I love that we start school with a nice three-day (or four-day, if you’re a rotten public school student. what the heck we didnt get that when I was in school!?) weekend right off the bat. It kinda eases us all back into that school mode. And it has never tasted so delicious to be in weekend mode as it does now that I’m teaching. I super hustled through my work on Friday so I could leave school knowing that until Tuesday morning at 730am when I’m back on campus (yaaay i love early mornings SIKE!) I could totally zone OUT about school and eat my barbecues and lay out by the pool and watch movies late at night and just overdose on good times because I was responsibility-free for 72 hours.

I really had some grandiose plans as I approached this Labor Day…I was totally jonesing for a road trip…thinking Santa Barbara, I was thinking Joshua Tree, I was thinking Santa Cruz, I was thinking camping. I was thinking downtown and dancing. But in the end, just being able to dress in sweats and not wear makeup and to sleep until 830am (or even later sometimes!!) and not have to remind anyone to write their names on paper every five minutes felt like starting the day off with a hot fudge sundae. On Christmas. In Disneyland.

In good news, I think I actually really like teaching. I know I’ll make it through the year. I love words and history and language and how everything all comes together, so something so ancient and yet present as Latin fascinates me to no end.

And I really love these silly kids. There were even a few I missed over the weekends. The ones with the speech impediments are my favorites. I am a huge sucker for a good lisp or stutter. And the super eager ones that are practically falling out of their seats because they’re waving their hands so hard to answer a question…I miss them, too. And I missed the boy-crazy girls who twirl their hair and always ask something like “Miss Weight are you married? Do you have a boyfriend? Do you like to go on dates? What are they liiiike???” and always want to know where I got my clothes, poor creatively-repressed things in their private school uniforms.

And I even missed the “always off on a tangent” kids, who when I ask something like “Why might the founding fathers want to inscribe the year in Roman numerals?” raise their hand and answer with “Miss Weight my dad says we might go see Washington DC when I’m in high school if my brother gets good enough grades!” And this makes eighteen other hands shoot up in the air so they can all tell me about the time their mom’s uncle’s grandson ate a hotdog in front of the Washington Monument, or whatever it might be.

I do have Back to School Night tomorrow. Worrying about what I need to say is giving me an ulcer, but my biggest concern is what I’m going to wear. And of course, meeting 300 something parents who all want to know how much I love their child. I’m still working on the connecting the face to the first name to the seating chart to the last name to the gradebook idea, so the thought that some anxious mother is going to want to know how her Madison is doing and I’m going to have to gently point out that I have seven Madisons and four sets of identical twins and I have a hard enough time remembering to eat lunch everyday so….we’ll find out how your dear Madison is doing at the end of the trimester? I don’t know how thats going to go over.

But sometimes they bring me presents and cookies and pumpkin spice lattes (that kid is getting an A for SURE) and they’re all so weird and cute I just want to pinch them. So I’m actually looking forward to getting back to school this week! I swear that only having four actual working days until another glorious glorious weekend comes back to me has noooothing to do with it…