Not a Wasted Word

It turns out, this may just be the weekend I needed. Last night I watched Theater Camp (it was fine, not much to it, but I laughed a bit) and went to bed too late. This morning I got five loads of laundry done, along with my regular weekend chores (sweeping and vacuuming, shaking out the rugs, actually cleaning the counters, etc). The house now feels more manageable. I’ve already scored three of the four assessments my classes took last week. My son and I had some really great QT while my daughter was at her grandparents’ house. We watched two episodes of Ahsoka (I love it!) and played Small World (a complicated, but fun table top game).

I only had both kids together for a few hours today, during which they played the new Dungeons and Dragons mod on Minecraft. It’s actually really cool, a narrative game that plays a lot like actual D&D. But the mod is pretty new and it kept crashing on them, so they only played for about an hour. Then my inlaws picked up my son so he won’t have to wake up at 6:30am to come to the swim meet tomorrow.

Tonight my daughter and I are going to watch a couple episodes of Twin Peaks and then head to bed early. She’s finally feeling nervous and stressed about the meet, so I don’t think she’ll want to hang out long. Which is for the best, because I really need to catch up on some sleep tonight.

Right now I’m on the elliptical and tomorrow I’ll do strength training, so even though I didn’t get to go to the dojo or run this weekend, I am getting my workouts in.

I’ve been thinking more about why this week was so rough at work. I think it was a couple things, the main one being all the new students. I don’t really understand why we’re getting so many new students over a month into the school year, but we are and it sucks. (We didn’t even get them all at the same time! Two started Monday and three started Wednesday. Why?! )I run a tight ship and my students know how to follow procedures by now, so I expect to move quickly from one activity to another. With new students EVERYTHING takes longer. And three of them don’t speak any English, so really I should be giving them English language development stuff. Which I don’t really have anymore because I haven’t taught that class since before the classroom move. Luckily my student teacher has been helping them a lot, but it’s still requiring a ton of my time.

{It seems like one of them should not be in a general education classroom – he will require intensive special education supports – so my guess he will not stay in my class. If he does stay he’ll be taking my class without English language development, because he has no reading or writing skill in Spanish, despite that being his first language. He can’t even say the numbers 1-10 in Spanish unless he’s naming them in order. If I point to one, he doesn’t know what it’s called. My student teacher has been spending a lot of time with him, and is really surprised with where he’s at. There is clearly a lot going on with him.}

Speaking of my student teacher, she is amazing but she is also leeching my prep time in ways I cannot handle. On Friday I needed to get a ton of stuff done, because I didn’t have a prep on Thursday and had to rush out immediately after school, but we spent the whole period talking about her upcoming solo teaching days. I know I’ll eventually get some of this time back, but right now it’s just slipping away from me and I am really struggling with how behind I get and how stressed I feel.

We also took assessments this week. My assessments require a lot of teacher leading, especially at the beginning of the year, so it’s not like I just got to work while they all took their tests. We won’t have assessments in my three 1A classes again until November, so that is good. Also, our next unit is a little less intense, as far as me leading lessons entirely in Spanish, so I think October will generally be less stressful than September.

I’m also not adding anything new to my plate. I just read about an activity that I think would be really fun and effective, but I’m not going to implement it this year. I did write myself a note to check it out again next fall, but right now I just can’t add anything that requires more prep. The only reason I’m surviving right now is I have everything I need ready to go. I’ve done so much prepping over the last two years to make this program great, and now I get to reap the rewards of all that work.

And of course my classes are big, and I’m learning to mange the extra work that comes with extra students. The good news is I can still run my program well, I just need to streamline some aspects of it. The free reading program is my biggest worry with such big classes, but that doesn’t start in earnest until the new year, so I have some time to figure out what to do to make it more manageable with such big numbers.

So after 24 hours to decompress and think more about it, I think work feels unmanageable less because of the big classes and more because of the new students and the student teacher. But honestly she is helping so much with the new students it’s probably a wash right now with time saved vs lost. Maybe, by the time the new students know what to do, and she is teaching more, I’ll feel a lot better. Then I can spend some of that extra time retooling my free reading program so it works with 130 students. It’s only 20 more than last year. I think I can do it. (I really love my free reading program and would hate to jettison it completely. It’s probably the part of my program I’m most proud of.)

