Sunday, March 28, 2010

Beginnings: New Daycare, New Quarter

Absurdist Tot starts a new daycare tomorrow -- with a more regimented daily plan. He's such a wild kid, I can't tell whether it's going to be a complete no-go, making him feel confined and ruining his sunny disposition, or whether he'll thrive in more structure than Absurdist Lover and I are good at providing. This place has a lot of art and music, gymnastics and outside time. So he may well thrive. I hope so. Why am I the one who is nervous?

I really hope he doesn't cry when I leave; I just hate that.

Tomorrow officially starts spring break, which means I've got to use the time to high-tail it and wrest the spring quarter under control. Learning objectives. Syllabi. Plans. All that. Not that I haven't been taking notes and planning and researching and thinking and rethinking. But I haven't written my syllabi, finalized exactly which readings to include, things like that. I certainly haven't mapped it all onto the quarter calendar. It all begins again tomorrow.

I long for the sleepy winter, everything blanketed under snow, with good excuses to stay in and hunker down. I must wake from my winter hibernation. Some hibernation -- I've been tired the whole time! Back to walking back and forth between my classroom, the women's bathroom, and my office for hours on end. Back to teaching. Back to trying to find time to get scholarship done. This winter, instead of pumping out some articles, I crocheted up a storm, worked on a huge cross-stitch project for AT, taught myself how to bake bread, cooked a lot. Started working out a little bit. Spent a lot of time with the tot. Spent some quality time with AL. Went away to a conference which reminded me how lucky I am, for all my grumblings about how hard it is to be a working mom, an academic mom, a mom mom, a mom on the tenure track. I'm very lucky. Even very barely squeaking by financially and incurring the irk of my Urban City family, I'm very lucky. Even though it is certainly difficult to balance everything, I'm still very very blessed.

1 comment:

Sisyphus said...

Wow, you learned a whole lot this past quarter, you know?

And I am totally on board with including chroceting on one's cv.

Coming from a place on the quarter system, I totally hear you on the suckiness of spring break. Our grades are due on Tuesday of spring break and most people I know took a couple days off to catch up on laundry, and then it's right back into figuring out what the hell to do for next quarter's syllabi and course packets. Bleah!

But you'll be able to do it all even faster with more practice, now, and soon it will be summer! Yay!