all downhill from here

Josh is officially more than halfway through this program. So even though it is hard and seemingly eternal ... the end will be here sooner than it feels like. Yay!

School has really been sucking hard for me this week. My newest kid Ru has been a royal pita (lucky me, all my kids have been dubbed pita's by the school shrink, but he is the biggest of them all). Golly, but they have been more than we can literally handle. On the up side though? I gave them a math test this week and they did far above and beyond what I thought they could. I know that they will probably never thank me for all the really hard work that my aides and I put in for them, but it was like a big huge pat-on-the-back to see them know how to find the area of a shape, work out long equations using PEMDAS correctly, substitute in numbers for X, and the like. It really made me feel great because even though a lot of times they still act like a bunch of hellions, they actually are learning. They know more now than they did when I first started teaching them.

Tomorrow's big event? I'm walking them over to the local public library. It'll be an adventure, but I'm determined that they shall have library cards and pick out their own books to read during SSR (so that they can't complain about it) and so that they will build up a sense of responsibility. Also cool? We started our garden this week. My dad had a couple extra cantaloupe plants and even though our big 4'x8'x8" planters have not yet arrived, I showed my kids how to transplant the little seedlings into a bigger pot so that when the real garden time came they would know how it should be done. It was really cool to huddle down in the mud with them and show them what my dad taught me all those years ago. Also, when later on that day one of the elementary school kids lost his cool and kicked the clay pots and broke them, my kids stopped their various tantrums and came together to save the seedlings. We transferred the plant to a bowl and this morning we once more transplanted the little guys into new clay pots, only this time we are keeping them inside our room until we get the big planters. My kids are now starting to worry about how the other kids will probably ruin our garden. Oh my gosh! Actions have consequences and acting out in anger hurts others. Even if the garden never bears literal fruit, there have already been some good fruitful lessons from it.

Well, off to bed at 7:30. Do you realize that I'm getting about 10 hours of sleep a night? It's crazy I tell you!