Letter to Rosalind

Dear Rosalind,

You are a little over five months old and in the last couple of weeks you have absolutely exploded with new talents. Don't get me wrong, you have been growing and changing and learning at a pretty steady rate since you were born. Even with all of that growth, though, you still fit mostly into the category of immobile blob.

Not anymore.

You are a lean, mean (chubby, sweet?) baby food eating, rolling over, sleeping in your own bed all night, right on the verge of crawling machine. A lot of this new-found talent can be attributed to day care, and let me just say, you LOVE day care. And they love you. Which makes me happy. You have learned a sort of army crawl that gets you from place to place enough to almost follow the older kids. If you can get your hands, feet, and knees just slightly more coordinated you will be off to the races. In the meantime you do a magnificent push-up.

Since I mentioned the sleeping in your own bed thing I guess I will give the details. You have been a kind of not so great sleeper. You needed to be swaddled and using a pacifier to fall asleep, and then you wanted in our bed after the first wake-up. So I let you. But it was not ideal for either of us. Every time I moved you thought you needed to eat and then you would come unswaddled and get all kicky and punchy. I have been watching you for a couple of weeks now and noticed you don't puke in your sleep anymore and you don't really eat much at night despite the appearance that you do. So we checked out the Ferber book, took away your pacifier and swaddling blanket, and prepared for a crappy night by renting movies and making cocktails. And then you cried halfheartedly for less than fifteen minutes before passing out for five hours. You woke up and cried twice in the night and put yourself back to sleep in under ten minutes. You woke up another four or five times but simply played with your crib toy until you fell back asleep.

You continue to shock me nearly everyday. Last night was the first night I have slept alone in my bed all night since you were born. Joy!

You are great right now. Everyone you meet likes you. You even went to class with daddy one day and made friends with his classmates. I took you to work and you were taken away by some of the coworkers for hours at a time. When they brought you back you were taken over by sixth and seventh graders. The day care gets mad if we hold you out for a day because they miss you. Nobody believes that you were ever intense or unhappy in any way. I don't know how it happened but your father and I somehow produced a people person. Way to go, Rosalind.

Love,
Mama

(Please, please, please do not let me be jinxing the sleeping thing by writing about it!)

Prunes!

She Fought the Law

She was tried as an adult and has been serving some prison time.

She was thrilled the day she was granted parol.















Now she makes her money as a wrestling coach.

GreenBeans

Cleaning Is Decidedly Not My Talent

When you go into teaching you really hope that you will get your own classroom one day. Most schools are so overcrowded that new teachers put their supplies on a cart and squat in other teachers rooms for awhile, dreaming about how they will decorate one day when the room is theirs.

I, on the other hand, am taking over for a person who had two classrooms. One in the middle school and one in the high school. Through no fault of this person he had to leave them completely as is for me to take over. This means I have to clean 32 years worth of stuff out of TWO classrooms.

Careful what you wish for.

I have been wondering if it is excusable to have students do my filing the first day of school, since I have hardly been able to to look at planning lessons yet. I am thinking that might be frowned upon.

Now With Words...But Just a Few

After what seemed like an eternity filled with studying Sergio finally took the Bar Exam last week. If it felt like an eternity to me then I can only imagine what it felt like to Sergio. Though it was a really useful excuse when, say, the baby was crying, or needed a bath, or woke up in the middle of the night.
"But I need to study!"
And I was all set to let him take over some of the baby night duties when he up and got a temporary associate position in the legal department of the largest retailer in the world (yes, we are aware of the irony of him getting this position). So, no night duties for Sergio.
Which brings us to our first (and probably only) visit to a daycare today. It is a little privately run place in a cute bungalow off the square. Only about ten or twelve kids and the first one we saw was running around in a cloth diaper. We had been worried some of the chain daycares wouldn't look too kindly on cloth. It felt like a good place and I think we are going to start her off going one day a week to get used to it. Then when I start substitute teaching or (fingers crossed) get a real teaching job eventually, she will go full time.
There was a time the thought of leaving her for more than an hour or so was almost crippling, but now we both seem ready. She gets bored if it is just the two of us all day, and I can't seem to get much done with her around. I am also hoping someone more strong-willed than me can get her to take a nap all alone and on a regular schedule. My goals in life have shrunk considerably.