I left my classroom today making myself take deep breaths and assuring myself, “You’re alright. It will be alight.”

If I’m already having to talk myself down like that before the first of October, that is not a good sign. There is no way I can maintain this level of overwhelm for an entire school year.

The good news is that after the five new students I got this week. I am at capacity as far as class size. So they can’t give me any other new students. That will help.

The bad news is I’m not sure I can run my program, even with the changes I already plan to make, for 130 7th and 8th graders. So I guess I have to figure out what I can jettison. And how I can accommodate the different levels that are in my classes right now.

I’m thankful it’s the weekend, and that I have swim meet time on Sunday to grade the piles of assessments and other work in my bag.

I’m alright. It will be alright.

This fall has been crazy. I’ve been meaning to look back at past Septembers here on the blog to see if the first month of school always feels this nuts. But even if school always feels really overwhelming, what is going on outside of school is what is making things feel untenable. We just have way too much going on. And right now we’re in the thick of it.

Last weekend was the camping trip. The weekend actually went well, only because I took Friday off. That gave me the margins I needed to enjoy Friday night camping and Saturday at home with the girls. Only sleeping in a tent one night also helped. The air quality got so much better by Sunday that I was able to run and that felt great. It was actually a pretty good weekend.

But this week is pretty nuts. My husband just left for a music festival in Memphis. His plane from DFW to Memphis was decommissioned, but they did eventually find them another plane. Then he got to his AirBnB after midnight only to find the key is not in the box. It’s 1:15am there now and he still doesn’t have a place to sleep. He’s trying not to feel like it’s all a sign that he shouldn’t have gone.

Work is crazy because conferences are next week and all my classes are taking assessments, and then starting projects that will take them through next week. We’re trying a new kind of student led conferences (again!) and many of the steps this week are unfamiliar and require more time than they should. Luckily our admin listened when we assured them the way they were trying to do conferences would not have worked. This way is new to us, but ultimately not that difficult. I’m so glad we’re not trying to make their original proposal work.

I got two new students on Monday and am getting three new students tomorrow. I do NOT do well with new additions so late in the year. At least now I have a full 32 kids in every one of my 7th/8th grade classes (and 35 in my 8th grade class!) so they actually cannot give me any more new students.

With my husband gone I’ll be getting to work a lot later tomorrow and Friday. It will be rough to lose that morning prep time, especially tomorrow when I have four block periods and no prep. But my in-laws are actually taking my son to school for me. If it weren’t for them, I’d have to take time off and get someone to cover my first classes. I’m very grateful for their help.

This weekend my daughter has her first swim meet. I swam competitively for much of middle and high school so it will be fun to see her dive in for her first race. It’s already a trip to be the parent, and not the swimmer. I keep asking my parents how I was registered for meets and other stuff for swimming, and of course it wasn’t online because online wasn’t a think in the 90s! It’s crazy to think how different basically everything was back then. And I’m only 43!

Next week is conferences, which will be exhausting. I’m also teaching Basics at the dojo on Monday. Plus I have to pack us all up because on Saturday we drive to Southern California to take the kids to Universal Studios for our son’s 10th birthday. He turns 10 later in the month, but Indigenous People’s Day is the observed by both our districts on the 9th so we’re taking advantage of the long weekend to take them down. Having three crazy weekends in a row (camping, solo parenting, Universal Studios) is a little more than I can manage, but I guess I have to do just that.

Oh, and high school tours open Sunday morning and later this month is the enrollment fair. There are few things I hate more about living in San Francisco that navigating SFUSD’s lottery, so I’m sure to handle all the uncertainty of which high school my daughter will go to next year with patience and grace.

…

BWAHAHA. Just writing that made me spit laugh all over my screen.

And now it’s 11:25pm, so I need to get myself to bed. I’m sorry my posts have been so sporadic lately. I’ll try to post more frequently.

Well I had ALL DAY to get ready for this camping trip and I’m still running late. How very me of me.

The good news is that my son didn’t wake up totally sick (and testing negative for Covid), so we’re going, and I definitely needed this day to get ready, so I don’t feel bad having taken it.

