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Sweet daughter came home from school and said, "I have to do spelling and times tables homework. I need help with the times tables." I told her to start on her spelling and call me when she needed help with math. She was really quite for 20 or so minutes then I asked if she needed help on the times tables. She said, "No mommy, I used your calculator." Little stinker.

Sweet daughter is so excited that tomorrow is December- she has been walking around saying "Merry Christmas, Mommy."

I have one final at 8 am tomorrow for Earthquake and Volcanoes. I am so over that class, I don't even want to study for it. On a happy note-the buy back for the E and V book is $47; pretty good considering it was a $100 book.

Son of a Bitch!

The head cold I've been trying to avoid all last week snuck up on me while I was sleeping! I've got a few Airborne left so after this I'm dragging my sorry ass to the store to buy more. I was all ready to become an official spokesperson for the stuff-I'll really know if it works if this cold is gone in a few days.

Sweet daughter has been bugging us to go bowling so yesterday we indulged her and went. We had a great time but it was expensive! The family bowled 2 games together, the the sweet girl bowled 2 by herself, 8 games total and we left with a $50 tab! Wow! I should have looked for some coupon or something! Oh well, sweet girl had fun and she even got a couple of strikes.

Last night I did something I have never done before, I went full fledged grocery shopping! Not just run in and pick up a few things but all the groceries for the week. It was really nice, no one was there and most of the shelves were stocked. Now I have pretty much the whole day to relax; I think I'm going to see Harry Potter with my mom this afternoon and work on a half finished sweater. Tomorrow I will have to start cramming for my two finals.

The Calm After the Storm

I survived, it was a little touch and go for awhile but I did survive.....My Tuesday test went remarkably well, sweet daughter and wimpy husband recovered from their colds (however, husband is lucky he didn't get smacked upside the head because he was driving me crazy), I guess the Airborne worked because I never got sick, and my Thanksgiving was nice and relaxed.

I have two finals late next week, then I have five weeks of nothing! What to do....what to do....

Sick....They're all sick.

• Friday morning-Daughter wakes up feeling terrible. She has been sick for a week- her mean parents make her go to school all week- sickness has caught up with her - she needs to stay home from school which means I have to stay home from work.
• Friday afternoon- I get time to study for big test on Tuesday. I also get many calls from work.
• Friday evening- Husband comes home from work sick. Great...Now I have two babies to deal with.
• Friday night- Gather essentials for American Public Schools presentation. Go to craft store to get stuff for daughters Rainforest poster that is due Monday.
• Saturday Morning- Get up early, must look cute for presentation. Go to drugstore for husband. Tell husband I must go to work after presentation, very, very, busy....he says, "I guess you have to do what you have to do." Do presentation. Go to work; very,very busy.
• Saturday evening- Study for Tuesday test.
• Sunday morning- Study for test.
• Sunday afternoon- Get rainforest poster started...daughter interested in poster for exactly 20 minutes...I finish poster. I START TO FEEL SICKLY.
• Sunday evening- Order pizza for dinner. Study for test.
• Monday morning- Over sleep. Take more Airborne for cold. Go to work; very, very busy.
• Monday afternoon- Take nap and go for walk with daughter. Review 11 pages of notes for test on Tuesday.
• Monday evening- Exausted....must study.

Final Thursday

I have spent my day wrapping up various school projects that are due in the few days. I considered going to work today but I really needed a quite day and a bit of a mental health day. I finished my presentation for American Public Schools, finished the evil term paper for the vile philosophy class, spent 1 1/2 hours studying for my Educational Psychology test, and I even took a nap, all before 2:30. Now I can spend the afternoon picking up my house, yeah.

On the wimp front, my mother-in-law broke it to the cousins that we are not going to their house for Thanksgiving. Whew, that is a load of my mind! I was going to wimp out and call and just leave a message on the answering machine but I kept forgetting. So the Thanksgiving plan is to have my mom and mother-in-law over to our house. The last time my husband and I hosted Thanksgiving there was a BIG ice storm, lets hope that doesn't happen this year.

The last day

Today was my last tutoring day and I had a revelation about the WWT-she has got her freaking hands full! I felt sorry for her today because she had a good lesson planned and was trying to fight through it but she has got three kids that just suck up her energy. All three of them are looking for some kind of attention positive or negative; one clearly had some ADD issues, one is just crying out for attention- lots and lots of attention-he can't do anything without someone standing right next to him, and the third one just refuses to do any work at all. The whole class needs a different discipline program for example, today a boy was writing on his chair and WWT yelled at him about what his was doing was valdalism and against the law--like a second grader cares. I would have told him to get up, get some cleaner, and wash down his chair not just the mark, the whole chair--if he did it again, he could wash down his chair and five others during recess.

