First Day

I went to bed early and woke up to the tangy smell of cat urine. An unknown perpetrator decided to fill Shane's old infant tub with yellow water.

Carrie bought a new infant tub to deal with the boy now that he's a wiggling 25 lbs dumbbell, and she left the old one on the landing upstairs. After my shower, I stepped out of the bedroom and immediately smelled something 'funky.' At the time, I thought a cat might have done something downstairs so I went downstairs to keep getting ready and troubleshoot the aroma. I found an overflowing cat pot with some cat poop that missed the mark (yuck), but it didn't seem like the source of what I was smelling upstairs. I was wrist deep in cleaning up when Carrie called downstairs. She'd discovered the same smell I had. Shane was awake at this point, so she'd flipped the lights on and saw the pool simmering in the baby bath.

Good timing that Tuesday is trash day at least. Thank heaven for small blessings.

I spent a lot longer taking care of the trash and cleaning this morning than I expected and it almost made me late for the new 'on time' at work. When I got to my classroom, I discovered a new problem: poster-geddon. A veteran teacher should know that when using duct tape, the tape should be in horizontal rows to hold up posters on cement walls. Instead, I'd hung up the posters with the tape rolls being vertical. Gravity had down the rest and there were sags galore. On the posters where I hadn't used duct tape, there were some decorating the floor, one lying on my chair, and a couple had dropped behind the bookcase behind my desk. It definitely threw off my morning mojo.

The rest of the day went smoothly enough with the kids. I've taught long enough, that I feel like I can keep almost any group of middle schoolers busy for fifty minutes without incident. The kids seem like a nice bunch if a little immature, but that's nothing unexpected for my grade. They'll grow up as the year goes on, and I hope to help guide them along in science and social skills (especially any of my kids who are on the spectrum).

I've got a meeting tomorrow to kick off "evaluation season" that I'm not looking forward to, but I'm happy that I'm going to get it over sooner rather than later. I got that email this morning after finding my classroom in disarray, so the timing was less than perfect. I do want to see what I'm up against this year. That way I'll know how much of my worrying was paranoia and be able to get on with moving forward.

I do think I'm going to like the people I'm room sharing and co-teaching with this year. There are three other staff members who use my classroom, two that I borrow a classroom from, and two that I co-teach with. Being a special educator means you get around! One of the perks of co-teaching is that you do get to look at other teachers and see what they're doing and what they're good at to give you ideas of your own.