The car is (almost) all packed. I am (almost) all packed. The tent works (and has less mildew on it than before I cleaned it). The cooler can fit everything. The camping stove has not arrived, but is supposedly “out for delivery.” This is why my son and I are getting In-n-Out on the way down, because I had a feeling the stove wouldn’t be here in time and I’m not even sure we can make fires because of the poor AQI (tomorrow is a Spare the Air Day and you’re definitely not supposed to make fires at home on those days, not sure what the rules are at camping sites where some people use those fires for cooking…

I keep reminding myself that I’m only going down for one night, and if we forgot anything important my husband can bring it down on Saturday.

It would have been a beautiful day for a run, but the AQI was pretty high, and I’ll be breathing that air all night, so I decided against it. Instead I’m on the elliptical machine (with the windows closed – it’s so stuffy!) and sending out some work emails (and writing this post). I think the hardest party about high AQI days is how stuff the house gets. We don’t have any kind of internal cooling system – the outdoor air usually does that for us all year long! – so when we have to keep the windows closed it gets really hot and stuffy.

I hope this camping trip is everything my son has been dreaming it will be. Pretty much all his friends and their families will be there, so it’s sure to be a great time. I’m usually not good at the mingling required at these kinds of events, but I think knowing that I’ll only be down there for one night of two will help me put myself out there more.

And now I gotta go! Here’s to hoping it’s an enjoyable evening!

This week has been… rough. Super busy and stressful. My husband and I got into a bit of a fight. Im tired of fighting with my husband over the same shit, but it didn’t help me recognize how much I hate sitting down and planning with another person, and how now I’m doing that all the time at work, with my student teacher, and I’m not handling it very well.

I’m taking tomorrow off to get ready for the first night of a camping trip with my son (and many other 4th grade families). Except my son’s throat is now sore. It may be from the poor air quality this week (there are two fires burning up north), but probably he’s just getting sick. I really hope he can go. He’s been waiting to be a part of this camping trip for literally years.

It took me about four hours to prep for my day off tomorrow. I need to find a way to shorten that prep time, because if I’m spending more than half the amount of time I’ll be out, getting ready for being out, it’s not really worth taking the hours. There must be a way to shorten that, but in 20 years I’ve never found it. And tomorrow my student teacher will be there! She can’t sub for me yet, but she can basically run the first three classes. So why did it take me so long to write my sub plans?! Ugh, there is nothing I hate worse about being a teacher than being absent. Such a pain in the ass.

And if I did all that, just so my son could get sick and not go… Ugh.

I also hoped to take a couple hours for myself tomorrow. I wanted to run. And maybe sit on the couch. My guess is only one of those will happen and I’ll prioritize the run. Only if the air quality is okay for it.

I’m not looking forward to this camping trip. My husband was supposed to take this on, but his friend is coming in from New York and I didn’t want to make him miss seeing his friend, so I offered to go the first night. I’ll be leaving our son with a friend’s family in the morning and driving back home, so my husband can take the car back down to the camp site. I have book club at 1pm and we’re talking about Demon Copperhead, which I loved.

Saturday night my daughter’s friends are spending the night. So it won’t be low key, but I can probably hide downstairs for most of it.

Some good news from this week: I ran in my new Hoka’s without hip/side of thigh pain. Also they are pretty (I put the rainbow laces on and like them even more).

We got a puzzle from the Murakami exhibit at the Asian Art Museum and we’ve had fun working on while listening to our audiobook. We finally finished The Hollow Boy! Now on to Lockwood & Co book 4.

I taught the teens class at the dojo today and it went well.

When it’s 5:30M and you have to be up at 6am, do you try to fall back asleep? Or do you just get up early and start your day?

Or do you write a blog post on your phone, while laying in your bed? Refusing to commit either way?

I think you can guess what I’m doing.

When your kids are young and you’re desperate to get a full night’s sleep, you count the years until they are older. But the reality is your kids may be waking you up regularly until they leave the house. My son turns 10 next week and he only stopped needing near nightly soothing from me a year ago. Someone still needs something in the night, or simply wakes us up with their movements, at least once a week. at least.

And of course as we get older, a sold night’s sleep becomes ever more elusive. Since perimenopause, I sleep through the night less and less regularly.

Sundays are always a hard night for me. I sleep in until 8am on the weekends and falling asleep by midnight is even harder for me on Sundays that the rest of the week. I’m always really tired on Mondays, but I guess today I’ll be doubly so.