I could go on and on about what I would do different in this class but my time is over, I'm tired, I'm ready finish this semester, and get on to the next semester.

10 days...10 days...10 days...

First of all...why am I awake so early on a Sunday morning. I should so be sleeping in but ever since the time change I have lost the ability to sleep past 7.

I have 10 days left until the end of the semester, Hallelujah! I have planned out every last bit of homework down to the minute. I did this elaborate schedule because I don't have any extra brain power to waste on unintended work. Today on the schedule is Educational psychology and a reflection on the WWT. I also need to go to my Mom's house so we can edit my term paper for the life sucking philosophy class. Total time (I hope) three hours, tops!

Friday night, my sweet baby girl begged her Daddy-o to sleep in his spot i.e. she wanted to sleep with Mommy. Daddy said fine and everything was going great (we were sleeping) until about 3:30 a.m. when she started tossing and turning and woke me up. After about 45 minutes of all the wiggling I asked her what the problem was, she had to go potty. When she got back I realized she was burning up! Poor thing had a temperature of a 102. I went to get her some water and grape flavored Advil which she promptly threw up....in my bed. I got my sweet girl settled on the couch, striped the bed, made the bed, started the washing machine, got her back into bed, found a different flavor of Advil (thank goodness she kept that down) finally, about 5 a.m., I fell into bed and of course, I couldn't sleep. You can probably guess, I was really tired yesterday and according to my homework schedule, I had to finish the evil paper...this is the life of a Mommy, always fun times.

Tuesday...I mean Thursday Tutoring

Tuesday tutoring was canceled because the Worlds Worst Teacher's class went on a field trip so I had to make up my time today. Fortunately, I got the "go to the hall and read" reprieve. Yes! We were reading a book about baseball and there were whole lot of words and concepts these kids had never heard of -- after we finished reading, I had to go over all the weird words and concepts so they would get the gist of the story and then reread the story. After reading, we played math games for 45 minutes so there wasn't too much teacher screeching today, thank God because I don't think I can take much more of the WWT. Next week I'll be done, finally.

I have to write a reflection for my American Public Schools class about my observation/tutoring experience. It's only supposed to be one page; I'm going to have a really hard time condensing my 20 hours of 2nd grade hell into one page.

Pumpkin Puddle

Since schools don't celebrate Halloween anymore the librarian at my daughters school started pumpkin decorating contest. This was the first year Maddie participated and she decorated a pumpkin like Camilla Cream from A Bad Case of the Stripes. As luck would have it and not a whole lot of people entered-she won first place for Funniest Pumpkin. For days I wanted to take her picture with the prize winning pumpkin but today I discovered Camilla leaking all over the fireplace hearth. I tried to scoop her up with a spatulla and dump her into a bag however she didn't make it in all in one piece so now I have sticky leaky pumpkin guts all over. This was an excellent reason to mop the floor really good.

So this is your warning-toss the Halloween pumpkins.

The semester is almost over...14 more days...

Parent Teacher Conference

For me, the hardest time of my daughter school year is parent teacher conference ( I stopped going to beginning of the year open house-that was just too brutal). I generally end up in tears because it is made so clear to me how she is not like the other kids, academically or socially. This year was a pleasant surprise because her teacher said, "This is Maddie's fall conference and we are here to talk about how well she is doing." We went through how well she is adapting to 5th grade and while she still is lagging and the gap is getting bigger, she is having some successes in her regular classroom. Her resource teacher was also in attendance and she said Maddie's reading didn't seem like it had progressed much, in reality after doing some assessments, she has moved up about a year. Maddie's speech teacher was also there and said she was plugging along. Her teacher also told me how kind and sweet her classmates are to her; they are careful to include her in what she can do and one boy always tells her that she is doing a great job.

So not too many tears for me today just the same anxieties about what her future is going to be like, how are we going to get through puberty, and what does Jr. High hold. I allow myself a few pity party tears a year and today is my day. I think my next one is scheduled for December 1st when we get together for her ARD.

Thanksgiving Dilemma

One of the reasons I married my husband was because of his great extended family. The first time I met them was 18 years ago on Thanksgiving; I think it was the best Thanksgiving I ever had. I was welcome into his family with open arms, like I had been around for years and I was everyone's best friend. We fried turkey, ate a huge meal and later, after football, we broke out the cards and played Tripoli. I really looked forward to Thanksgiving with them because it was everything my family was not.

