Weird week

This week at work has been very weird. Two classes were very easy; I only had a few students in each and I had a decent plan to do stuff with them. One class was super weird; I had my own 8th graders plus 13 from another class and I was trying to get each group to do something different (you can imagine how that went). Then two classes were the same as always, except I was never quite prepared for them because of the rest of the day being so odd.

I hoped to get a ton of stuff done at work this week, and I did use my preps (the ones that weren’t taken over by subbing or IEP meetings) and those two easy classes relatively wisely. I dug myself out from under the pile of free-reading checks, which is no small feat. But I am taking a fair amount of work home with me to complete over the break. At least I shouldn’t have to come to my classroom over the break. I consider that a win.

And I feel relatively prepared for our trip. The amount of work required to spend 2.5 days in the snow is not (in my opinion) worth the actual time in the snow, but I’m trying to get excited about it. The things making that somewhat possible are:

• We’re leaving Saturday morning, so I can spend tonight packing up the car (which I just exchanged with my mom).
• It’s only a three hour drive to where we’re going
• We had most of the snow clothes we needed, despite not going to the snow in many years. My son can use my daughter’s old stuff and my daughter is borrowing some pants and boots from a friend. Somehow the jackets I bought them two years ago still fit well enough (I always buy big, thank goodness).
• The person watching our cats doesn’t want to sleep at the house, so I don’t have to have a bedroom cleaned up, just the common areas, kitchen and bathroom. Ditto on a bed set up with clean sheets.
• This week wasn’t “regular” at work so I had a little more mental and physical energy to prepare.
• We’re coming back on Tuesday so the kids are missing one day of school and we are hopefully missing the President’s Day Weekend Traffic.
• I am off the whole week so I have Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to unpack and do laundry and repack all the snow clothes for the next time we go.

The first and last items on that list are the most important ones. My husband wasn’t so thrilled about going Sat-Tues instead of Fri-Mon but I was adamant. I cannot be ready for a trip like this on a Friday afternoon. I just can’t. I’m so glad I insisted. I absolutely need this evening. I’m also so glad we aren’t doing this during my kids’ spring break when I would have to have been at work the day after we got home. No thank you.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful that we get to go to the snow. My kids are so excited and I’m excited for them. It’s just A LOT of work for such a short amount of time. But now that most of the work is done, and I feel relatively confident that I haven’t forgotten anything important, I’m trying to get excited. Once I get all the snow clothes and regular clothes and food in the car, I will feel even better (I’m not confident it will all fit).

I’m going to post this now because if I don’t it will sit here until Tuesday and wouldn’t that be silly.

I hope everyone had a nice long weekend (if you get one)!