Swimming in the Library

This week is my week to do the craft in the youth department. This is a thing we do at our library, fun art projects for kids to work on and take home. My coworkers have set a very high bar, coming up with clever designs and prepping all the components, the easy-to-follow directions and samples and materials.

My turn, and I’m floundering. It takes me a good month to find a craft that looks simple enough to do. Not for the kids. For me.

I am not a craftsy person. I say this about myself, and then I wonder if saying it makes it so. Why can’t I be a craftsy person? How hard can it be to make stencils, cut paper, glue a bunch of thingamabobs together?

Not hard, but somehow, hard. Whipping out my reading glasses at the desk to do the careful tracing and cutting, I have to stop every two minutes to help a child find a book or clean up a baby toy that’s been spittled on or take note of the train table where a little boy is making a high-pitched choo choo sound over and over again, so many times that it’s become the soundtrack of the youth department and I don’t notice it anymore until it stops, the absence of choo-choooing nearly as loud as the noise itself, an echo of it still ringing in my ears. But in a nice way.

Have I ever told you how much I love this place? I don’t know what it is. The books. The kids. The book-kid combo. The love sneaked up on me, and now I am full-blown swimming in it. Speaking of swimming, that’s what my watch thinks I’m doing every day when I’m at work. Yes, I know. I had been trying to go Un-Smart with the watches, but I finally gave in on it and got a new fitbit.

The fitbit has a screen that is so tiny, I can’t see it without my reading glasses. Fortunately, there’s a synched-up phone app where I can learn fun facts about my heart rate and sleep stages and steps. This is how I realized that my watch has been logging swimming sessions every morning. The swimming sessions coincide with the times when I’m shelving books. I think it must be calculating the arm movement, the reaching, the stretching, and all of that bending and dipping around the book cart.

(By the way, I love shelving too. The gentle shushing when a book slides into its proper place. The surge of satisfaction when I empty a cart. Plus, I’m always getting new book suggestions. Here’s one: How Can I Help You by Laura Sims. It’s about a killer nurse who’s on the run and working in a library VS the failed novelist recently hired as a research librarian who is growing more and more suspicious of the nurse. I picked the book up because I wanted to see how accurately it portrayed working at a library. It did a decent job… sorta, capturing the array of services we provide, the sometimes weirdo questions we get at the desk, but something was missing: Neither of these characters wanted to help anyone. And that’s what we do at the library.)

Anyway, after my intense swimming activity, I took a rest and worked on my silly craft. I call it “Cocoa with Polar Bear.” The website where I found the idea says to glue real mini marshmallows on top of the cocoa cup, but I nixed that and decided on a smushed cotton ball. Over the week, I traced and cut out approximately ten thousand parts and pieces, assembled all of the necessary craft supplies—glues, scissors, markers, cotton balls—spent an absurd amount of time putting a sample together and writing up the easy-to-follow instructions.

Stop by the library this week, if you’d like to make one. You’ll find me down in the Youth Department swimming.