Well needless to say, things have changed over the past 18 years, one cousin moved away, my sister-in-law and her family moved about three years ago and the kicker, summer 04 the cousins who have hosted Thanksgiving for the past 11 years filed for divorce after 20 years of marriage. Last year Thanksgiving was so not fun - the divorcing cousins were there and no one knew what to say or how to act, my mother-in-law didn't show up because she was uncomfortable around them, and they (the cousins) invited all these extra people that I had no idea who they were. I know it's their house and they can invite who (or is it whom, I never know) ever they want but it kind of turned into a free for all for a bunch of neighborhood teenagers. Nobody bothered to introduce the hanger-on-ers. I introduced myself to a few but they so were not interested in talking to a 30 something mom. After dinner all the people either retired to the garage to watch football and smoke or to the patio to chat and smoke. I don't like football and don't smoke so there was not a lot going on for me. I spent the afternoon coloring and watching a cartoon with my daughter waiting for halftime so we could leave. Last year I promised myself I would not go back because I had such a miserable time.

Fast forward to this year-said cousins sent a invitation for Thanksgiving and there is my dilemma-since I don't have any family in Dallas to speak of- should I just suck it up and go to the cousin's house for the sake of my husband? After all it's his family and I think he would like to see them, truth be told, they live 15 miles from here and the last time we saw them was last Thanksgiving. I would much rather stay home and have my own Thanksgiving than be subjected to five or six hours of total boredom. My husband is sweet and says he'll do whatever I want to do but I'm pretty sure he'd like to see the cousins.

What to do...what to do...Thanksgiving now sucks.

Foul Friday Philosophy

Three more foul philosophy classes remain....nine class room hours left....It can't come soon enough....I feel the life force being sucked out of me already and I don't have to be in class for two more hours.

On a note from the homefront...I have cleaned the guest/hallway bathroom and the office/TV room is now picked up. My desk is in another room so that is still a disaster. My house is driving me crazy; it's a toss up as to what is sucking the life force out of me more-my messy house or the evil philosophy class. I'm pretty sure it's the philosophy class.

I think I passed

For the last two days I've been cramming for an Earthquake and Volcano test. The previous test was a disaster for everyone in the class for a lot of reasons, unprepared professor, overworked professor, poor review, excuse me, I mean no review, and the list goes on and on. This time we had a so-so review and some kind soul posted all of the review notes on our class message board so I think I might have done OK.

Here's the thing about this class-the lectures are really good and very interesting but the professors interest in the success of his students is marginal. I turned in a journal assignment 5 weeks ago and I have not got it back-the next set of journals are due next week; I have no idea how I did on the last set so I can't make any adjustments for this set. The professor said he would post the test review online Tuesday afternoon but he never did- it's a good thing someone else did. I know he is overwhelmed with grading 180 papers, teaching four classes, raising money...yada, yada, yada but I'm really busy too and I somehow manage to make it. I'm vacillating between being pissed off and having pity for this guy. Many, many, many people are complaining to the head of his department trying to get him fired however I can't waste my precious mental energy on revenge-oh well, I'll be done in a few weeks. Off to write a paper for the life sucking philosophy class.

I must mention the state of my house....It's a freaking disaster area! I'm seriously thinking of applying for federal aid to help in the clean up- at the minimum the Red Cross needs to set up an aid station outside of my house so I can have some fresh coffee. It gets like this at the end of every semester- housework gets neglected and papers, books, homework and notes are spread out on the floor all around my desk. My husband asked if he could help me clean up my desk area. Are you a crazy person! I'll never be able to find anything if I do! 20 more days, 20 more days, 20 more days.

The Countdown Begins!

I don't have much to say today because I have a HUGE headache-I took three Advil, one Decongestant, and washed it down with a Coke-I hope I feel better soon.

Random thoughts about tutoring today-

• PK was absent today-not because he was sick-he was sent to another school for a few days so he can think about his bad behavior. Whatever-I have so much to say about that but I can't due to my ENORMOUS headache.
• School counselor came into the classroom to talk about responsibly- kids had a hard time figuring out what responsibly was- I think that concept is a bit above their heads.
• Police officer came into talk about bus safety- class across the hall came in to watch safety film- teachers kept telling kids to be quiet during movie but were yacking away themselves.
• I think too much seat work is assigned to this class.
• I have been tutoring with WWT for eight weeks-I wear a badge with my picture and name on it-she still does not know my name-she keeps calling me Stephanie.
• Two more weeks until I'm done with the World's Worst Teacher.
• Not tutor related but 23 days left until the end of the semester.