Let's do this!

I've spent a lot of time in my room getting it all ready.  It looks a lot different than last year and is also a lot more organized.  I'm hopeful that things can only be better having a year under my belt.  I have ultimately decided that knowing what's going on is definitely a good thing.

My night-terrors have been rearing their ugly heads again this past week.  I flew out of bed in an intense state of panic with an image of Evangeline falling across the computers in my classroom.  After I successfully woke up Kyle (a.k.a. the sleeping beast) and then spent what felt like hours of lying there with my heart pumping and my mind racing before finally falling back to sleep, I was awoken again with that terrible nightmare of being late to school.  Let the good times role...

Here are some pictures I took just before open house.  It will not look this organized and clean again until this time next year.

The blank green board is reserved for student work and the red one will be for a few charts.

This is my new writing center.  I'm pretty pumped to see how this new arrangement works out.

My friend Carrie Miller came over for coffee on Tuesday morning.  She student taught in the classroom next to me last year.  She is beginning her first year of teaching (1st grade) and is considering taking a 3 and 5-year-old in for foster care. She already has a 9 and a 14-year-old of her own.  She has to give the social worker their answer by today.  She has taken foster kids before, but decided that she had so much going on that she needed a break from it.  However, she feels that she is being called to take these two kids.  Wow, as I talked with her I felt that I had no right to complain about feeling stress about the upcoming school year compared to all she had going on.  She said that "if God leads you to it, He will see you through it".  I like Carrie, she has all kinds of little sayings like that.  Last year she told me "just do your best and let God take care of the rest".  That saying saw me though the second semester and has become one of my mantras.

Here is a picture of my little big girl before heading off to her second year of preschool. 

 

She was really looking forward to taking her new Hello Kitty backpack that she got for her birthday. 

She was very excited to start a new year at Ms. Linda's, however when I dropped her off she stood frozen holding her little blanket.  I kept looking back at her as I made my way out the door and she had never moved.  She didn't cry though, which gave me peace of mind as I left.  I know she warmed up though.  She came home with all kinds of stories.  She also peed outside in the rocks on the playground because she was having too much fun playing to stop and go potty.