A Rough Week

Last week was a rough week.  It's one of those weeks when you count your little blessings . . . like hoping that there are no clothes in the dryer when you need to move clothes out of the washing machine only to realize that of course there are clothes in the dryer (there are always clothes in the dryer), but it's just a load of towels.  You couldn't ask for an easier, quicker load to fold.  I call that a little blessing.

So why was last week rough?  I don't know.  It just was.  A student died and that set a challenging tone.  In comparison, the rest of the week wasn't all bad.  It was just busy, and full of pressure and, well, challenging.

• There was a shooting in Murray and two kids died, one of them was a student in my 6th period.  No one really knows what happened.  The kids were alone at the house at the time, were friends, neighbors, and had no known issues.  It seems that one of the boys shot the other and then went to another room of the house and shot himself.  There were several articles in the paper and they speculated that the two may have had had a fight (possibly over a girl); may have made some kind of double suicide pact; or perhaps (what seems more likely to me) were messing around with the gun and when it accidentally went off, the one who pulled the trigger panicked and shot himself, not knowing how else to cope with the situation. The student of mine was a sophomore, so I'd only known him for a couple of weeks and had had him in class exactly 4 times before this incident.  On the last meeting, I'd finally had a couple of conversations with him.  One was about the way he wrote his name on his paper because no one could read it and he proudly said, "that's my signature."  Next, he was working with a partner on an activity and was giving his partner a bad time.  He admitted that he just didn't want to do what he was supposed to do.  After prying a few answers out of him, I told him something like, "You are way to smart to be pretending you don't know how to do this."  He grinned and shrugged his shoulders.  The next class he was not there.  

• On Monday afternoon, Molly had her first dance class.  She was super excited to go and could hardly contain herself.  She couldn't really tell me what she did other than, "You put your hands like this . . ."

• After dance class, Molly went to a play with my mom, Elliott, and Wyatt.  Their 2nd cousin, Rilee was in a children's production of Alice In Wonderland.  The kids seemed to like it and Grandma said they were all really well behaved.

• Molly didn't sleep and was up every hour on the hour.  She seemed fine in the morning, so I didn't think anything of it.  I was just tired.

• Tuesday night James had a work dinner meeting.  This was the second one he went to.  It is for "networking" purposes and for learning the latest and greatest techniques for wound treatment.  He goes with one other guy from his office.

• Tuesday night we played outside.  The neighbor kids were emptying their garages (without any parents knowing) trying everything they could to lift off all the different manhole covers in the circle.  They finally lifted a water cover and started throwing things down it.  Yippy!  I had to be the mean adult to tell them to cut it out.  One of the neighborhood boys (who accompanied us to the mailbox that night) also tried to tell me that his family's mailbox was the big one with the key stuck in it.

• Tuesday night, Molly was up again in the night.  I couldn't figure out why.  She kept going back to sleep, but she was just awake so frequently.  

• On Wednesday, I slept in . . .  like REALLY slept in.  We try to leave our house at 7:00, but I think I woke up at 6:50.  Oh crap!  We were in our car by about 7:23 and school starts at 7:50.  The traffic at 7:23 was terrible compared to the traffic at 7:00, so it took us forever to get to school.  I called another teacher to open my door for me and once I got my own kids dropped off, I made it to class by about 8:02.  Late, but phew!

• Wednesday afternoon we got an e-mail from Ms. Sarah, the day care director, that one or possibly two kidlets had gone home with Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease.  Great!  "At least it's not us," I thought.

• Wednesday, I had an unproductive meeting after school.  I'll just leave it at that.

• When I picked up Molly and Jack on Wednesday afternoon, Molly was super grumpy, kept talking like she had a thick tongue, and literally kept slobbering so much I had to yell at her to knock it off.  After we'd been home a few minutes, I started to connect the dots and thought, "Hey, I wonder if something is wrong with her mouth."  Yep!  Her tongue was covered in gross canker sores.  Ta dum!  Hand, Foot, and Mouth.  James came home and I handed Jack to him and told him I was taking Molly to Instacare.  After a heated debate, I conceded and called our pediatrician's office instead.  It was almost 5:00, so there was no way I could take her in, but I was able to talk to a nurse.  She said that yes, she probably had the HFM, and that it wouldn't really benefit her to take her to Instacare.  She told us what to do for it and James and I looked at our schedules for taking the next couple of days off since she would be highly contagious until the sores began to heal.

• On Thursday James stayed home with the quarantined kid (and Jack). 

• Thursday morning, I had two challenging conversations at work.  I was a bit stuck in the middle of two teachers not communicating with each other.  I was trying to help one of them and could see the point of the other one, but really they had both dropped the ball with some professional responsibilities and . . . yeah.

• Thursday afternoon, I decided to go to a meeting with our administration about a change to our school's attendance/citizenship policy that I disagree with (and feel very strongly about, because I was involved in making some other changes to it 3 years ago).  There were four other teachers who came to the meeting and once it started, it lasted a long time.  The principal was late, which I wouldn't mention except that he, himself said he had only been golfing for "half the day."  We were able to voice some of our concerns and accepted an apology for the new policy changes not being well-communicated.  We also decided that we should get other input and try to collect some data on the effectiveness of the new policy, to perhaps change it back (or leave it) for next year.  By the time the meeting was over, I still had to put together my classroom and sub plans for the next day, since it was my turn to stay home with the quarantined.

• Friday, I stayed home.  It was great.  We continued to eat lots of ice cream and popsicles.  We watched movies and when Mom started to go stir crazy, we went for a ride in the car to see the elk and buffalo in South Jordan and the helicopters at Airport II. Molly was feeling better, mom got a day off, and Jack was just Jack! 

• On Friday night we wrapped up the week by celebrating Grandma Huber's 83rd birthday.  (We decided to come out of quarantine and just keep Molly away from slobbering on anyone.)  Grandpa invited us all to meet at her grave, where he gave a nice family prayer.  Then, all 40+ or so of us bombarded Crown Burger for dinner.  It was a fun night with family, a great way to remember Grandma Huber, and a good end to a crazy week.