For them and for no other reason

Today was a very long day to top off a very long week. Yesterday was capped off with Back-To-School night, basically an open house where families follow their kids' schedules for an abbreviated 10 minutes per class period. By the time we got home it had been almost 14 hours since I'd seen my house. And after what happened then, it could have been 14 more.

Since residing in the desert for over a year now I've seen my share of cockroaches. They're ugly, fast, and freak me out less and less. I'd yet to kill one but I'd seen the scurry away in the copy room at school when I turned on the lights. I knew they crawled up drains and came searching water and food. Then this week I had the well-know black widow spider incident (sidebar: Yuma Pest Control was in my classroom at 4pm today, telling me all about the nasty looking spiders and spraying for them, let's all say a prayer it works!). And then last night I had the cockroach incident.

We got home and ate a snack before falling asleep in front of the tv. At 10:15 I woke up with a start and knew I needed to take out my contacts and brush my teeth and go to bed. So we head to the bathroom and I sit down on the toliet and Ang starts to freak out a little. I am still so asleep I can't understand why and then I see it - a giant cockroach. I am not exaggerating. It's got to be six inches long. So I freak. And we go get running shoes on under our nightgowns and I grab my steel-toe shoe to kill it with and Ang, to her credit, chases after it. But it's fast. And then it STARTS TO FLY. Yes, it flies. I did not know cockroaches could fly. Today I find out that we have the super duper kind of roaches called Sewer Cockroaches that are huge and fly and come up through the drains in search of food. Fantastic. Really, this is great news.

Eventually we get it into the hall and I stand on it. I am afraid that it won't die because I've heard it's hard to kill them so I instruct Ang to get a container to capture it with. But I press down with the many pounds I have, all of them into that foot and praise God literally, he crunches and dies. (I had to step over that spot on the carpet this morning, seriously.) Needless to say, no one slept well in our house last night.

Thus, morning comes way to early and we get to school and it's a rough start. I have a nasty row (I like to pretend to sound British, it's so cool!) with a co-worker who chews me out in the hall and then have both the principal and the vice-prinicpal visit me within an hour to make sure I am okay and to let me know everything will be fine (my chewing out was not called for and an apology, such as it was, was made). But through it all, the exteremely long day, the crazy schedule of taking my kids outside to another room to be tested today, teaching them how to monitor their own progress (something now required of us and the kids in all subjects), and all the crazy adult stuff going on, it was the kids who got me through.

They were all smiles and good mornings and hellos and calling on me to popcorn read when they could have picked any other child in the room. They were telling me about books their reading and begging to take the spelling test today when they came in late. They were troopers who were quiet in the halls and the testing room. They were respectful when applauding their peers for being helpers of the week. They volunteered in droves to help serve lunch in the cafeteria next week as part of our new drive to encourage community service.

On child in particular touched my heart today. He's a quiet child who's always got a book and is very attentive to his work. Today he returned the second Harry Potter book and when I asked him if he enjoyed it he replied, "Oh yeah, I've read it a ton of times before. But my copy's all messed up and I just wanted to read a brand-new copy." I loved that! LOVED IT! That I have a brand-new book for him to read and that he's reading his so much it's all messed up.

So today was all about them. One class in particular rocked today because I knew they were tired and they could tell I was and I made the decision to read our class novel Tangerine first instead of last to give us all a little reprieve. Well we were all so into it, as I haven't read the book before and their class is furthest ahead, that we just kept reading the whole period. And I didn't see or hear a single kid not into the book. It was great.

So I'm going to sleep now, hopefully for a very long time. Ms. Knapp is exhausted. But happy too.