Big Changes

In May the county I work for laid off all part time teachers, so I found myself for the first time in my life contemplating unemployment- not fun. I almost became a middle school Family & Consumer Science teacher, probably not the best job for someone whose blog is all about what a mess she makes & how she's totally domestically challenged! I have a very domestically inclined mom AND a best friend who is like the Italian Martha Stewart (who would have been in the room next door- big upside & #1 reason I was pursuing the job)- so I figured we'd have lots of "guest speaking" opportunities. In the end, I got re-hired at my previous school and will be teaching KINDERGARTEN again, full-time. I'm thrilled to be going back to Kindergarten, not so sure about how the full time thing is going to go with the kids & responsibilities around the house. We're all going to have to adjust.

For right now the plan is that daddy has the kids in the morning, we have a sitter come to the house from 12-4/3 days, 1:15ish-5/2 days (Pnut will be going to Pre-School 2 days/week!!- more fun changes!!) and I'll be home hopefully earlier than 4/5. I'm feeling pretty good about the arrangement since the kids will still be with daddy all morning, they nap from 2-4 and then I'll be home. I'll really only be missing 2 "awake" hours with them that I had previously. Of course I'll also be missing the 2 hours that they nap where I got stuff done, but we'll just have to figure that out when we get to it!

In preparation for going back to Kindergarten I've been doing a lot of online research & reading K teacher's blogs, so now I'm going to get to post some of the great stuff I've found & want to use on here! I'm seriously cringing a bit when I think about ALL the stuff I gave away when I left K 4 years ago. There are SO many things I have to re-make or re-buy. I spent 2.5 hours the other day writing out some poems for the poetry center- did 24, filled up a whole $7.50 chart tablet (that I'm now going to bring to my mom to have her illustrate- thanks for volunteering mom!!) and realized that I had only made a very small dent in the poetry notebook. Of course all the research has created additional work/$ spending plans to incorporate all the cool ideas I've found...c'est la vie of the full time Kindergarten teacher! Twist my arm...