The proper place for wild imaginations

For those of us who live many miles north of the 91, it doesn’t come tripping off the tongue: “School’s closed for the day so I’m taking the kids to Cerritos.”

“Cerritos?” a friend asked. “What, are you going to buy them a car?”

See, that’s one of the downsides of living in an area of far-flung cities and townships -- this is exactly the sort of geographic snobbery that led to the Wars of the Roses. I think. Maybe not. Anyway, I was heading to Cerritos because there is a fabulous new library there, one with a state-of-the-art children’s room designed by people who apparently have actually met children and so understand the magical power of a couple of words -- T. rex and aquarium.

If you think it’s strange to hear “I’m taking the kids to Cerritos for the day,” imagine the incongruity of a 2 1/2-year-old tugging on your arm and saying, “When are we going to see the sharks, Mama?” as you walk to a public library.

The 88,000-square-foot titanium-sheathed edifice, situated just behind the city’s civic center, opened in March and has become Southern California’s first destination public library. And pulling into the parking lot, the reasons for this begin to add up. There is free parking. There are also several amazing fountains around the entrance -- one looks like long-stemmed whimsical flowers, another spouts leaping water jets and dolphins. The children of my acquaintance -- all three accompanying me are under 5 -- could have spent the whole day playing with the fountains. If they hadn’t already been tipped off about the sharks.

These are visible the moment one walks through the sliding doors. A 15,000-gallon saltwater aquarium serves as one wall of the children’s room, which is immediately on the left; its entrance is constructed of oversized mock books, the top being “Little Women.” But wait, that is not the only entrance, as the children discovered. There is also a way in through a green-screen station in which kids can sit on a bench and see themselves in a rain forest, fleeing a dinosaur, on the moon -- all projected onto a video screen opposite them.

Finally entering the room, it is very difficult to categorize what you see as a “library” despite all the shelves and shelves of books. Maybe it’s the life-size T. rex model, as fierce as the infamous Sue, or the floor-to-ceiling banyan tree, or the lighthouse and wharf the kids can sit on and climb. If they do it quietly. Well, sort of quietly.

Looking up, I was startled by a glimpse of lightning. The ceiling above the lighthouse -- yes, I am still talking about a library -- looks like something out of Harry Potter: a patch of sky that moves through a day and night, on 20-minute cycles. Next to this shifting vision is a series of pinhole lights, which, according to library aide Tony Pacheco, re-creates the constellations in the night sky over Cerritos.

“They’ll change with the seasons,” he said.

Of course they will.

With his handsome face and cell-phone headset, Pacheco looks like he’s working concert security, albeit at a kind and gentle venue -- a Wiggles tour or “It’s a Small World: The Musical.” The aides are a whole new level of employee brought on when the library opened, said Stanley Strauss, the support services librarian. The headsets ensure patrons will not be bothered by intercom pages. “The space is so large,” Strauss said. “This way, when we need someone to help out at the computers or to find a book, we just call them and no one is interrupted.”

There are two rows of 12 computers, many of them already turned to kid-friendly games. The children in my company were thrilled, or at least I was pretty sure they were thrilled. I didn’t see them much after we walked in, but occasionally I heard them and the sounds were exuberant. “There isn’t another entrance is there?” I asked the librarian as I hustled the littlest one off to the bathroom. “I mean, I can just leave them for a minute.” The woman smiled brightly. “Of course,” she said, “we won’t let them slip away.”

A word about the bathrooms -- adorable. The smallest, dearest yet fully functional potty and the sink right at kid height. Such a great bathroom that my daughter immediately shut the door in my face. “I do it myself,” she said, her voice bouncing off tiles marked with the alphabet.

“We have a lot of parents who say they practically toilet-trained their children here,” said the librarian.

Of course they have.

Like many local libraries, Cerritos offers a bunch of programs for kids and parents -- story hours, crafts, pajama night. But according to Strauss, the new library was so instantly popular that registration is now required for some of the events. The Children’s Room Theater, where the stories are read, can hold only 60 children although the Skyline Room, on the third floor, can accommodate 200 pajama night participants. Do they get that many?

“Almost,” said Strauss. “We average about 175.”

After exploring the perimeters of the children’s room, my kids and their friend settled down with some books -- oh, right, those. My daughter presented me with a stack she wanted me to read to her, the only problem being that they were in Chinese. Because of the large Asian population in Cerritos, the library has a large collection of kids’ books in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Hindi.

The library’s collection grew 20% with the opening of the new building, said Strauss, but circulation in general has increased 65%. “We get about 4,000 people a day coming through the library,” he said. “We expect to have checked out a million items by the end of the fiscal year.”

About 48% of those will be from the children’s room. Kids, he said, tend to return their books within a week and then check out more, unlike more slothful adults who wait the full three weeks or more.

The only downside of this wondrous place is the difficulty of explaining to three children under 5 that this isn’t a playground, it’s a library and we use our whisper voices in the library, even when there’s a T. rex looming overhead and really pretty tropical fish swimming through the wall. The staff is more elastic in its definition of whisper than in other libraries, but they will, and do, admonish the children when they are becoming too loud.

After an hour or so, my sister-in-law, who had mercifully joined us (3 to 1 is never a good child-to-adult ratio), suggested we adjourn to the nearby Heritage Park with its fabulous mock Colonial town, which has also been refurbished recently.

According to Strauss, mine are not the only children who find the children’s room almost too intoxicating.

“A lot of parents come

here for an hour or so and then go to the park for a picnic. Sometimes,” he added with a kind laugh, “we actually suggest it.”

Of course they do.