Exhausted!

After a relaxing holiday weekend with Chad's family in Indianapolis, I had a crazy and exhausting first day of school with my new group of kindergartners. I wish I could say that it was a pleasant, easy day...but it wasn't. I have 27 kids; 14 boys and 13 girls. The girls were all very well-behaved and so were many of the boys. However- there were about 5 little boys who kept me on my toes all day. I literally couldn't take my eyes off them for a second or they were doing something inappropriate/hurting somebody. One little boy told me "No!" EVERY SINGLE TIME I asked him to do something. He seemed really angry all day. Usually when kids are defiant, I try to provide them with lots and lots of choices. So when that particular child wouln't cooperate, I acted like it made no difference to me. I told him "That's fine if you don't want to do the project right now. It's up to you. You can do it now or you can do it during playtime." Sounds reasonable, right? His response..."I don't care. I hate playtime and I'm not doing it anyway". Ugh!!!! Of course all the other kids are watching to see how I'll respond, which means they're learning about what THEY can each get away with. Now while I was having this discussion with this particularly defiant child, Alex was stuffing crayons into the guinea pig's cage, Dante was laying on the floor crying for mommy, two kids decided on their own to join the other kindergarten class for a while, another child was using scissors to cut his hair....and our principal walked in right at that moment giving a tour to one of the head honcho's from our HR department :) Could they have picked a worse time to come in and observe? Ahhhh!!!! To sum up my day-- when dismissal came at 3:25, I felt as if I'd been run over by a truck. And I get to do this all again tomorrow :)

Other than my crazy day, I'm feeling pretty good. Tired, but good. I've felt the baby moving around throughout the day. Luckily, the kid took a break from playing soccer with my bladder today so that I could get through the first day of school without running to the bathroom multiple times. I'm thankful for that!

Have a great night. I'll try to post a belly pic on Thursday. (I have grad class until pretty late tomorrow night).
Love,
Mindy and Baby S.