Last Friday marked the conclusion of the first week of school. It wasn’t a full week, but it was close since we started on Tuesday. A few teachers wanted to complain about that— The first week of school usually starts on a Thursday to ease us all in! —until I reminded them that if we’d done it that way, we would have had to start the Thursday before to get in all the required days. Unpopular opinion that’s probably better left unspoken but I’m not too good at that: Teachers will always find something to complain about. Always. Fridays are my favorite day of the week. Even though it’s a school day, there’s such a festive feel in the air: fun music floats from classrooms as you walk down the hallway; the kids have an extra pep in their step; recesses are a little longer; a word search might take the place of pages in the grammar book. We have this deal at our school where teachers can pay $1 each Friday to wear jeans, and at the end of the year, we giv...
I used to be one of those people that things just happened for. It was part of the innocent charm I was born with: without even realizing I was doing it, I simply believed good things would happen for me, and they did. I’ve mentioned before that I was a person who ambled through life wearing rose-colored glasses, stopping to smell every flower. I didn’t think about failure. I didn’t really think about anything. I walked blissfully through life, letting good things befall me because I didn’t question that they would. And they always did. My friends both marveled at it and hated me for it. Senior year of high school, I had no doubt that I would be voted homecoming queen. So when the assistant principal’s voice crackled through the intercom and she started announcing the ten girls who had been chosen by their peers to be on homecoming court, I sat back in my chair and waited patiently. I knew I would hear my name. I wasn’t even s...
“Hey, Mom,” my 16-year-old son said to me as we sat in our sunroom together one Saturday morning recently, “how are you going to spend two entire nights at Uncle DJ’s house and not fight with him?” I paused, coffee cup halfway to my mouth, suddenly deep in thought. “I hadn’t thought about that,” I murmured. “Maybe we should cancel the trip.” My husband and two teenagers and I were planning to stay at my younger brother’s house in Las Vegas for two nights before hitting the MGM Grand for a night, then driving our rental car four hours to Los Angeles to spend the last two days and nights of our spring break trip hitting every single tourist trap L.A. had to offer (update: it was amazing) before hopping on a plane to fly us all the way back across the country to Missouri. My younger brother DJ has been in the military for the last 26 years and he’s always living in really exotic, faraway locations, so we don’t see each other very often. Maybe once every couple of ...
Comments
Post a Comment