Playing

This morning was a visit to a soft play centre. Julie and I used to meet there fairly regularly when it first opened about 4 years ago and it was all new and shiny but I’ve not been for well over a year and had heard it had gone downhill, indeed the last time we went it was feeling shabby and tired. But Julie and I had arranged to meet there and put it out on the local home ed facebook group and a few other people had said they might come along including Caz and the boys as it is Eliot’s birthday today.

So, running late as usual we dashed out of the house with home made card and hastily wrapped present, and socks for Scarlett. The smell of feet, school changing rooms and general despair hit us as we opened the front door, ah the odour of soft play 😆 Twelve quid (twelve fucking quid!!!) later we joined the others and I took my cup of overpriced tea to sit down with Julie, Caz and Lou while the kids ran riot with the pack of kids for a couple of hours.

The place is in even more tired repair than when we last went and they have this big list of RULES posted up which includes things like ‘any food and drink brought onto the premises will be confiscated and returned when you leave’. You can get a paper cup with tap water for 10p and get free refills 😆 Scarlett rinsed my teacup out in the sink in the toilets and took that up and asked for tap water. I didn’t ask her to but did find her attitude very funny – ‘well you paid a lot more than 10p for it so I think that you should be able to get that cup filled up instead!’ 😆

It was a nice couple of hours despite the surroundings and expense and neither Davies or Scarlett really wanted to go, paricularly when they learnt Archie and Eliot were headed for a picnic on the beach. But Chatterbooks needed finishing so we came home for lunch and then headed out to the library.

Today was the session I had probably put the least effort into planning really as I have booked the display space from next week and wanted the children to do a display of what Chatterbooks has been about for them to put up and celebrate the sessions / explain to other library users what we’ve been doing. So I’d got in all of the books we have used in sessions so far, plenty of paper and pens and was hoping creativity would strike.

We started off with refreshments and talking about all of the sessions we’d done so far to see who could remember – I got some great feedback there from the children remembering sessions with plenty of enthusiasm. It was clear that the storytelling session had been popular, along with the film and book session. I’m really proud of that as those had been the two sessions I had put most planning effort into and had been completely my idea rather than inspired by sessions I’d read about – the storytelling one particularly had been fairly ambitious so I’m glad we pulled it off and the kids enjoyed it :).

We had cake and juice and then I read to them by popular request while they did drawings, wrote poems, copied book covers or whatever else reminded them of Chatterbooks. I was very touched to get a couple of pictures of me along with a thank you card made during the session. And a box of chocolates presented to me by some of the kids too :).

While I did all that Abi spent some time chatting to the parents and getting some feedback forms completed, then came back into the junior library and worked her way round the kids and got their answers on what they had liked and disliked. The popular answer for favourite bit was ‘biscuits!’ proving either we’d not phrased the questionnaire very well or we’d really not needed to bother laying anything else on other than free biscuits in the library – I’d definitely not bother doing refreshments again 😆

Very popular was being read to, with most of them saying they enjoyed that and the storytelling and film sessions getting several mentions too. I’ve brought home all the paperwork from the sessions and will write up a proper report for work over the next week or so – I have a proper debrief session with Important Library People in 2 weeks time.

Everyone left with a flurry of thank yous and goodbyes – I do feel like I made connections with all of the kids in some way over the 6 weeks and several of them I really clicked with and will miss although I’m not sorry not to have the regular committment and stress of the crowd control element of the sessions, I really did struggle with that at times.

I had a chat with Brenda, the chief librarian who had come in to talk about changes in hours (mine will just have a very slight shift and I will do 11.5 hours one week and 10.5 the other so still an average of 11 hours a week although the 10.5hr week is the one I work a Saturday morning in so I will lose half an hours worth of Saturday enhancement, which probably only works out to be about £1 a week so I’m not too stressed about that.

Brenda and I had a long chat about Chatterbooks and I was warmly thanked for having done it. I’ve learnt a lot, it achieved my personal aims of proving there was a need, providing that experience for Davies and Scarlett (as I am often telling them if the world doesn’t offer what you want it to, make it happen for yourself, that was about doing just that), giving me something else to add to my CV and another feather to my bow, giving me a small amount of career advancement potential and getting my name known in higher circles and meeting a need that I personally feel the library service fails to do and am quite passionate about us failing to do. I have really enjoyed vast elements of it, will take what I’ve learnt and use it and hopefully be instrumental in offering a better service at some future point to that slice of our customers.

Fully Chatterbooked out we left the library and came home for dinner, putting chickens away, getting the fire lit and finally sitting down with a large mug of tea.

We rushed through the end of The Happy Prince in preparation for tomorrow’s Book Club. Davies told me he was proud to be my son – comments like that from him are worth 400 feedback forms from anyone else :). He and I had already shared some knowing looks when the kids at Chatterbooks were talking about ‘golden time’ – as he later told Brenda ‘my whole life is ‘golden time’ :)’.

Bed for them, bath for me, Ady cooked (again). I might even try and get to bed before it’s tomorrow.