And to think I was insecure about kissing the goat

Last week I had two storytimes.  Two!  Because my coworker was on vacation, I gladly took her baby storytime in addition to my toddler storytime.  I had so much fun!  Because I had two storytimes this week, there will two whole storytime posts!  Happy birthday to you!

We'll begin with baby storytime!

After the last time I subbed for baby storytime, I vowed to do some more research, and I am proud to say that the research paid off.  

We began storytime with the hello song - good morning to you sung happy birthday style.  After our hello song, we did the Five Little Hotdogs fingerplay, which was one of the big hits during fall storytime season.  I had planned for this storytime to be mostly about food as well, but more about that in a minute.

We sang Lisa Loeb's ABCs song, which gave a big brother a chance to show off during my first storytime.  We had some yucky weather and iffy road conditions so my first storytime was small - two familes comprised of two babies, a toddler, and a mom and dad.

For the first storytime, there wasn't any need to do a quieting down fingerplay because they were very mellow.  My second group, which turned into a family storytime due to the weather and schools being closed, had about 15 kids ranging in age from babies to a couple seven-year-olds.  They not only needed the first quieting down fingerplay, but we also took a lot of deep breaths.  

The first book doesn't really have anything to do with food, but I happened to read it for the third time just days before storytime and knew I had to include it.  The book, Littles, continues to grow on me each time I read it and is a real heart-melter.  

After Littles, we read How Do Dinosaurs Eat Their Food (but only in the first storytime), and it was the favorite book.  The second group was way too rowdy to sit through two books in a row so we moved on to the next thing on the agenda.

This is where the storytimes turned into two completely different experiences.  For the first storytime I did something I've always been curious about but have never had a chance to try.  I found two lap bounces I instantly fell in love with - "Acka Backa Soda Cracker" and "A Hippopotamus Got Up On a Bus" and spent an afternoon practicing them with our goat puppet.




There was one large problem, however.  Each time I came to the part where I needed to kiss the goat I'd look around to see if anyone was looking, and even if nobody was, I would nearly faint with anxiety and start the rhyme over.

Because there were two babies and a shy toddler, it was the perfect opportunity to try the lap bounces.  The toddler belonged to dad, who was holding his baby brother.  The dad included big brother in both lap bounces even though he had his hands full with the baby and big brother was sitting next to him.  After dad lifted the baby, he tickled big brother.  When dad gave the baby kisses, he also gave big brother kisses.  But the most beautiful part happened during the hippopotamus lap bounce.  Dad squished both kids at the same time, and baby and big brother lit up the entire room with their smiles.  It was amazing.  Meanwhile the mom and her baby were having a blast.  

And to think I was insecure about kissing the goat.  Thankfully, during the storytime, when it mattered most, I was able to kiss the goat with no problem.  

I believe I can officially say I have graduated to the puppet-kissing tier on the sky-high ladder of youth services.

After the lap bounces, I handed out scarves and we did the popcorn rhyme.  We also waved the scarves around and played peek-a-boo a bit before reading our last book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.



We finished up the first storytime with the fabulous slide-and-find board book version of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, which we sang to music until the battery died on my laptop.  Thankfully, no one was upset that we had to sing the rest of it without music. 

In the second storytime we most certainly did not do lap bounces.  Thankfully (lots of gratitude in this post), I saw the patrons signing up for the second storytime and quickly modified my storytime.  

We did some scarf warm-ups (waving, brushing the floor, fluttering like a butterfly, putting it on our heads), the popcorn song, and finished with the wave/flap/twirl song.  Instead of wadding the scarves in our fists like we did last season, we tossed our scarves high and caught them when we "stopped" after each verse.  It was a lot of fun.  

Though we did the finger fiddle and took lots of deep breaths, everyone was pretty wound up and we just barely made it through The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  

After we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, I made a rookie mistake and told everyone we were going vote on whether we would read Brown Bear, Brown Bear or do the hokey pokey.  I asked everyone to raise their hands if they wanted to read Brown Bear, Brown Bear and breathed a sigh of relief when everyone raised their hands.  Once we finished Brown Bear, Brown Bear however, and I began packing up, the older kids began asking me about the hokey pokey, and as their hokey pokey demands grew louder and louder, I knew there was only way for me to make it out of the room alive.  So we did the hokey pokey.  

It was almost as exhausting as kissing a goat.