First of all we just wanted to say we hope you all had a lovely Christmas & New Year that was filled with lots of wonderful memories, great food and relaxing times!
Ok, so onto the big news. As you may have seen on our Facebook Page, we recently decided to relocate the Arnos Grove Library to Turnpike Lane. We are hoping that with the new location being more central with a lot more transport links, a lot more families will be able to access our services.
New Location:
The fabulous folks at the Burghley Road Under 5’s Centre & PlaySpace have offered us the use of their facilities in order to bring more people to their centre and enable us to help more people. It truly is a wonderful space, not only for the kids but for the adults too. For the kids there is a soft play area, a giant ball pit, plenty of entertaining toys and on the dry days an outside climbing frame. For the adults, lots of really comfy sofas, hot drinks, snacks and plenty of good conversation! They also serve a daily lunch for both adults and kids (£1 for each child & £2 each adult). The lunches are always healthy, vegetarian and really affordable!
New Day:
We decided to trial a change of day too. We have always run on Fridays but from January 9th we will run on Thursdays. If we find it excludes too many people we will of course change the day so please keep giving us your feedback!
New Booking System:
We are trialling an appointment system as we had a few requests for one in our annual feedback questionnaire. The 1st hour of each session we have sole use of the centre so will be offering four 15 minute appointments each week, then when the centre opens at 10:30am we will operate the regular drop in service. Of course, you are more than welcome to drop in during the first hour too, but people who have booked will take priority. The booking system is available here: http://nlslturnpikelane.clickbook.net/
Library Costs:
The library sessions are remaining free of charge, however the centre do have a £2 entrance fee (£1 for additional children) and this charge will be enforced from 10:30am making the first hour free. Of course, if you attend without a child there will be no charge. All of the entrance fee goes back into the running of the centre and helps pay for new toys, new facilities (they’re currently raising money for a new kitchen!) and to help it go from strength to strength!
Big Thank Yous:
Of course, we need to give a MASSIVE thanks to Toddy and her playgroup at Arnos Grove which looked after the library in its first year of operation and helped catapult us to the fantastic position we are in today. That playgroup is still running every Friday morning and is a really good space for the kids to play and friendly parents who go out of their way to make you feel welcome So please do tell your friends about this wonderful group! Kate, the sling librarian, will still be attending with her twins and just LOVES to chat about slings so if you have any sling related queries please don’t hesitate to talk to her about it!