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Ballo Stress
Aug. 22nd, 2018 10:25 amThis has been the first morning in literal, without hyperbole, months where I am not sweating over my morning tea. I actually wore a (very light) cardigan to take the kiddo to daycare this morning in anticipation of a cool breeze. I think I almost felt it. I have a fancy dancy temperature gauge where I have the sensor outside under a bush, under the eaves, and it read 65 degrees this morning. For comparison, I haven’t seen a six as the first number in a very long time. Waking to a 70 or above is normal. It is August, but we are so over summer. After tonight, I seriously can’t believe that I’m already two weeks into the semester already. Two down, sixteen to go. Clovis Community College has the longest semesters of ANY COLLEGE EVER. I would know. I have been to six!
All of us have been cruising along on a large ball of stress and the house reflects that. I have no time to clean or to even stop and write, like I am now. I scheduled this time for me because if I don’t, I could just keep working forever. First year teaching is a fucker. I’m not only writing lesson plans at midnight because my child will not go down until 11pm, but I cannot shut off my brain from teaching. I’ve gotten to the point of carrying around my notebook just to write all my lecture ideas down just to get them out of my head, but it’s like a Hydra. As soon as I cut one head, two more pop up! I have more and more angles to think about the reading or writing that I want them to do. Mentally, it’s exhausting.
Caleb has been a thing and I know he’s three and almost a half, but Jon and I are at full tilt max capacity with taking care of him. He doesn’t play on his own for very long and still very much needs our attention all the time. From the moment he is up at 7:30 until the nap at 3-5 and then again until almost 11 he is UP and busy and needs us so much to play. If you are doing the math, that’s only 10-11 hours of sleep and it’s a fight to get him to sleep that much. And he fights when he doesn’t get his way and won’t listen to us when we want him to do things like sit on the potty for 30 seconds just to see if he needs to poo. And I mean FIGHT. This morning’s fight to get him to sit ended in tears. He’s making potty training traumatic for himself.
Ok. At this point, for all our structure and routine, we do the same damn thing ever damn day at the same time every damn day, he still fights us like it’s going to change. By 10pm I’ve lost my fight, my smile, and my charm. Jon always steps in at this point because he has about 10% more patience than I do, and we are very patient people.
This on top of trying to deal with the textbook change and writing all my lesson plans from scratch. We can’t do this forever, or for much longer. Something’s got to give and my sanity is at stake.
Next week, I’m making the lesson plans a little on the easier side by exploring classic Poe. These kids haver never heard of Oedipus Rex!!!!! I actually had to full on explain Plato’s analogy of the cave, because I was teaching what an analogy was and they have never heard of it. We are going to hone in on some classics like The Raven and The Tale Tell Heart because I’m honestly in shock on how much they don’t know. How are they going to grapple with Foucault’s Panopticon? It’s in the new text and I plan on teaching it because I know it well. These kids barely just learned how to wipe their bums!
Oh and baby Stella still isn’t here yet! Poor Kate, 40 weeks and three days. I texted her earlier and she said that she was having contractions, but they go away. I told her that if she has Stella after 12:08am she will officially be a Virgo. She’s pretty confident that Stella will not be coming today. She has an OB appointment tomorrow and I think they are going to induce her. So unless something dramatic changes, I’m going to win on naming Stella a Virgo. It was a long shot, but I could just tell from the way she was hanging that she was going to be in it for a long time. We’ll have a new baby in the family by the weekend for sure!
All of us have been cruising along on a large ball of stress and the house reflects that. I have no time to clean or to even stop and write, like I am now. I scheduled this time for me because if I don’t, I could just keep working forever. First year teaching is a fucker. I’m not only writing lesson plans at midnight because my child will not go down until 11pm, but I cannot shut off my brain from teaching. I’ve gotten to the point of carrying around my notebook just to write all my lecture ideas down just to get them out of my head, but it’s like a Hydra. As soon as I cut one head, two more pop up! I have more and more angles to think about the reading or writing that I want them to do. Mentally, it’s exhausting.
Caleb has been a thing and I know he’s three and almost a half, but Jon and I are at full tilt max capacity with taking care of him. He doesn’t play on his own for very long and still very much needs our attention all the time. From the moment he is up at 7:30 until the nap at 3-5 and then again until almost 11 he is UP and busy and needs us so much to play. If you are doing the math, that’s only 10-11 hours of sleep and it’s a fight to get him to sleep that much. And he fights when he doesn’t get his way and won’t listen to us when we want him to do things like sit on the potty for 30 seconds just to see if he needs to poo. And I mean FIGHT. This morning’s fight to get him to sit ended in tears. He’s making potty training traumatic for himself.
Ok. At this point, for all our structure and routine, we do the same damn thing ever damn day at the same time every damn day, he still fights us like it’s going to change. By 10pm I’ve lost my fight, my smile, and my charm. Jon always steps in at this point because he has about 10% more patience than I do, and we are very patient people.
This on top of trying to deal with the textbook change and writing all my lesson plans from scratch. We can’t do this forever, or for much longer. Something’s got to give and my sanity is at stake.
Next week, I’m making the lesson plans a little on the easier side by exploring classic Poe. These kids haver never heard of Oedipus Rex!!!!! I actually had to full on explain Plato’s analogy of the cave, because I was teaching what an analogy was and they have never heard of it. We are going to hone in on some classics like The Raven and The Tale Tell Heart because I’m honestly in shock on how much they don’t know. How are they going to grapple with Foucault’s Panopticon? It’s in the new text and I plan on teaching it because I know it well. These kids barely just learned how to wipe their bums!
Oh and baby Stella still isn’t here yet! Poor Kate, 40 weeks and three days. I texted her earlier and she said that she was having contractions, but they go away. I told her that if she has Stella after 12:08am she will officially be a Virgo. She’s pretty confident that Stella will not be coming today. She has an OB appointment tomorrow and I think they are going to induce her. So unless something dramatic changes, I’m going to win on naming Stella a Virgo. It was a long shot, but I could just tell from the way she was hanging that she was going to be in it for a long time. We’ll have a new baby in the family by the weekend for sure!
