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.