Summer reading: so how’d I do?

As you can see, I’ve been having a leisurely Labor Day weekend, so leisurely in fact that I skipped by THursday posting schedule and started the weekend early. Actually, I worked on some of my YALSA protege stuff on Thursday so this fell by the wayside.

But I still want to write one more post for the year about summer reading. I was planning to get my statistics from the program on Friday so that I could more accurately write about them but I forgot. Sorry. I’m just going to wing it and say that I think I had a better year than last year. I presented about the same amount of programs, maybe even one or two less and I had more teens participating. I had more sign up than the year before and keeping track of attendance was easier than I thought it was going to be!

Here’s a pic of the shirts from this year! One of my teens really liked them! And he’s a boy! Teenage boys are mysteries. They might be one of life’s greatest mysteries second only to where all the missing socks go in your dryer and why people use Trojan brand condoms. (Seriously? Doesn’t anyone remember the Trojan horse? Terrible things charge out of it and ruin your life/sack your city. It’s beyond me. I suppose, the Trojans did hold out for a long time . . . but these thoughts are venturing into inappropriate waters so I should just stop.)

ANYWAY. Teenage boys are a mystery. Come to think of it, teens in general are mysteries. I’m always surprised at the things they like or want to do. I mentioned a game offhand at the end of the summer party, where I tabulated all of their attendance and books they read to hand out prizes, and they were so sad that I didn’t make them play. Here’s the game that I got from a youth group game website. (I get all of my stupid games from youth group resources. They have the best, most mortifying, and weirdest games.) Here’s the rules: You pick a partner and you have a bowl of gummy bears. You get 30 seconds or a minute to see how many gummy bears you can bite in half and stick on your partners face. You switch. The team with the most gummy bears stuck on their faces after each round wins.

I read the description and thought, “Nope. That’s disgusting. 8th grade me would hate that.” I didn’t do that because I assumed they also would hate it. Not at all! They were whining that I didn’t have any gummy bears to try it. Then they started licking the marshmallows I had for cookie decorating and chasing other teens around trying to stick it to their faces.

I love my job.

I made the teens fill out a brief survey evaluation about what their favorite programs were. They aligned fairly closely to my most attended programs: CC the Huntress – a ghost hunter/paranormal investigator who was very sweet but still managed to scare the living daylights out of a few kids by confirming that the library was haunted, and Candy Sushi. I had around 30 and 20 teens for those programs, respectively. That’s really good for me and I will definitely consider doing these programs again because they were so popular.

I think overall, I had about 80 kids who either attended a program or signed up online to track books. I also want to say that my attendance for the summer was over 200 for all my programs combined. Last year I didn’t make them track their books, so I had about 40 teens attend at least one program. I’m happy with it.

Moving forward on a programming note, I’m still super excited about my prospective “Hunger Games: Catching Fire” movie release party and I’ll also be doing a Harry Potter Halloween party. I just found out about this cupcake wars program from the Show Me Librarian through Pinterest (Yes, she’s a librarian from Missouri! My birth state!) and I would like to do that sometime. And more! I’m sure I’ll tell you all about them as they happen.

And now, I’m off to lay on my bed because I ran 17 miles today and I’m tired. By the end I was all over the place and looked a bit like Phoebe:

Man, that gets me every time.