I spoke not a word, but went straight to my work…

Cos, you know, you can’t be all rowdy at the library!

Thanks for all messages, texts, emails and comments – it really meant a lot. 🙂 Not least cos I was actually really quite nervous this morning, partially I’m sure because I hate feeling wrong footed – I like to be super confident, know what I’m about and bluff it if I don’t – which is a bit tricky on your first day in a new job, in a place you know nothing about including how to get in to the building on your first morning when you are starting half an hour before the library actually opens!

So Ady was his ususal husband from heaven and made me tea and almond croissants for breakfast (that he’d sneakily bought and hidden in the kitchen yesterday in preparation), got the children dressed, told me I looked lovely, assured me I’d be fine, loaded us all in his car and took me there incase I couldn’t find a parking space. I waited until someone else looked like they were there to go to work and leapt out the car and followed them 🙂

Fears very quickly were allayed as they told me their names and assured me I would forget them all anyway (I remembered at least four of them out of the five though 🙂 ), gave me a set of keys for toilet, staff room, locker and front door, a badge to mark me out as A Worker and a coat hanger of my own. 🙂

I did lots of adminny new starter type stuff, learnt a bit about Dewy Decimal :shock:, did some putting books and dvds back on the shelves and spent ages chatting to the Senior Library Assistant. I sat for a while as she told me all about Customer Service and The Best Way To Talk To A Customer Including Dealing With Complaints before deciding actually I needed to say something so I explained some of my past career and readjusted the footing slightly – being patronised I can deal with, particularly if the person isn’t aware they are patronising – wasting time telling me something I used to give training sessions on is probably just pushing things a bit too far ;).

So there you go, they seem a friendly team, it’s a really nice working environment, I got my library ticket updated to a Staff one which among other things means NO MORE FINES 🙂 :), enjoyed the library vibe, which is something I have always loved, liked watching the gang of old men who come in every morning to read the papers and debate the news of the day every morning together – Oh how I see them becomming blog fodder for me in weeks and months to come ;). And I was told again about long term career prospects. Obviously very early days but so far, so very bloody good. 🙂

The children were fine – Tarly wanted to come to work with me but Davies just asked me if I’d bring back a library book for them each. And when I said I would he asked if I could do that every time I go to work. So that’s a fairly easy bargain to stick to 🙂 D’you know I reckon there might just be rather a lot of perks to this job :).

Ady came and picked me up at 1pm, Lucy had arrived around 11am and that had worked really well. 🙂 A went off to college, I came in and made lunch and we had a debriefing session, then Lucy kindly let me dash out again to the Wizard store to pick up a couple of pretend Barbies. We managed some more chatting while the children played, I read some Charlie & Lola to any listening children (the books I’d brought home) and there was a complicated and potentially dangerous game involving stunt leaping over two stools onto a pile of pillows and cushions which denegerated into rough play. Which seems to work just fine on two children but gets out of hand very quickly when a third and a fourth join in 😆 Davies had spent time on creating some sort of greenhouse which Luct did explain to me and seemed both complicated and rather excellent – it was all 3D and contained inside bits and accessories. I love how his art and craft has gone to that next level now and how he visualises what he wants to create and works out how he is going to execute it, then does it. He also did some more snowflake making. His scissor control is not a patch on Tarly’s, I really need to get some decent child’s scissors anyway and maybe work on how to hold them with him. But then again his pen grip is still pretty ‘individual’ and I have long since realised that he is capable of quite lovely writing with it when he wants to so it’s sort of irrelevant how he holds it really. I guess the same goes for scissors – however he holds them he is still improving.

I made Tarly’s first birthday cake (there’ll be another one for the party on Saturday obviously :lol:) – a triple sponge with (very) pink icing and lots of sugar flowers and silver balls. Both the children took forever to get to sleep tonight, I asked a very sleepy Tarly at about 8pm how old she was and got the answer ‘three’ for the very last time. Davies and I made birthday cards for Tarly. He did a fab flying horse with a 4 on the front and with only a little help wrote ‘Happy Birthday Scarlett love Davies’ inside. He did six kisses because he’s six and four hearts because she’s four. Then he decided to do some embellishing of the letters and did some vines and flowers on the H from Happy then a heart and a kiss inside the O on love. His letters, although not bad at all, are not quite clear enough to stand up to such messing about with really but given Tarly can’t read anyway and I was so impressed by his idea to do it in the first place I let him carry on :).

When they finally fell asleep I wrapped the last couple of pressies, Ady’s blown up balloons and the house is ready for a four year old.