I'm Here!

Hello everyone : )
After about a year of trying to decide if I should actually start a blog, I'm finally doing it! I've been so inspired by the contributors over at Flannel Friday who use their blogs to save and share storytiming ideas.  I REALLY appreciate that if I need some inspiration, I can just pop over to the Pinterest boards and browse. But, what finally gave me enough confidence to get this thing running, was meeting with some youth librarian bloggers at PLA. I went to a Storytime Underground lunch meetup and happened to sit between Lisa of Libraryland and Miss Sue of Library Village. I mentioned that I'd thought about blogging, but felt like I wouldn't be adding much to the youth librarian blogosphere, since it's so full of awesome people already. But, Lisa and Miss Sue were super encouraging and told me to go for it. So, a few weeks later, here I am! I'm hoping this blog will be a way for me to grow my PLN, and will also allow me to think more intentionally about planning and evaluating my programs. I'll be focusing mostly on storytimes, but I'll probably post about other special family programs that I plan, as well.

I'll give you a little bit of background if you're interested:
I'm almost a year and a half into my first full-time librarian job at a regional branch of a large library system in Indiana. I work with two other children's librarians to provide library services to kids 0-11 and their families. One of my favorite parts of the job is storytime! Right now I facilitate storytimes for toddlers (walking-3) and preschoolers (3-5). But, sometimes I might have a random baby storytime, so you might hear about that every once in a while. Our programs for kids under 5 are pretty popular, so we usually have between 25 and 30 for toddler storytime and 10-20 for preschool storytime. They are drop-in programs, so we never really know how many will show up, but this set up works well for our patrons. 

Where else to find me:
Twitter: @loventhelibrary
Pinterest: hlwheeler

Note on the blog name:
It evolved from my Twitter handle, which was inspired by my maiden name (Love) and this awesome Jimmy Buffet song...

Oh, and obviously, everything I say here is my opinion (not my library's) and my intellectual property unless otherwise stated. Thanks!