A Delicious Midlife Crisis

I am not quite sure I knew what overwhelmed meant until now.  I can't remember a time in my life when I have had so many new things thrown at me all at once.  Usually, I feel pretty on top of my life with my trusty little planner.  I write down everything I need to do and then joyfully put a thick black line through each item as I accomplish it.  Planners tend to become inefficient, though, when one's To-do List is about a page and a half long, as mine currently is.  The fact that I have a lot to do is probably not the most overwhelming thing, though.  I think the fact that I have so many things to remember is.   For example, the person who gives me my keys to the building is not the same person who gives me the code to stop the alarm when I enter it.  The lady who sets up my email address is not the same lady who changes my mailing address.  My code to use the copy machine is different from my code to log onto the computer.  Stephen comes to my room for 1.5 hours a day, but Jeremy is with me all BUT 1.5 hours a day.  Oh, and I got two new students in the past 3 days.  There are 12 different cables sitting with my computer, but I only actually use six of them and I don't know which six those are.  These are not the things you write in your planner.  These are things you just know.  Well, I guess "you" means people other than myself because I certainly don't know all of the unwritten (and written!) rules yet.  Somehow all of this is supposed to come together before next Thursday when my little students enter the classroom for the first time.  I have never in my life been so nervous for a first day of school.

We have had professional development training over the past few days.  Whenever I am not professionally developing, I am working in my classroom.  Everything about setting up my room has taken far longer than I expected (Exhibit A: Computer Cables), and my plight has been especially interesting because the other autism teacher's room is not finished yet.  Because of this, we will be sharing a room (17 students and 11 adults) for the first couple of weeks of school until her room is finished.  Her things are basically piled in the middle of my room right now because they have nowhere else to go.  I am getting stressed out just thinking about it.  Lately, I have been coming home and crashing at the end of the day because my brain is just overloaded.  Out of everything I have been learning, perhaps one of the most important is that I have a very patient and kind husband who is sweet to me even when I am at the end of my rope and tend to take things out on him at the end of the day.  Poor guy.

All worries aside, I have not lost faith in public schools.  This has been a topic which has arisen on several occasions lately, and all of my experiences with Roosevelt so far have led me to believe that great things are happening in public schools.  I think this is especially true for kids with special needs because public schools provide resources they would not be able to obtain otherwise.  (I do sometimes get nervous, though, in thinking about the fact that kids with autism move so that their neighborhood school will be Roosevelt and they can come to the autism program which I will be teaching.  Ahh!)  Will we send our kids to public school?  I guess that's a question for a later date, but for now, I am so happy to be at Roosevelt and to be a part of all that is going on there. 

On a different note, my best childhood friend, Carolyn, is in Oklahoma City this week!  She is doing a project for work here during the next week and a half, so she will be in and out of our house during that time.  We discovered tonight that this stretch of time will be the longest we've been in the same city since I was nine.

Also, my mom, Nana, and cousin (Shawna) came up this past weekend to visit.  We enjoyed just sitting around and talking, but I would say that by far my favorite thing was playing games with Nana.  She had us all almost in tears because we were laughing so hard as she acted out Mary Poppins and a taxi cab driver in Cranium.  And "the delicious midlife crisis" in Apples to Apples was pretty hilarious, too.

Time for this girl to hit the hay.  Have a great week.  :-)

In Christ alone,
Mary Rachel