Yesterday afternoon the kids and I came home to discover one of the neighbor’s dachshunds had escaped from their yard. I was busy unloading our school things from the car and herding the kids through the back door when I heard the barking behind me. I know that bark, but it sounded awfully close. I turned around to see that sweet but rather shrill little girl wiggling with pleasure right there in my garage. So I scooped her up and carried her next door to her grateful owners, who had no idea their gate had been left open a crack, and somehow I wound up with their three (human) boys in exchange.
No, it was fine -- their oldest is Suzannah’s age, and the youngest is Isaac’s age, and there’s one in the middle, so they make pretty great playmates for my children. It’s just a lot of energy for a sunny afternoon at the end of a week, so I was grateful both for the weather and for our fenced, kid-friendly backyard. I was happy to host, but I was admittedly a much more cheerful host when I could tell those five energetic children they needed to find games to play outside rather than in the family room, where they tend to make short work of dumping every toy in the house onto the middle of the floor.
Yesterday, I thought, would be the last truly warm and sunny day of the season -- a fitting end to the week and a nice way to greet the fall. The news promised rain today, and mostly, I’m fine with that. Fall always feels like my favorite season, although I love the turning of every season. Still, when I woke to sunshine this morning, it felt like a blessing. Matt would be able to finish mowing our wildly overgrown lawn, and it was a beautiful morning for a 5k. The kids at my school put on their second annual Colorsplash 5k, and I ran it for the second time today. It was a ton of fun, as it was last year -- you want to keep me going on a run, especially one with some hills, then line the route with high school kids cheering. Especially kids who know me and throw brightly colored powder all over me. I’m telling you, my next ordinary evening run through the quiet streets of my neighborhood might feel a little anticlimactic.
Seriously, though, while I had no hand in today’s event other than showing up and running it, it reminded me that I work with really fantastic people -- both the adults and the teenagers. The teenagers were there at absurd o’clock on a Saturday morning to pull this off, and everyone had a fantastic time. Teachers, administrators, people running with strollers, people running with pets, and tons and tons of kids -- kids I don’t always get to see outside the classroom, kids who seem to be involved in everything, kids who I honestly didn’t expect to ever see at a school event that didn’t strictly require their presence without the threat of detention. I ran the race today with all of them, and it was a privilege.
I’m slowly -- slowly! -- finding my groove this year. I’ve been back in the classroom for a couple of weeks. I haven’t managed to settle into a routine bedtime, unfortunately, and I don’t do well with long stretches of not-quite-enough sleep; it colors everything. However, I get to work with a really great student teacher and a lot of absolutely fantastic students this year, and in the first two weeks of school they have filled me with joy and laughter and hilarity and absurdity like only teenagers can. I also have some challenging kids -- some of them (most of them) are really lovable. Some of them break my heart. (Often, those are the same kids.) Some of them make me want to drink wine straight from the bottle. All of them deserve the best I can give them, and those are the kids who inspire and require me to truly be at the top of my game.
In other words, it’s back to business as usual.
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