I struggled to get out of bed this morning to go to work, particularly when Scarlett put her arms round my neck and hung off me saying ‘don’t go to work Mummy, I haven’t had enough time with you this week…’ 🙁 Getting up and heading off to work within half an hour for 3 mornings out of the last 4 is just too many for her.
Work was frustrating. I was working extra to run a storytime special as part of the Adur festival and it was planned to be a session for 45 minutes including stories and craft activities for 4-8year olds based on a theme of mixed up fairy stories. Unfortunately all the marketing for it has been crap – there is a real lack of Adur festival brochures, the posters and flyers came through really late and whilst beautiful with their pencil drawing of a fairy in some woodland hardly appeal to children, none of the other staff have been briefed to ‘sell’ the event to people coming into the library over the last couple of weeks and we’ve done nothing about putting it on the council website on the library pages or anything like that. I find this really annoying as I only get about half an hour a week in work time to look at anything like that but I am really aware of the obvious benefits of marketing such events and what a productive use of time it would be to get the word out there about the things like that the library service offer.
Consequently at 10am we had one little girl who comes to storytime every week and her baby brother :(. I’d done a bit of preparation work but intended to wing it a bit but was being assisted by the Children’s Librarian so was having to pretend I was super organised and as enthusiastic about the whole thing as she was. We did manage to rope in 4 more children over the course of the hour as they came into the library and were pressganged into joining in.
We started off with a sack filled with items for the children to guess the fairy story. C, the children’s librarian had brought in a bowl and spoon (porridge, Golidlocks), a mirror (Snow White) and I’d brought in a brick, some straw and some sticks (3 little pigs), a silver slipper which used to be Scarlett’s and prior to that used to be Lulah’s (Cinderella) and some runner beans from my granny (Jack and the beanstalk). That went down well with lots of kids tv presenter style overacting from C and I.
Next I read a story which is a parody of one of the most parodied fairystories ever but went down well with lots of joining in of huffing and puffing (sounded like asthmatics anonymous in the junior library!). Then I left C to read a lift the flap story about fairystory houses while I gathered the first of my activities which was folding a sheet of paper into three and drawing a head, passing it on, drawing a body, passing it on and then drawing feet. We had some good mixed up characters from that and then C read from and I led an activity of a storyboard of mixed up people and places. It would have better suited some older children really but I’d done lots of drawings of things to give inspiration so with lots of encouragement we got some ideas down.
We finished about 11 and I went for a restorative cup of tea. Whilst I’d been peering outside the library hoping to see lots of children heading towards us for storytime our regular drunk was on the bench outside the library with his flask of alchohol. He said something conversational to me and I replied and then he said ‘don’t worry, this isn’t whisky in here, I’ve just filled it up with beer!’ to which I laughed and said that at before 10am it probably wasn’t much better really! 😆
Part of my objectives for the coming year, along with everyone else is to visit various named reference books and learn something from them, very similar to what we’re doing at home at the moment, so I got the first book; and had a good peruse of that which gave me my thing I learnt today :).
I was on the counter for the last hour and it really dragged as it was so quiet.
Back home I caught up with Ady, Davies and Scarlett’s morning which had been spent at Pulborough Brooks for Wildlife Explorers. They’d looked at some live moths caught in a moth trap last night and learnt about moths and butterflies. Davies got the leader to write down a word for him that he was bringing to the What I Learnt Today table which apparently impressed her no end when he explained what we did and why he’d like it written down :). Ady enjoyed a nice walk round in the sunshine.
I had time for a quick lunch and then we were off again to Magic Lantern. It was the last one of the season and they watched The Prince’s Quest we watched at home not that long ago. We were slightly late due to dreadful festival traffic so I ran in with the kids who were led off happily. It’s been great for them, they’ve loved the films and the chatting about it bit too and Ady and I have really enjoyed the couple of hours we get to potter around the shops or the town on our own too :). We’ll definitely be signing them up again in September :).
Ady and I had a wander round the charity shops and he got a pair of shoes, a video and found two identical china mugs with Viva Pinata characters on them which we got for the kids. I found a book I’d been looking for in the local bookshop in the branch there and we had a quick look round the Oceans Day marquee that was up for the festival. There were various live sealife things such as crabs, a display about litter in the sea and on beaches and loads of photos of seals and dolphins seen off local beaches (rare but not unheard of). We still had 45 minutes to go so went into a cafe and had a coffee and an iced chai tea, both of which were lovely and under a fiver so we considered an excellent treat :).
We collected Davies and Scarlett and as there was a stall in the arts centre for the Environment Agency who were giving away jute bags for signing a pledge to not use plastic carrier bags we both signed up and got free bags – mine is excellent, it has a picture of a water butt and says ‘I love my big butt! Save water’ 😆
We left there and drove past home to the village green to catch the last hour of the Sompting festival which basically entailed the children going on a crazy house ride – like Danny and Sandy are in in Grease for You’re the one that I want. They totally got their £1.50 each out of it by working out how to stay on and and go round again and again. They were both really dizzy when they came off after about 20 minutes 😆 We were heading off again when I decided to give into their pleas for another ride and took them on the waltzer style ride which we all enjoyed (Ady stood and watched, very much not his sort of thing :)).
Back home we watched Madagascar 2 on dvd and then it was bed for Davies and Scarlett. An as usual late dinner for us of curry and a second night of rather too much wine – those boxed are lethal!
Oh and, things we learnt today:
Davies – the group name for butterflies and moths is lepidoptera,
Scarlett – to kill a zombie you need to chop it’s head off 😆
Ady – RV stands for Recreational vehicle – I knew that already but the kids had asked him this morning so he’d googled it.
Nic – in the year 2007-2008 nearly 1.8 million driving tests (car) were taken in the UK – the passrate was 44%.