I'm sitting here sipping my tiny cup of coffee, enjoying the quiet before my daughter wakes up. Matt is having a swim at the gym, and I'm enjoying the peace -- I try to be especially conscious of moments like this because I know that soon, for awhile anyway, I'm going to have to find my peace in different places. (That's my way of saying I know this house will never be quiet AGAIN, for YEARS, probably. But today I'm okay with that.) It's also nice to be awake and showered and doing things before Suzannah wakes up, especially on a weekend. Everyone with kids knows that they're somehow programmed to wake up far earlier on weekends than they do on weekdays, no matter what time they went to bed the night before. Yesterday morning, my wild-haired little girl marched into the bedroom and said, "Mama, get up get up get up." Well, good morning to you too.
I've really been savoring moments in general -- I'm particularly conscious of the dwindling time we have as a family of three. Yesterday we all piled into the car and drove to Mt. Rainier for a somewhat spontaneous day trip, and all day I found myself thinking things like, "This will be the last time we go hiking here as as family of three," or "The next time we drive by this place, we'll have two kids in the back." I don't feel sad by this, although sometimes knowing that my time with just Suzannah is nearly over is a little bittersweet; I say it more with a sense of wonder, I guess, because I am already so aware of this little person kicking away inside me and he or she already feels like such a part of our family.
Matt has been feeling the baby kick from the outside over the past ten days or so, which is cool because I love sharing this part of pregnancy with him. He has to be a little patient sometimes, because this kid is a stinker -- she'll be kicking so much I can see my belly moving everywhere and I'll go, "Matt, get over here, Baby is having a PARTY IN MY BELLY." And he'll put one hand on me and Baby's all, okay, naptime. (I wonder if his hands will have the same calming effect when we can actually hold our baby? He doubts it.) But last night after Suzannah went to bed, we curled up in the family room to watch an episode of Mad Men and Baby woke up big-time. So I grabbed Matt's hand and moved it to my belly, and pretty soon we both felt those little feet pushing back up at us.
"Whoa -- wow," Matt said after a particularly forceful kick. "That's...weird." I just laughed, because I've actually never met a man who wasn't a little weirded out by all the tumbling around in a pregnant woman's belly, like it's a little alien invader. It's still my absolute favorite part of pregnancy.
Other things I'm savoring: my last Sunday morning before school starts For Real. I head back on Tuesday for two days of in-service/professional development/mind-numbingly boring and depressing stuff that doesn't matter and makes me want to quit every year, and then the kids come back on Thursday. Don't worry, I cope with the boring and depressing stuff by ignoring it. I learned years ago that if I want to feel hopeful, energetic and excited by the first day of school, I have to literally put my head down and pay ABSOLUTELY NO ATTENTION to all the things they throw at us about what we have to do to save public education, which involves more and more work and is usually nothing that actually matters to kids. Once I'm in my classroom, doing my thing, it all falls into place and I fall right back in love with the romance of September. My other coping mechanism this year is to remind myself that I only have to do survive for a couple of months if it's really that bad. I'm teaching two sections of freshmen for the first time, although I'm actually pretty excited about this. I'd rather teach freshmen than seniors any day. I loved my juniors last year, but when they whine about why I'm not teaching senior English I have to explain that it's because I would like to continue to love them, which would never happen if I had to listen to them whine about how THEY'RE SO DONE by the middle of September.
Class sizes are apparently huge this year. Thank you, budget cuts.
At least I have new notebooks.
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