It is a little bit scary to think it is now less than a month until Christmas and that the Waimairi Toy Library will be closing for the summer break in a couple of weeks!! Thank you to all of our members for your support this year. We have had a busy and successful year. We have had successful fundraisers with the Kiddie Kutters and the Bunnings sausage sizzle and thanks to our Grants Officer and Treasurer we have won many grants which has enabled us to buy lots of new toys and pay for the operating costs of the library. We also recently celebrated our 30th birthday celebrating with members and family on a beautiful day. We have a wonderful team of committed members working hard to keep our library running. We cannot stress the importance of volunteers and committee members to keep the
toy library open.

Final Sessions and Summer Holiday Hire
Our last session before we close for the summer holiday is Saturday 8th
December. All toys must be returned by this date, except for the new loans
made to cover the holiday period. During the sessions on Saturday 1 December, Thursday 6 December and Saturday 8 December you can hire toys for the entire summer holiday for $5 per toy, returning them when we reopen in the New Year. So during these 3 sessions you can return toys but any new loans will be for the summer therefore costing $5 each. This is a great opportunity to hire those fun outside or big toys for the kids to play with over the summer. We reopen in the New Year on Saturday 2nd Feb 2019! Your summer hire toys will be likely to be staggered over the first few sessions of the year to avoid it being too busy in the library.

Thank you
We would like to thank the following businesses and organisations for supporting us through awarding us grants in the past few months.

The Lotteries Grants Board have paid for our insurance and some new games.
The Christchurch City Council Strengthening Communities Fund gave us $976 to update our water play section.
The Warehouse through their Bags for Good promotion gave us $840 to go towards new toys.
COGS awarded us a grant to pay for 3 months of operating costs.
New World Bishopdale and New World Fendalton donated the
food for our recent 30th Birthday celebrations. The support of these businesses is greatly appreciated.

Roster
In 2019 we will introduce self-rostering online via our Mibase library database. There will be an email sent outlining this in more detail in January. Members will be able to choose and assign their own duty dates. We expect and need members to undertake at least 4 duties per year and to put down for rosters regularly and honestly throughout the year, and the librarian must still be notified of any changes to the roster. Our current roster runs until March 2019 so that will give us time to get this new system up and running in the New Year.

WE NEED YOU!
At the end of this year we are losing our wonderful Grants Officer, Catherine as she and her family are moving to Wellington and our long-standing Marketing and Fundraising Officer, Alison, as her children are getting older and are ready to leave the toy library.

Are you able to come on board and help on our wonderful committee? We also need general committee members to package toys. Without a committee, our toy library cannot function. Please consider joining. If you are interested please see Annabel in the library or email the library for more information.

Many thanks to all of you and we hope you have a splendid Christmas holiday!

We look forward to seeing you in the New Year. Enjoy your toys and take care.