volunteers, Take & Makes, summer reading

Howdy! Warning: run-on post...

First things first: Xandi, I left several urgent messages on your desk area in the cubicle--please read!!

I have VOLUNTEERS coming in on a regular basis on Tuesday and Friday mornings. (Actually 10 man-hours total: Shannon's here all four hours of my shift both days, and Katie comes for two hours on Tuesday.) Now that the terrors of SRP Take & Makes are over, they need tasks!! If anyone cares to think ahead about craft prep for fall programs, etc., or has any other, more pressing tasks I can offer them, we'd all be grateful. Otherwise, I will have to subject these darlings to endless & exhausting book-scrubbing (ugh!). (Could they help organize the storage room? Clean out any other nooks/crannies? Shelf-read? Have the story room windows been cleaned? What else can you dream up?)

TAKE & MAKE LEFTOVERS for August (when I will be off playing in the sands and wilds of Nova Scotia--a lifetime dream for me, because I think I lived there in an earlier lifetime!!): I think we have about 150 each of leftover "Goofy Sea Creatures," paper plate clocks and paper plate masks to put out when the frames are all gone--if this doesn't take the whole month of August;I don't expect them to fly as fast as the other crafts have. (Penny, can you remind me of how many of the masks were taken July 3-8?? Thanks.) I can't imagine that you'll go through all this before 8/15, but I'll try and scare up a super-simple September craft to put out early, just in case.

While counting SRP cards on Monday, it dawned on me that kids who join the program late were being penalized twice: once for not joining sooner (i.e., missing the prizes from the later weeks--though I realize there's no way around this), and again because all of our prizes to date have been drawn from the most recent week's cards. I went ahead and pulled two cards from each of weeks 3, 4, and 5, and one each from the week 1 and 2 cards--but it occurred to me that maybe it could be "policy," next summer, to consistently include cards of each design/color in each week's drawing? Many people have commented on how fun and easy our SRP is--thanks to all who sweated over designing and implementing it!

One other thought, on SRP prizes: I don't know how the WPL magnets compare in price to our other prizes, but kids just don't seem to groove on these. (I'm pretty sure that Xandi and I both regularly give them as freebies to moms, who are generally delighted and can always use another magnet, but I can safely say I've never seen a kid actually take one without maternal prompting.) Obviously, the tattoos and pencils are extremely popular, and while I'm sure they're more expensive than stickers, we seem to have an overstock of the stickers, so maybe it makes sense to buy fewer of the stickers and more of the other goodies...? I know this is a tough guessing/budgetary game; just wanted to give you input, in case it's helpful.

Y'know, coming in just one day a week last summer, to play second fiddle to whoever was the "real" person at the desk, I never really got the full intensity of the summer experience. I love this job, even at the most insane moments, but whew!--I find myself looking forward to returning to "normal." (NO COMMENTS on whether "Marcia" and "normal" can appear in the same sentence, please!!)