where the regular chairs go. i have tried to explain to them that this is an exercise in fruitlessness since no matter what there will be miniscule chairs where regular sized chairs go. but they don't listen to me.

more zany chair bloopers

1. i am sitting at the children's desk and i hear a ruckus ... things falling and clattering and whatnot. i look over to see a 10 year old boy on the ground next to an overturned chair. i asked what happened and he said, "i tripped over the chair. i didn't see it there." obviously he didn't spot it because it is so minuscule.

2. again, sitting at the children's desk and i hear a ruckus ... i look up to see an 11 year old girl on the floor in front of the computer station. i ask what happened and she said, "i feel off this damned chair." she then went on to imply that the chairs were not only small, but extra slippery.

opening day: a summary

opening day went well ... the kids were excited to be back. i've decided to start something where every week i have a puzzle and the kids get a prize if they can solve said puzzle. i put up a word search of the US, thinking that word searches are pretty easy. however the kids seem to think that finding all 50 states in a word search is far too much work. oh well, maybe they'll warm up to the idea slowly.
i forgot how strict the other librarian here is. she keeps coming over here and yelling at the kids when really they're hardly doing anything wrong. i'd like to speak to her about it but since she is the library manager, i feel a bit weird telling her to get the hell out of my children's room.
but my favorite thing which happened today is that these two sisters came in. they're both 11 and very overweight. and they seem really old. i think they could easily pass for 16. anyway, they come in and they're looking around, saying how nice everything looks, saying how much they missed the library, etc etc. and then they see the chairs and one of them says, "damned, what happened to the chairs?!"
then the other one chimes in, "those are some little chairs!" (turns to me) "why they get such little chairs?!"

thank you mental health day

back and work and feeling much better ... getting this place whipped into shape for tomorrow. working on my calendar of october programs. i've decided we're going to make collages! i've collected a box-full of discarded magazines for this. i'm so excited!
yet again i have forgotten to bring my camera to take pictures of my organized closet (which is getting less and less organized every day as i find more things that need to be put away). but i swear i will take pictures tomorrow.
spoke to the nubian god last night. i do believe he is trying. maybe i don't need to move to texas after all.
so in conclusion ... things are better. i'm happier fitter more productive (although yesterday i was highly productive. i sold clothes at buffalo exchange and got a $65 credit! then spent it all on dresses!)
fyi: our chairs are still too small

punch list

back when i worked out on long island, which i now realize is some sort of librarian nirvana, we demolished our library and built a completely new building. this project was overseen by the library director, so when things would go wrong (which happened alot) you could come to this library director and say stuff like, "ohmygod! i don't know what to do! this [insert problem] is wrong!" and then she would contact people and figure out what had happened and then she would get back to you in a very timely fashion and tell you what she had found out and together you would solve said problem. amazing, right?
so today i came into library-in-the-hood and as usual there are no workers in sight. now, there are some problems here that need to be addressed, but for the most part we are about 1-2 days away from opening. but we've been 1-2 days away from opening for about a week and a half. why? because no one is in charge. people come and they point to stuff and say, "oh no that's not right" and then they leave without fixing anything. please indulge me as i go through our "punch list" of problems yet to be solved:

1) our media/ya shelving is now in pieces: they created a YA area in the front of the building. this is good. but they put an extremely tall shelving unit in front of it so you cannot see what is going on in the YA are. this is bad. so after we unpacked all of the YA books and the media items which go on these shelves we were told to take everything off so that they can take the shelves apart and make them shorter. so then repacked the YA books and media items, trying to keep them in order so that we can easily unpack them again. last saturday they were supposed to shorten the shelves. this of course did not happen. then one day in the middle of last week we came in to find them shelves in small pieces neatly tucked away in the periodical section (completely blocking all access to the periodicals). and there they have stayed untouched.

2) we have no chairs for adults - not in the computer area, nor in the seating area. adults like chairs. who doesn't like a good chair? especially when studying at a table or using a computer. chairs are the cornerstone of our civilization as far as i'm concerned.

3) the children's chairs are too small - i don't know if there's something in the water here or if living in the hood ages children more quickly, but the kids here are big. not obese big, but old looking big. i'd say every kid here seems at least 2-5 years older than they actually are. so even though children are typically small and need small chairs, that is not the case here. this is another case of why i don't like the branch system. someone from "central" has decided that children need small chairs and have ordered miniature chairs, despite the fact that they are useless here. had they asked we would have told them. but "central" knows best. that's what they're there for. so we have chairs that are so small they are actually shorter than the children's tables. you can push the entire chair under the tables. i spoke to a design person about this ... it went something like this:
me: the chairs are too small
designer: no they're not. they are the right size.
me: no, they are seriously too small. look (i push chair so that the entire chair is now standing completely underneath the table).
designer: maybe you're right.

4. we have no copy machine

5. we are missing a high-tech book drop system - they say we're getting this high-tech book drop conveyor belt system which will magically sort the books as they come in through the book drop. so far we just have a big empty space. maybe the big empty space will magically sort the books for us. wouldn't that be something?

6. supposedly, a wall needs to come down - i belive a wall needs to come down in order for the high tech book drop system to be put into action. this would take construction workers. or they could just give me a sledge hammer. i'll have a go at it. you know, for the good of the team.