How Do You Leave This?!

Next week I go back to work.

I am not excited.

Aside from the obvious having-to-leave-my-baby (!!!WHY?!?!!!!), I am also terrified of having to get up at 5:30 again. Aeli and I are more accustomed to the 9am-11 final get-out-of-bed. The logical response to this worry is that I need to get to bed earlier. But, with Stefin rarely getting home before 7:30, dinner is forcibly late, and we have a tough-time getting quickly to bed. We'll just do it, I know. I managed to make it through six-weeks of institute on an average of 3-5 hours of sleep per night. It was miserable, but I did it. It did end. So will this.

I'm feeling okay about the actual work (it's never the work that's the problem- the amount of work, sure, the time constraints, the bureaucracy, the absurd top-down priorities...). We'll have a month after I get back to get ready for the big high-stakes test (LEAP/iLEAP). Then we'll have an awkward week in between testing and spring break. Then a month and suddenly it's the end of the year! I think I may have them work on college applications and publish something (a class newspaper or junior-high survival guide) as a class during that last, often fuzzy month.

I'm nervous about time, though. As in, not having any. In planning for life with baby, I decided that I would just have to use my planning period really efficiently in order to be able to leave all my work at school and spend my late-afternoons and evenings with A & S. However, thinking about the logistics lately, if I'm spending 15-20 minutes of my planning period "engaged" with my breast-pump, that leaves less than 30 to do actual work. I'm going to have to do some serious streamlining to make this work.

Presently, I'm planning and entering a couple long-overdue grades. Entering grades is the most tedious part of teaching, to me. A lot of clicking and copying numbers from a piece of paper to a computer screen. Good thing I went to college, right?

Okay, back to work. Mardi Gras is what's in between now and my return to the classroom, and I WILL enjoy it!