It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

Work day for me today. My cold that doesn’t seem to be a cold after all but might yet progress into being a cold seemed to go into remission a bit today which was good.

We have a new member of staff who only started 2 weeks ago and was off sick last week. She is sweet but rather wet and I suspect won’t be working with us by about November, but we’ll see. It was my last shift with Jody today before he leaves for his new job next week so much fond farewelling was done with plenty of nonsense including him writing me notes in german and french which were very funny.

In the morning I did storytime so spent the first hour choosing some books and drawing some pictures for the children to colour in from the books. I only actually read two of of the three books I’d chosen as although we had a good turn out of 20 children they were all so tiny they were not really capable of sitting and listening for very long so we did lots of action songs instead. There is that annual September oddness of the Missing 3 year olds again who have all gone off to preschool or nursery with noone over 2 foot tall anywhere to be seen during the day. 🙁

In the afternoon I had my 6months review of my PDR (personal development record) which was done in February and is reviewed every 3 months. I was told I am doing well still and that there is general frustration that there is so much more they feel they could give me to do but can’t because I am not there enough. I confessed that I feel I could still do more anyway and that I do often feel unchallenged which although not a problem for 11 hours a week and certainly not something any of us should worry about does indicate to me that I could have more to do. This was imediately taken on board and another 2 regular responsibilities allocated to me – which is good :). I also put across an idea I’ve been toying with for a little while which was well received and I am seeing the children’s librarian about sometime soon to discus further. No idea if that will go any further than an initial discussion but I’ll blog about it if it does.

I spent some time on the enquiry desk then and had intended to babelfish my notes from Jody but I was so bust joining two new members and helping someone with a computer, emailing the senior librarian about an upcoming display and generally enjoying my new increased job list that Jody had to translate them himself for me. It was very quickly 5pm and the end of my working day at work.

At home Ady had been off this morning and done stuff out in the garden, not sure if the children joined him or not. Dad was here this afternoon and when I got home Scarlett and Dad were out in the garden with Tarly digging up an area to excavate it and find bits of pottery etc in it (the archeaology has been a bit of a recurring theme here thanks to Butser :)) and Davies inside making ‘presents’ for me with glitter. He was recovering various things with paper and then decorating them such as toy cars with quite artistic results.They’d also done some painting and drawing during the day.

At their request I made french toast for tea and then we had nearly an hour snuggled up reading books which included ‘what’s eating you?’ another Nicola Davies one, a Greyfriars Bobby retelling and Ellie takes a chance which I’d found catalogued at work under the ‘childrens books covering OCD’. I’ll come back to that whole thing another time. There were a couple more in the pile too and we read until Ady got home.

In other news Scarlett had a win on the premium bonds (£50 but all the kids winnings get transfered straight into more premium bonds for them) and my parents have offered to pay for all our passports to be renewed as an early Christmas present after we mentioned (and yes I was hinting but it’s the first time in my living memory that they’ve even been aware of a hint let alone responded to it :lol:) which is rather good and means we are able to try and arrange a day trip to France we’d been talking about with Em sometime soon :).