I don’t know how people who have more kids get any sleep. Or people who had their kids later (though I’m going through perimenopause early so maybe that is affecting me the same as someone who is older). Or people whose spouse doesn’t sleep well. Or snores (god does mine snore).

I guess most of us are just moving through life semi-exhausted. Or all the way exhausted.

Happy Monday.

And trying not to fall asleep…

This week has been super busy. Monday I taught basics and forms. Tuesday I went to Sparring. Wednesday was a professional development meeting and my daughter’s Back to School Night. Today I’m getting my allergy shot and going to Costco (and working out). Tomorrow I’m assisting at the dojo.

I’m glad I did so much at home this past weekend. I’ve also stayed up late a couple nights to grade papers and input scores.

Things feel slightly more manageable, but only if I keep moving. Not sure how long I have the stamina to keep it up.

My brain is definitely struggling. I can’t think of what else to write. I’m just starting at my phone screen.

One thought before I go. My student teacher has started taking over the opening activities we repeat every day. She’s doing a good job, but she takes forever to finish them. And I’m realizing that I pack A LOT into a class period. I move fast and use my time wisely. I plan the activities carefully and am prepared to move quickly through transitions. Maybe part of why I’m always so tired is I do so much in a 55 minute period. Definitely something to think about.

Sometimes I want to come here but I feel like I have too much to say. Or I don’t feel like I can recap a weekend without recounting some event that requires it’s own, more thoughtful post.

This is one of those times.

The weekend was… rough. Saturday morning our downstairs bathroom exploded and it became clear quickly that it would require a massive sum of money to fix it.

Then we had an application appointment for our kids’ passports and I made the same mistake on both their applications. So I had to fill them out by hand. And when I got to the end of my daughter’s and I wrote a 0 instead of a 1 somewhere and was told I had to start all over again I lost my shit. Not at anybody but just in general. And my husband demanded I get calm immediately I and just couldn’t. And honestly I didn’t think I should have to because the whole process was so unnecessarily tedious and difficult. I hate that kind of shit so much.

My run afterward didn’t feel great. I had a side stitch and the pain on the left side of my leg and hip wouldn’t go away. It just wasn’t what I needed to undo the damage done at the post office.

My husband barely spoke to me the rest of the day. But I refused to apologize more than once and we never really talked about it, which honestly feels like a win on my part. I’m always apologizing for having regular human emotions, and I’m kind of tired of it. He never apologies for the way he reacts to things and he isn’t perfect either.

I did spend some time thinking about why I lost my shit like that, and besides the fact that I was super stressed by the bathroom blow up and impending many thousand dollar quote from the plumber, I think mostly it’s watching my husband slowly fall into the same despondency that dogged him all of last year. I just can’t do it again. I can’t provide him the support he needs and I can’t be so entirely without a partner.

So yeah. Rough stuff.

Sunday was better. I got so much shit done. I just put my head down and did it. I won’t list it out, but I will say that I crossed some old shit off big lists and I felt better for it.

I think mostly I just wanted to see if getting on top of some shit at home would make things at work feel more manageable. But today felt anything but. I lost my Friday prep to a meeting with my student teacher and her supervisor and I lost today’s prep to another meeting with my student teacher to figure out what she’ll be teaching on the days we schedule last week. I know that eventually I’ll get some of this time back, when she is teaching some of my classes instead of me. But right now it’s just leeching prep time from me, and I’m drowning at work because of it.

Tonight I had to teach Basics at the dojo and I was dreading it. I had stress dreams about it last night and I considered calling to say I was sick. But I showed up and did it and it went much better than last time. I’m glad I stuck it out, and I’m glad I don’t have to do it again for a few weeks.

Tomorrow should be better than today was. I think I can get out from under some giant piles or papers and that will make me feel better. In the evening I’m going to Sparring at the dojo and I always love Sparring.

We’ll see if all the work I did this weekend start to pay off.

Days have been long this week. Suddenly I had piles of stuff to score. It was weighing on me. So I stayed up late last night and even later tonight to comment on all 95 of my 1A “me gusta/no me gusta” slide decks. It’s a super easy assignment for them to share their likes and dislikes and I take the time to comment on each one. It took forever but it always feels worth it.

I also scored the reading and writing portion of my 1B classes first assessment. They did so well! I’m so impressed. Their previous Spanish teacher must have been amazing! I’m kidding but maybe not? This group is high but also my 1A program is pretty effective. This class will be able to do amazing things if I hold them to a higher standard and I expect to do that. And to tell them I’m doing it.

