Happy Halloween!

I officially have the cutest kids in the world in my class! We had spiderman, superman, a witch, a purple people eater (the best costume ever) and a little mermaid as well as a firefighter and a cheerleader (who was also the witch - long story). The party was total chaos - partially because the kids were wild from the break in routine and the access to the ball pit (this is why it is only made available like three times a year) and partially because I felt like total crap. However, we still had a lot of fun! I think when you are three the combination of costumes, face painting, ball pit, cookie decorating, and cupcakes is pretty darn exciting! I then sent them on their merry little way home hopped up on sugar and way overstimulated from a day of "No Routine!!" and "Anything We Want TO Do!!". Oh yeah, tomorrow is back to schedules, schedules, schedules and rules. Sorry kids, party's over. :) Our November party is much tamer (think feast not party) and in December it is a "snow Ball" not an all out party. Still fun though. And so much easier to plan!! Oh, and I got many compliments on my funky looking Raggedy Ann self and a few laughs which is kind of what i was going for. And the best reactions were driving to and from work today in full costume - wig and all! Now I am hiding from the few trick-or-treaters where I live because I was too cheap to buy candy after putting together treat bags for 10 kids at school ... shame on me!! Good thing I don't have a pumpkin for them to smash! :) Happy Halloween!!

What Have I Done?

I have officially jumped off of the bridge of sanity and am falling head first into the abyss of the insane. Wednesday is Halloween, perhaps one of the most enjoyable not-really-a-holiday-holidays to celebrate with preschoolers. Nothing is cuter than three year olds dressed up in costumes and filled from toes to eye brows with excitement about the fact that, while they may not understand what on earth this is about, they know something fun is going to happen. However, nothing is more stressful than a classroom full of parents expecting you to not only show off your wonderful abilities as a teacher but to entertain them and their children for an hour with creative and enthralling activities. And what did I do for Halloween? I invited the parents of all 10 of my little ones to an hour long party! Oh what have I done! They are expecting crafts, games, activities, entertainment, fun and a demonstration of the wonderful world of preschool. Is it too late to hire a substitute? Anybody instersted? Don't all come running at once! So far I have suckered...um, convinced...um, my very nice friend and the parent of one of my little ones has volunteered (okay, so I asked politely but offerd plenty of opportunities for her to say no) to do face painting for the kids. We also have treats to decorate with frosting and Holloween candies/sprinkles. I plan on setting up our ball pit with its four bags of balls which means a lot of work (cleaning all of the balls before and afterwards - dratted MRSA infection marching through our district) but should be entertaining and I can set my assistant up to play referee to limit the injuries. If I am desperate I can set the swing up - but only BEFORE we eat our endless sweets that parents are providing (I am so not catching any vomit on Halloween - that's what the parents are there for!). I have some games we can play for prizes - toddler basketball, bowling for ghosts (pop cans covered with white tissue paper). That sounds like a party to me. Besides, they are three years old. I think a few balloons and the ball pit would be enough to entertain them. As for the parents - they are always welcome but in large numbers I still get nervous like I have to put on a song and dance or something. Maybe that will go away as I teach more years...or I will learn to sing and dance. :) And performing while in costume - bonus! Yes, I will be the dork dressed as Raggedy Ann! Try finding a costume that is preschool appropriate, not scary, not trampy, readily washable, and that will not become indecent while doing preschool acrobatics (i.e. chasing a child down the hall, helping a child on the playground, circle time). Its even harder when anything with a wig, mask, or face paint is scary as is anything too "not normal" (i.e. the teacher dressed as a cow is going to scare the crap out of my kids - should be fun!). I really enjoy having parents come in the classroom, and I enjoy our parties, but it stresses me out so much beforehand. Especially this year when I have taken on extra students, when my assistant leaves (a lot) to be desired, and I still feel like I am chasing myself in circles. I think it will be lots of fun, but right now I am wondering what on earth have I done????

Running of the Preschoolers

Forty days and forty nights has never seemed like quite such a torturous sentence until now. It has rained non-stop for most of this week which means that at school we have been inside almost all week. Three year olds are not generally happy with the notion of being confined, especially when there is an attractive playground visible from the classroom windows that beckons to them regardless of the sheets of rain pelting the windows relentlessly. So after days of entertaining them with other options - extra play time, bubbles, balls, and I can only imagine what the substitutes used yesterday (that was not covered in my lesson plans)- I finally relented to riding our tricycles in the hallway. This seems harmless as the hallway is a giant circle with only two points of escape (one door to the outside and one entrance point to the main hallway) but there are several classrooms along the hallway that are not selfcontained classrooms for children with special needs. And three year olds riding tricycles do not understand the concept of an indoor voice. Trust me on that one. We can keep our indoor voices up until the point that our feet hit the pedals and then it explodes no matter how hard we try. Also, our ability to steer is not fully developed and so we might occasionally ride into a classroom door or wall at full speed. I am quite sure that the other teachers just love me! It is a redeeming quality that we are rather cute and it is hard to resist a three year old on a tricycle laughing and waving (as they just miss the wall). So today we braved the tricycles and I am forever thankful there was no video camera available. The running of the preschoolers is not a moment of a teacher's life that she wants recorded for the world to see, especially when it involves dodging ankle crashes and rescuing wall smashers while pushing a rider in training on an adapted tricycle at full speed. Oh the glamour would be overwhelming and cause such weeping by jealous supermodels that it simply must remain a secret forever! It is fun, but there is no way to look anything but rediculous while dodging tricycles, rescuing stranded children who are flailing with no success trying to escape the clutches of a wall, and running circles around a hallway pushing a tricycle that looks like it could double as a torture device. But we had a good 20 minutes of fun, we worked on motor goals, and I got a free workout! Bonus points for that! I felt slightly like a NASCAR driver though only making left turns - next time we go right around the hall so I can unwind myself! And I need to invest in steel toed, high ankle boots... or learn to run faster.

