Amy and her dad 22 years or so ago.

Florida post!

It's 90 degrees. I'm tanning nicely. And I can't wait to go swimming. I cannot wait to get into public school and out of the center so that I can have summers off. I am so traveling the globe. Lookout world, here I come.

I snapped this pic at work today. One of my students and his baby brother. There's something to be said about black and white photographs. There's also something to be said about brotherly love.

Hi again. Long time no see. I apologize. Things have been rather crazy here, and I needed a bit of a break anyway. Let me catch you up.

Mother's Day is this weekend. Which means I've spent the last three days, and will spend the next two days creating crafts for the children to give their mothers on Friday. So far we've created clay handprint, which didn't work because the clay we have is the wrong type. When the kids picked up the hands after they had dried, the fingers broke off. I can't risk having the kids give their parents a gift that may well be shooting them the bird. I can hear it now, "Exactly what are you teaching my child?" I eventually gave up on that idea around Tuesday afternoon after a messy incident with Elmers glue.

Today I scraped together enough material to have the children make picture frames out of a much easier to work with clay (Thank God for Crayola.) We glued a piece of decorative material to poster board, put the kid's handprint in the middle with acrylic paint (we didn't have fabric paint, but it worked all the same), painted their names and the date on the material, and added the clay frame (more Elmers glue). I trimmed off the extra material and tomorrow the kids are going to use water colors to paint the frames. I might mention that the clay looks and feels like marshmallows, only not so sticky. I wanted to eat it all morning long. It has the consistency of one of those foam stress relieving balls. It's hard to explain.

Also, I've been haphazardly preparing for the closing of one of our sister centers. (I work in one of three centers run by the same bureau.) This means that I'm getting a handful of new children next week pushing my number of 4 year olds to twenty-three. I keep asking if they're going to give me more room for that many children, but so far the administration won't budge. I guess some of the students will have to sleep in the bathroom, closet, and hallway at nap time. Where else am I supposed to put them? Perhaps I'll suggest "bunk cots" and I'll stack them five high.

In other news, I received my first grade in the masters class I'm taking. Yes that's right, 4 units, 4 assignments each unit, for a total of 16 papers. Each unit is graded as a whole. Who's going to guess what my grade was? Yep. A's all around. So far so good.

7 more days of work until my vacation begins.