Emerging from the craziness

I didn't blog yesterday. At 9:00, I realized I could either go to bed or blog, and I chose bed. Sorry.

I'm realizing that I'm in a better mood and that things don't get to me as easily if I'm somewhat well rested, so I'm really making an effort to be in bed by 9:30. Anyway...

I mentioned in my last post that things have been crazy. As far as work goes, we've been getting ready for a visit from these people. Now, I don't know to what lengths your school prepares for these visits, but our extremely Type-A principal (and I feel okay typing that because I would say that to his face, and he knows it anyway) has been treating it as though President Obama himself were going to be coming into each and every classroom. Anyway, the visit was Tuesday, and apparently we "passed," so that's good news. I spent all last Saturday cleaning and organizing my classroom which is something that needed to be done anyway, but I felt I needed to do it before the committee came.

In addition, my juniors have been writing research papers. Any teacher who reads this blog knows what a painful process that can be. I was somewhat encouraged when we started the assignment and my students all acted that they were fully aware of what parenthetical citations and a works cited page were (they usually act as though I'm speaking a foreign language), but when drafts were handed to me with neither of those, I just wanted to bang my head against the wall. The papers are done now, thank goodness, but I realize that I now have 80 research papers waiting for me to grade. Yippee!

On the home front...Darryl's good. Amelia has been a little sickly and irritable lately, but we have discovered that she is cutting her molars, and a doctor's visit revealed she has an ear infection. For the record, I'd like to say the child never has an ear infection when she shows all the signs--pulling the ears, refusing to eat, etc.--but has one when she shows no signs whatsoever. Last night she really started seeming like her happier self; I'm wondering if it has something to do with the fact that she tried cheesecake for the first time. Man, she loved that stuff. Goodness knows cheesecake can put a smile on my face.

So anyway, add all that stuff to the normal routine of having to get up early, teaching all day, doing laundry, emptying and loading the dishwasher, trying to keep the house in a somewhat decent presentable fashion, spending some quality time with family, catching up on TV (which deserves another post soon), and such, and life has just been busy.

And this update wasn't really all that exciting, was it?