Things I have Lost

I am used to being incredibly organized, or at least organized enough to know exactly where everything is in the piles. For some reason over the past few months I have become scatterbrained to a new extreme. It seems like my brain has become a sive and most things enter and then drip out before they can be officially processed. This is not good! Below is a short list of things I have managed to lose recently.

* a pack of gum
* a pair of shoes (they are here somewhere...)
* a stack of papers
* a CD
* my keys several times, but I have found them each time (Thank you God!!)
* picture symbols
* more pens than I could count
* notes to myself about things not to forget
* for a few weeks I lost my planner
* my mind

My Hands Are Overflowing

There are some times when your instincts kick in that you are very thankful - swerving to avoid an object in the road, ducking as a ball comes flying at your head. Then there are times when you act on instinct and then regret your actions. There is a short background necessary to this story to fully appreciate it. Apparently God has a wicked sense of humor. My greatest phobia in all of creation is vomiting. I would literally go to a hotel when my mother got the stomach flu. So God, in his infinite wisdom and with his sense of humor, has blessed me with beautiful children in my class who are proficient at what? Any guesses? Yep, vomiting. Last year it was such a common occurrence we had blue buckets stationed around the classroom to catch it. Nice. In summer school a child vomited on my feet. Thanks. So tonight I am babysitting for my blue eyed boy, who has done his share of vomiting at school. He has to keep up with his peers you know. He was complaining a bit this evening as we watched his choice of movies and so I was letting him sit on my lap. Any guesses what beautiful boy did? It is obvious. What is not obvious (or might be by the title of this post) is how I reacted. In an act of pure instinct, and in direct imitation of something that two days ago I swore I would never do, I stuck my hands under his mouth and caught it. Um, nasty does not even begin to cover it. He seemed satisfied with himself and I had a nice handful of his dinner. I deposited it on his sheet on the floor and positioned him so that any more returns would land on his sheet and not on me. After making sure that he was done with his review of dinner I cleaned him up (easy, I wiped his mouth), folded the sheet, and ran to wash my hands. I think after that I have earned some kind of bravery medal. Who would ever expect such cute creatures to be so disgusting? :) And who knew I could catch so well with my bare hands?

You Want Me To Put My Mouth Where?

There is nothing more fun to do on a Saturday morning than to kneel on a nasty gym mat in a high school at 8 am and perform CPR on an alien-looking dummy to the sounds of mild grunting from your classmated as they too pound the crap out of this half-bodied form. Well, perhaps sleeping would be more enjoyable. Or grocery shopping with a hyperactie toddler. But my certification had expired and I do need to have these skills, so I pulled my sorry self out of bed on a beautiful Saturday morning and sat in a high school classroom that brough back creepy half-memories (my high school was more modern, and just looked a little less dingy somehow). So my dummy had the nerve to lose his arms, legs, and mot of his torso but still want CPR performed on him. I had no problem crushing his chest with enough force to snap ribs, but staring at his alien silver face with odd orb eyes and a gaping hole of a mouth I knew that there was not a chance on earth my mouth was touching that creature. There is not enough alcohol in the world to make him clean enough, especially knowing that multiple high school students have potentially been "kissing" him and depositing their germs onto him. And kids are not generally very good at cleaning things - look at their bedrooms or lockers. And with this high school having had confirmed cases of MRSA, and me having mouth sores and a compromised immune system that sealed the deal. Luckily I had contacted the teacher before hand and notified her that I wanted to take the class, but becaue of immune system issues I was not going to put my mouth on anything. In the past I have taken multiple CPR classes and not had to do the breathing component (or for one class I had been given a mouth barrier). She was fine with that and so instead of doing breaths I just properly positioned the head and leaned down. I'm sorry but I don't put my mouth on things that get around more than an heiress in Hollywood. Lets just hope if I really need to do CPR I remember to do the breaths and not just lean down and pretend!

A Victory Dance

Yesterday I had a home visit with my blue eyed boy and I decided to really put him to the test. He is our mystery child, our little one who presents with so many delays but all of the testing the doctors have conducted have revealed no answers. To anyone who first meets him, he would probably be considered to have severe disabilities limiting all areas incuding language comprehension and cognition. Yet more and more as I work with him I am seeing him make incredible progress and demonstrate that he comprehends almost everything that is said to him, and that he is learning preschool skills that are pretty age appropriate. So I took two of our color sorting boxes to his home visit yesterday. In each colored box are four items that are the same color of the box. With some positioning and assistance from his awesome mom with holiding the items against the lids of the boxes, we asked him the colors of each item using yes/no format. I was so careful to keep my tone of voice neutral so that it would not be a clue to him. The only prompt he received was that when asked "Is the (object) red?" his mother would hold up the red lid behind the object and when asked "Is the (object) yellow?" his mother would hold up the yellow lid behind the object. My blue eyed boy correctly identified 7 of the 8 items!!!!! I was amazed and stunned, and thrilled!!! We cheered, clapped, sang, and little boy blue earned a special treat. In my heart, I did the biggest victory dance! He is learning, he is aware of everything around him, he has greater comprehension than I would have imagined when I first met him a litle over a year ago and was told that he sat in a beanbag and that was about it. Now my challenge is to figure out a way to pull his comprehension out of him, to establish a communication system for a child who is nonverbal, who does not functionally use his hands, and for whom vision is unreliable. Time to get creative!!! Victory is so sweet and he has earned this one! He has earned a gold medal for this victory, for coming so far and defying expectation. I am just glad I got to come along for the ride!