Blur

I was at work all day today. Ady stayed home in the morning with Davies and Scarlett and my Dad was here in the afternoon. Davies has got some display space booked at the library next month for a week after he asked about the paintings and artwork that was displayed there by someone else and I told him anyone could book it to put a display up. So before I left for work I reminded him that he needed to start planning for it. We talked about a few ideas such as a theme – eg space with all the pictures being related to the theme, or a storyboard with them deliberately laid out in order to tell a story and I gave him the suggestion of something library related as a subject matter. When I got home he’d worked with Ady to create a 9 page set of pictures of libraries ‘through the ages’ starting with cavemen drawing on cave walls for people to come and look at as the very first example of libraries. He had Renaissance libraries in fancy buildings, Viking library on board a viking ship, Roman libraries in a colleseum style building and Ancient Greek library too. In about number 5 he had a small tree growing which grew to be a big tree in the final, current day picture which is of Lancing library which is indeed next to a tree. They are fab :). He wants to do some labels to go alongside them talking about the periods and some of the details in the pictures but it was an excellent idea, all his, with Ady just supplying a book with some sort of timeline in it and some pictures of the sorts of costmes etc that would have been worn. Lovely to see the influence of the museum visit yesterday coming through in there too :).

I had a busy but enjoyable day. There were lots of staff in today – we currently have a full time vacancy and a 25 hour a week post that is being covered while the member of staff takes an extended leave of absense to care for her ill mother. And my direct boss is on compassionate leave as her mother passed away so it was a real mish-mash of staffing. And there had been a break in at the library earlier in the week so there was high drama and excitement to be caught up on too. I was also told of another of the perks of the job which I’d not known about before being that we don’t pay when we take books for sale – clearly that is subject to not wiping out the whole shelf for resale on ebay and amazon marketplace but I had a pile of about 15 books which I was about to pay £4 something for and was told I didn’t need to – so hurrah! :).

I had an interesting post-training chat with the senior supervisor and we touched on a few things in advance of my annual review which is happening next week, I really must give some proper thought to that and get some stuff written down prepared for it.

A librarian I’d not met before came over in the afternoon and I had teabreak with her and Abi, a younger librarian who works in the area and I see every couple of weeks. We got to talking about Home Ed (as you do!) and Abi mentioned that she’d met someone last week who HE’d when interviewing them for Brighton Ourstory, which turned out to be Dani and she said she is interviewing Allie aswell so that was a coincidence :). Small worlds…

I had an interesting conversation with someone joining the library about why you don’t just get to have one library ticket you can use anywhere in the UK and then another one with a family wanting to know all sorts of things to help with homework, sort out a replacement for a lost ticket, find some films and some other authors who write like one’s they already knew and liked – sometimes I pleasantly surprise myself with how much I do know and have learnt in my time there. I also went round and checked my displays and was very pleased to see several books had been taken off each and there were holes to fill up – that’s great given the stock on one had been utterly static for months and since I did the display I have filled at least 10 gaps :).

I came home, put away the chickens and my Dad went off with my car as he is going to collect my brother and his friends from Gatwick (they’ve been to Amsterdam) and none of them have suitable cars to do it in as Dad has a van, Mum has a sports car and Frazer’s car quite possibly wouldn’t be up to the journey. The plus side of this is that it was running on fumes and Dad will hopefully put more petrol in than it actually would take for that trip so I won’t need to fill it up again :). I sat with the children and admired their pictures (Scarlett had done lots of drawing too and created tickets for her and I to go somewhere although she hadn’t quite decided where :lol:). Ady came home and cooked them some tea while I lit a fire (I am so good at firelighting now, probably could call myself the firestarter on my CV and everything. I might make a certificate and laminate it for myself :lol:) and then we finished reading about Plop while Davies drew portraits of us all including posing Scarlett who managed to sit still in the twee litle position he’d got her in :lol:. I was heartened today to hear them both coming to report to me something nice about the other one – Davies brought me a picture of a chicken that Scarlett had done because he thought it was ‘brilliant, the best chicken drawing I’ve seen, loads better than I could have done’ which made her all glowy and then she was all full of praise for his portraits and his library pictures. I love the way their take pride in each other’s successes and strengths. I’ve brought home some Enid Blyton, some Dorothy Edwards, a Doctor Who choose what happens next in the adventure type book and a Sally Gardner to read aloud next so hopefully one or more will grab them. I’ve tried to choose things that I will actually enjoy reading too but will hopefully capture their attention and imagination. They are both keen to improve their reading at the moment so hopefully lots of reading aloud from me will aid that – I can see that the idea of being able to take the book off and carry on reading it themselves is very appealing to them both now – Davies for yet another reason not to go to sleep and Scarlett just because she loves books and knows what treasures they hold if you can only unlock them.

Tomorrow we’re off to T’s birthday party and Scarlett has her first session at Rainbows.