Things at home are rough. I asked my husband for more support and he stepped up and now it feels like he’s imploding. I know the start of the school year is as jarring for him as it is for me because I take on a lot of his responsibilities during the summer, when he’s working and I’m not. My going back to work is a big shock to both our systems and I hope things even out soon, but September is crazy and October will be crazier and I don’t see when we’ll get a break.

Our 15/10 anniversary is this coming January and I want to go away for it. We haven’t gone away together in ages and I’m dreaming of 4-5 nights away and maybe planes to get us there. Not sure we can swing that logistically or financially but I’m sure going to try.

I emailed my doctor about the side-of-thigh pain that I can’t shake, and I can’t seem to self-diagnose. Nothing I read about online seems to match it, so I’m going to see if a real doctor can help me. Who knows if Kaiser will actually provide that doctor of if I’ll have to find one myself, but I took the first step and that’s something.

It’s 12:30am and I need to go to bed. I haven’t been sleeping great, and tomorrow is a long day. But it feels so good to have those comments done! I’m so glad I did them. They were weighing on me. Maybe the way to let go of heaviness is to do the shit that’s weighing you down. At least sometimes that is probably the answer.

It was a good weekend. It was a long weekend! And a long weekend was exactly what I needed after what felt like a VERY long week.

Some wins this weekend were:

Friday was a minimum day which means I got 1.5 extra hours of prep in the afternoon and I still left at 2:30 (a little before we would normally get out at 3:10).

I took back two pairs of Madewell jeans AND didn’t get anything on the sale rack there or at Athleta! Woot!

Assisting at the dojo was pretty fun, and I picked up pupusas (six for $20! And they are so good!) as we left.

My husband and I started watching Irma Vep on Max. I have a major crush on Alicia Vikander and my husband loves the director (Olivier Assayas) so we’re both quite happy with it.

Saturday morning at the dojo was fun. My final sparring was with a friend who is basically at the same level as me, but it’s clear she has gotten a lot better at ground grappling while I was away all summer. It definitely lit a fire under my butt to start going to sparring more.

My parents picked up the kids Saturday afternoon and my husband and I had a date night. One of our favorite local restaurants got a liquor license (tl;dr it’s SUPER hard/expensive to get them in SF) and their new drinks menu is amazing. We also saw Bottoms at the Alamo Drafthouse. Bottoms was great. The Alamo Drafthouse was great. It was a really fun night.

Sunday morning was slow and low key. My husband made breakfast and we watched more Imra Vep. We walked to the library to return a book our daughter had kept too long (we couldn’t renew it) and to get coffee and sweat treats at a favorite local spot.

At 1pm I took our bikes down to ride with my parents and kids. My son’s bike was having some brake issues, but after we resolved them we all had a nice time. I’m glad we got them back out on their bikes again.

Sunday night our daughter went to her other grandparents’ house and my son, husband and I watched two episodes of the new One Piece show on Netflix, which is based on one of my son’s favorite manga series. Surprisingly, we all liked it a lot.

Today I woke up with the alarm I forgot to turn off, but then I fell back asleep (at least for a bit). It was nice knowing I didn’t have to get up and get ready for work at 6am.

My husband, son and I played some of the new MarioKart levels this morning. Now I’m working out on the elliptical (it’s so foggy that I couldn’t rally to run, and since I’m not training for anything right now, I’m letting myself take a break on running until I really want to do it). After breakfast my son and I will hit up the Academy of Sciences for a bit. Then we’ll come home and watch another One Piece before daughter comes home. We’ll probably play the new MarioKart levels with her, then we plan to listen to some The Hollow Boy (third Lockwook & Co book) while we draw and play solitaire.

All in all it was the weekend I needed. This week at work will be a little more low key, but next week is crazy again (with what I’m teaching at school, and the fact that I’m signed up to teach Basics at the dojo on Monday).

I read a blog post about “letting go of heaviness” that spoke to me. Sometimes I’m not sure exactly what I’m feeling emotionally, but “heaviness” definitely fits and I appreciated that feeling being articulated for me. Now I need to work on recognizing it, accepting it, and then deciding if I want to continue holding it. I hope to work on letting go of heaviness more this month.