Teacher anxiety dreams...even during the summer!

So...I walk into an administrator's office and she hands me an envelope.  In the envelope is notification that I am being removed from my classroom and sent to a second grade class at Tompkins...as a STUDENT! So I head on over to Tompkins and squish my grown up self into a tiny student desk next to a sweet girl named Erica.  The teacher is a pretty blonde woman and I move through the course of the day as a mix of student and colleague.  I help the other students and mentor the teacher.  At one point, the students are doing math by choosing and matching objects and I tried to get a little boy to recognize and name "rectangle" and I looked up at the teacher and we said in unison," haven't taught geometry yet, that goes closer to the test window".  Then the teacher went to lunch, leaving 4 students in the room with me and I wasn't sure what to do with them.  Fortunately, the room had a big arch cut into the wall, connecting it with another room.  The teacher in that room told me that the little blonde pony tail girl could be very wild at which point the wild girl opened her lunch box to eat while she did her work.  then I headed back over to GH to see if I could find out why I had been exiled.  No one could tell me.  Finally I ran into Cyndi pushing Charli and Olivia in a stroller down the hall.  Their hair had been dyed with dark gray and blonde streaks.  She told me that "they" were getting rid of "problems". I ran into Neva in the cafeteria and she told me that she was subbing for my class.  It didn't make sense for me that the district was paying me to sit in another class and paying for a sub for my class. I went back over to Tompkins to talk to the administrator, who was Heather, and ran into Stacie and the twins. At this point I had a giant six foot tall box of Rice Krispies.  The secretary told me that Heather would not be available for 15 minutes and I said I needed to talk to her, and I and my cereal box would wait however long it took, even if I had to sleep there all night.  She asked what the cereal box was for and I told her that it was just a visual.  Stacie and I go out to the grassy area under the palm trees to wait and run into a high school class that is being walked out with the hands behind their backs.  They stand in a circle and Keenan says something funny and Stacie and I are reprimanded by the teacher for laughing too loudly.  The secretary comes out to find us and as we head back into the office, I wake up.  I NEVER FIND OUT WHY I WAS BEING PUNISHED! ACK!

Lazy?

It is a quiet summer morning in the neighborhood.  With the 4th behind us, summer is half over and I still haven't gotten into the rhythm of vacation days.  I can't quite decide if summer should be lazy or productive.  So I have a list of ToDos which I am slowly working on.  And there is another list of things in my head which I should be working on, but mostly I have been spending time with the kids (YAY! We were able to put the pool up this year!) piddling around the house, watching TV and reading.  It has been an unusually hot summer, topping 100 several times, which just really encourages lazy afternoons.  And my favorite TV shows are the summer ones...HGTV Design Star, Whodunnit?, Rizzoli and Isles, The Killing, Drop Dead Diva...such fun.

Our trip to see little Maxwell in Hawaii started the summer off right.  He is such a beautiful little guy.  Susie and Joe have dived into the parenthood pool head first, totally immersed in this tiny (although growing fast) character. I predict that as he grows and becomes more able to explore the world around him, his complaining will cease...

One would think that since Leah, Sam, Emma and Tela live here in the same town with us that we would see a lot of them...especially the two that attended the school where I teach!  But life during the school year is so busy and exhausting for these two grandparents, that it just doesn't happen that we see them much.  But now, we are all out of school and the time is there!  So we got to have Leah for a sleep over, all by herself! Well, she brought Hobbes, the kitten too.  And we all spent a fun 4th of July weekend together at Muna's and the beach.  And I even got to have the newest members of the clan, Nate's boys Caleb and Gabriel, and Alice spend the night...admittedly for a not-so-fun reason when Abby hemorrhaged  and had to be flown by helicopter down to Bakersfield, but still...

We made it through the hardest week of the year, the week that we remember both Aiden's birth and six years later, his death.  This year we bought a cement bench to put next to Aiden's tree at Stacie's house.  We will have a paint day sometime before school starts and let all the kids paint it together. Meagan told me that she feels Aiden pushing on her back when she is up by the tree.