Bored

It's the middle of my winter break, and I am once again struck with that odd feeling of "sigh."

Don't get me wrong!  Like every other teacher anywhere, I waited and waited and wiggled oh so patiently for this break.  I worked hard and, dammit, I earned this break.  But now that it is upon me, I find it hard to fill a day with lazing. 

Plus, I miss the kids and want to find out what fun things they did over Christmas.  How pathetic is that?

Didn't you used to have all your teeth?

Today I visited my old kiddos in their new school.  It's always bittersweet to make eye contact with them- some will remember you, and some will not.  Reality being as harsh as it is, the kids you really connected with will be the type that do not.

One of my kiddos, let's call her Silent Cecily, lit up the minute I stepped in the door and ran in for a hug.  I was more important to her in those three seconds of greeting than Santa.  Or at least, that's the feeling I was floating on until she said, "What's your name?"  I would like to say that I was crushed, but, like I said, bittersweet, harsh, etc.  When you teach the young, you have to accept that you can have a profound impact on them without leaving a mental indentation of your face.  So instead I laughed and told her, "Miss Chelsey," whereupon she lit up and repeated it like a mantra a few times before stating, "You said I'm smart!"  Which filled me up like a freaking hot air balloon.  Yes, yes I did.  I gave you a microscope and some caterpillars and dinosaur bones and a journal to write in and I told you that you were smart.  And, lo, you believed me.

That'll do.  In this harsh world where people daily will compete with each other to try to tear you down, you never have to remember my name, hon.  Just remember that I said you're smart.

Take a piece of cake with you...

Today was my second Christmas party.  It went well- we sang Jingle Bells, no one bit anybody else, the gifts we spent two hours wrapping yesterday were unwrapped in less than 10 minutes, and the children were stuffed with candy until you could see their snot crystalize with the amount of sugar it contained.

It always puzzles me when people with poorly behaving two-year-olds apologize to me about them.  Of course he is acting like a monster.  He's two, it's a party, and everyone is watching.  What better time to pull out the "I wanna" whine, followed by the "boneless heap" huddle and the "run away from mama" marathon?  If he's showing us his entire repertoire, it's our job to be an appreciative audience- I especially like saying "oooh.  You're gonna be in so much trouble when your mom catches you."  I totally chose four-year-olds for a reason, and that kind of behavior?  Totally the reason I went with the older kiddos.

Also, it's really awkward when a child obeys me instead of their parents.  I always want to say, "You were handling it fine, but she's not really sure I won't eat her, so she has millions of years of evolution screaming at her that she has to listen to me to keep me appeased, whereas she knows damn well you won't kill her."  I'm never actually sure that this will help the parents to deal with the fact that their little monster is my little angel, so I usually just smile and joke about the power of counting backwards from 5.  I do, however, really enjoy the preening I get to do when they look at me awestruck and and ask how I do it for 8 hours out of my day.  My favorite response is, "Well, with travel time and lunch, I'm really only doing it for 7."

Finally, what kind of insane person drops off a 25 lb 8-layer cake for their kindergartener's Christmas party?  An awesome person, yes, obviously- I'll make sure she gets personally invited to every party this year.  But what the hell am I going to do with all these leftovers?

My tongue is swollen

It's 5 days before Christmas and I have to say, I'm barely hanging on. 

I woke up last night reassuring a kiddo in my morning room, let's call him Bucky, that Santa still loved him because he knew how hard it was for him not to swear and understood that Bucky really was trying every day to use school words, but damned if those dumbass cuss words didn't leak out every once in a while under duress.  My boyfriend doesn't even turn over when I begin lecturing or reassuring children in my sleep.  In fact, he's told me a few times that he likes the constant encouraging statements ("you're doing a good job- we'll make it okay, I promise- I see that you're trying really hard and I appreciate it") he hears at midnight.  Stop taking your work home with you, people tell me.  Dude, my work invades my freaking sleep, whether or not I leave the lesson plans at the office.  Learning to accept that has really helped my insomnia.  After all, just because you bury a body in a dream doesn't mean you won't have the self control to untie that kid's shoes (again!) when you're wide awake the next morning.

Last Friday, Santa came to visit my morning class.  Santa.  In a room full of 4 year olds who have all been trying "so hard, Miss Chelsey" to be good.  It's an actual physical state children rev themselves up to- "I'm trying so hard, [insert adult name here]"- a state that is specific to situations in which rewards are tied to completely unrelated good behavior, and attaining the rewards requires the goodwill of the insert-name-here adult.  Don't even get me started on the fact that the raised behavior expectations cause a correlated raise in bad-behavior leaks and total blowouts.  At this time of the year, if I tell the children to focus on any one object in their environment (i.e., the door that Santa will shortly be stepping through), they channel the ability of hummingbirds to be in absolute motion while remaining distressingly stationary.  It's nerve-wracking just asking them to concentrate, as I'm forced to watch them contort their faces, hands, legs, ribs, ankles, and elbows into some semblance of alert posture while at the same time attempting to radiate innocence and devotion to duty.  My body aches after a straight 8-hour shift just watching them.

Which brings me to my tongue.  Which also aches, but more because it is swollen than because of anything I have watched the children do or not do.  Why is my tongue swollen?

Well, it could be hand-hoof-and-mouth disease.  I could be allergic to one of the many, many crafting supplies we used today to create decorations to send home (please, God, let it be glitter- any excuse to ban that from my room, any, oh please, I have the "no glitter zone" sign already typed up and everything), or I could simply have engaged in nervous tic behavior all day unbeknownst to me.  I might have strep throat, or a cold.  I might have an incurable saliva-borne parasite, or less-scary, but equally-skeevy thrush.   It could be simple dehydration.

The scary thing is, given the environment in which I daily work, any one of these is a reasonable possibility, so until other symptoms appear it's impossible to know what level of alarm I should be feeling.

I kinda hope it's the parasite.  At least then my coworkers wouldn't be able to say, "Oh, yeah, I had that two years ago, it was horrible."

Or dehydration.  Dehydration would be good too.  In fact, change all my hope to dehydration.  I only want it to be dehydration.

...or the glitter allergy.  I have the signs made up already.  It'd be a shame to waste them.