Toddler Tales

     Today we went to Toddler Tales at the local branch of our library.  We went to Toddler Tales for the first time last week, but we went to the main branch of the library, downtown.  There were at least thirty toddlers there.  The first couple rows in front of the reader (a very animated middle-aged woman with good makeup) sat nicely and responded to her questions and cues.  The rest reminded me of the back of a mosh pit.  A little girl wearing lace-trimmed biker shorts pivot-hopped on one leg in the middle of the room.  Several children wandered, whining, and a little boy made distressed sounds in his throat and cowered between his mother's knees.
    Clara was completely nonplussed.  She wanted to go back out to the kid's section and pull books from the shelf, "read" the first page and toss them aside.  She wanted to sit at the kid-sized computers and wear the panda bear headphones and bang the keyboard.  She wanted me to lift her to pet the giant fabric dragon floating above the first shelves.
     My neighbor told me fewer kids went to the local branch for Toddler Tales.  When we arrived there today, a little boy, probably three years old, with kind brown eyes, approached Clara and said, "Me, my story-time," and attempted to herd her in the direction of the story-time room. 
     "Oh, yes.  Books," Clara said, and headed for the adult fiction hard-covers.  She liked the pictures on the front.  She also liked the heavy "thud" they made when they hit the floor.
     The librarian read inside a room with a glass door at each end in the back of the branch.  While many of the other toddlers listened to the story about animals and petted the furry (or scaly) three-dimensional pictures, Clara did laps through the doors.
     She was interested in the library's collection of puppets, and brought me a Sesame Street Ernie puppet and a door stop she found on the floor.  I made Ernie pretend to eat the doorstep.  Clara watched  for a moment and then thoughtfully licked the doorstop.
     "Oh, yuck!  Yucky! Yuck! Yuck!" I said, hurriedly wrenching it from her grasp.
     She lined up a series of puppets on the miniature foam couch in the kid's section.  A little two-year-old girl picked one up to play with and Clara came at her with a face like a thunderstorm.  She likely would have smote her down had I not been standing there.  She grabbed the other end of the puppet and an epic tug-of-war ensued, with both little girls screeching like baby owls (I was relieved to find other little girls make this sound).
     Next Clara plowed into a group of little boys at the puzzle station, making swimming motions with her arms to shunt them out of the way.
    When I'd settled her into her car seat later, I said, "Clara, the library is a different sort of place.  It's not like the park, where we can be loud and rough.  Although, even at the park, we don't hit people or push or not share things."
     She watched me, listening.
    "At the park, we can talk like this: 'La-la-la, I'm bein' so loud!  I'm at the park!' [waving my arms, sticking out my tongue].  But at the library, we have to talk very softly, like thissssss [making my hands small and noodling my fingers together in front of my chest]."
     She grinned at me and chuckled.