We're just trying to keep the mood light.

One more day of TAKS testing this week. It's hard to get anything done, it's a good thing we're done with any major ordering of supplies for classrooms. I can't seem to stay in my office for more than 15 minutes. Sometimes my job consists of buyer, bookkeeper, typist, editor, teacher, tutor, baby sitter, disciplinarian, nurse, mediator, travel agent and on days like yesterday, today and tomorrow I become an event planner. I have been and will be tomorrow, in charge of setting up the lunch buffets. Do you know how hard it is to guesstimate how much food 97 people will and can eat? It's brutal. I guess I don't eat as much as most people, because what looked like a lot of food to me wasn't near enough. I'm nervous about ordering pizza tomorrow.

On top of this we have had rain everyday this week. Lots of rain. When kids are under stress because of state wide testing they need to blow off steam. The teachers become stressed, they need to blow off steam. The last thing we want to do is keep everyone inside all day. But the rain doesn't look to be stopping anytime soon. Now towns to the North of us are beginning to flood, these are the same towns that were flooded last Fall. My sister's house flooded in Houston Tuesday night.... it's state wide.

Another thing we've had to deal with this week is the Swine Flu scare. The kids are scared, the parents are panicking and we are inundated with phone calls wanting to know if we will close school. Many of the families at our school are from Mexico or have family in Mexico or both. Several of the area day cares have closed. A school in nearby Richardson closed two days ago. Then two other school in two other towns in North Texas closed. Today they announced all school sports events in the state would be canceled. Then tonight a crawl went across the bottom of the TV stating the schools of Ft Worth were closing. 148 schools! I think it said they would be closed until May 8th! That will tack on an extra week to their school year. As of tonight our county has not had any cases reported.

If people would just be responsible and stay home when they are sick. I know why they don't... they can't afford to miss work. Either they need the money too badly or they risk loosing their jobs if they stay home. Then their kids get sick and they can't keep them home because they can't miss work so they send them sick. It's not unusual for us to have a sick child with fever sleep all day on a cot in the clinic because their parent can't get off work to come get them. Or they can't afford to take them to the Doctor, so they just let it run it's course.

I think we are in a vicious cycle here and it's starting to not just catch up with us, we're about to be run down! We need to start going to work and be glad we have a job to go to and do a good job when we get there so our boss thinks highly of us and will allow for us to be off work when we have a sick child. As employers we need to be compassionate of our employees and understand we are people or parents and we need to take care of matters at home sometime (but at the same time we shouldn't take advantage of this....) We need to stop carelessly spending our money so we can take care of ourselves and our families, and be able to save for that rainy day because friend... it's about to start pouring.

In the mean time we're going to try to keep the mood light in the office.... Judi has just been crowned the High Priestess of Goofy. She robbed me of my title of Lucy yesterday when she announced to our Assistant Principle that she was going home with the Swine Flu.


I'm going to miss this girl next year.