AAaand Here We Go

Summer is almost over, I have meetings beginning on the 9th.  Whenever I say that, people ask me when the first day of school is, and I tell them I don't know.  I figure someone will tell me on the 9th, and not looking it up makes the summer feel longer.  But...the back to school dreams have started. Last night I dreamed it was the first day of school, so when I woke up this morning I thought I'd check.  Apparently my subconscious knew.  This morning is exactly one month till the first day of school.  Well-played subconscious, well-played.

The dream is fairly uninteresting if you're not a teacher.  The first day of school must have come as a surprise, because I was totally unprepared.  The dream involved things like only having seating charts for the first class of the day, not having my disclosure docs printed, and not even being sure which classes I'm teaching that day.  Of course, there was also the grand constant of teacher dreams:  the students act up, then refuse to listen when you try and give them the stern speech, and soon you're yelling while they continue to giggle and ignore you.

I used to have teacher dreams my first few years of teaching, but they were much less specific.  Now the dreams reflect my experience in teaching:  something goes wrong and I come up with a clever adaptation to fix it, only to have something then go wrong with that.  See?  I'm much more experienced now.  I also for some reason this time went to school in a tank top, and so tried to scramble to my old classroom to grab my back up sweater (I'm changing classrooms this year), and in the process, mistook the second bell for the first, and came into class five minutes late.  Sigh.

Okay universe, I'll think about school more seriously.  I'll think about my disclosure documents, I'll actually start planning.  Besides, I moved my back up sweater to my new classroom months ago.

Bring it on.

Last fall, my old room, my old dreads, my new shoes.  

Grown-Up Girl's Cry More

The following is not a plea for sympathy, simply an observation of changes in my own behavior as I grow up:

I've been watching Cake Boss in my spare time the past few weeks of summer vacation.  This week I saw two baby episodes, and I bawled through both, tears of sympathetic joy, and then longing.

That didn't used to happen.