The Last Day

I have sad news to report. Very sad news. Today is my last day of summer vacation. The kids don't come back until Friday, but I return tomorrow. Where did my vacation go? It went by so quickly. I didn't do nearly as many things as I wanted to do. In fact, what did I do? Oh yeah...I worked. Yes, I worked during my vacation. Does anyone else see how wrong that statement is? It's like being back in high school and having evil AP teachers assigning huge massive projects to do over the break. One year, my class walked into our AP history classroom to see "Vacation Homework" written on the board with several time consuming junk for us to do. We tried to point out to our teacher the oxymoron behind "Vacation Homework." She laughed long and hard. Anyway, I digress. I worked this summer and worked and worked and worked. Why did I work? Long story short -- I'm a damn fool. I covered for three (well, four if you count me) speech pathologists and for some reason every single family in my school's district decided to refer their kids over the summer.

Nah, I guess my summer wasn't so bad, well other than I didn't really have any days off. I did have most afternoons off to play with Lance. And there were some fun things this summer. Joseph got married and now he has someone to keep him in line. Oh, the picture is from the wedding. The pictures that I tried to take of Joe and Rahel during the reception and stuff didn't come out. Anyway, so that was one fun thing this summer. Oh, and Girls' Night was fun. We just made yummy pizzas and talked but it was quality girl time with none of those troublesome boys around.

Anyway, now the summer's almost over. I'm spending my last day off with Lance. We're going to the movies, Wal-Mart, and the library. And then it's back to school tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to going back, but I am excited to see what the new year will bring. We have a lot of new teachers and I'll, of course, have new students. Oh and Matt will be a part of my complex this year so that should be fun. I also noticed that work was more fun last year than my first year so hopefully it'll be even more fun this year. I think it's because I more or less know what I'm doing, I'm comfortable with the people that I work with, and I've finally discovered the secret to therapy. Although it is important that the kids have fun and that they learn during therapy sessions, it's just as important that I have fun, too. So I feel like playing Go Fish, then we're playing Go Fish.

Here we go again...

The Library

I love the library. The people who invented the public library system are genuises. A system that allows people of all socioeconomic classes access to books, music, movies, and even the internet for free? Brilliant.

While I was waiting for a librarian to find my CDs and books earlier this week, I entertained myself by watching a mother and her two young children. She was inquiring about getting a library card for her son and the librarian who was helping her explained that her son couldn't get a card until he was able to write his full name on the card. He was able to write his first name but couldn't yet write his last name so he didn't get a card that day, but watching them brought back memories of my first library card.

My parents introduced me to the library at a young age. I spent many days in the cool, air conditioned building with my parents, looking for books to take home. I really wanted my own library card so I learned to write my name for the sole purpose of getting my library card. My dad taught me and I practiced and practiced. As soon as I was able to write my name in the little box on the card, I went to the library and happily received my own green card to borrow books on. I was still really young, so all of the letters on the card were really shaky and not at all straight. And while I was able to write the letters of my name, many of them were formed incorrectly -- the "a" was formed with a circle and a line that weren't quite connected and the "n" didn't have the initial line, just the curvy part. I even put a hyphen between my first and last names. The red library card came out when I was a teenager. As I signed my name in grown up cursive, I was really sad. Luckily the librarian let me keep my old, green card and I still have it in my room at my mom's house.

Woo hoo!

Look what came in the mail today! Woo hoo! I was hoping that it'd come when Lance was gone because I knew I'd need a pick me up to get me through the week. I just ordered it on Friday and it's already here. Yea!