MillenniaLibrarian: national pet day

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

YAAS: National Pet Day

If you want to learn about the original conception and mission of this program, read my What is YAAS? post. TL;DR: It's a weekly group for youth age 14-24 where we'll be doing community service work, library programs, hosting guest presenters, and making connections with peers in a safe and welcoming environment.

National Pet Day is on April 11th every year. I started celebrating it at the library so I could have a standing program every April, but it's turned out to be a major hit. Last year's event even had a visit from our Vice Mayor!

The main idea of this holiday is to make sure our pets have great lives. I like to take it a step further by taking time to acknowledge all the homeless pets-to-be out there looking for their forever home. Our group made tug toys out of fleece to donate to a local animal shelter, and had a visit from a City of Mesa Animal Control officer and her adorable rescue puppy!

This video shows the basic instructions for making a toy, but you can braid or twist it any way you want as long as it's nice and tight so it takes aggressive puppies a long time to chew all the way through. Using the same technique as a summer camp lanyard works very well, as does braiding for younger kiddos. It also turns out that chewing on fleece is good for a dog's teeth!

Wednesday, April 11, 2018

National Pet Day

This program started out as a small idea, and morphed into a pretty big deal by the time it was planned and ready to go. I follow several "daily holiday" web pages that list all the local and national silly holidays, because this sometimes gives me program ideas. It's how I thought of Make a Grandparents Day Card, for example. A few months ago I noticed that National Pet Day was coming up in April. We had done dog toy making as a teen activity last summer and it went over pretty well, so I thought about combining that with a few other stations and having a National Pet Day celebration at the library.

Because the library is a city entity, I contacted the City of Mesa Animal Control Department to see if they had any advice, resources, or even a representative they could send out on the day of the program. They got really excited about the program, and said they would send one human representative from their department and at least one furry friend. Of course, the exciting idea of a dog or cat in the library got the community buzzing.

My mom also happens to be a professional dog toy maker. She knows the exact right size and type of fleece strips to make the perfect long-lasting tug toy. Luckily she was available to help, so she set up at a table and guided kids in braiding their colorful creations. At the end of the night, we had over 30 tug toys to donate to homeless dogs at Animal Control.

The best part was, the Animal Control department totally came through with their furry friends! Their rep brought three seven-week-old gray kittens! I'm a dog person, but the kittens were the best thing that has happened to me this year. Adorable.

In the end, we had an attendance count of 94 people! In my previous experience this is almost unheard of for a weekday evening program. The Vice Mayor of Mesa even stopped by and featured us on his Twitter, and Nearby News was back to photograph for another feature.

Also, enjoy these pictures I took during the event (with parent permission, of course). I especially love the action shot of the two kittens wrestling.