| So, can anyone out there tell me what exactly qualifies as “the middle of the night”? Is it the middle of the night from the official sunset till the official sunrise or is it simply midnight? For some people midnight is simply bedtime and the middle of the night for them would be four in the morning. I don’t know. All I know is right now, I’m here typing on this dorky little laptop I borrowed from school for the summer. It is pitch black. My kids are asleep out in the backyard on the trampoline. It is dead silent out there and I am WIDE awake. I have to do something to pass the time till I get the drowsies. I’ve tried reading. That didn’t work. I’m trying this now. I could probably go take a massive amount of Valerian root and see if I even wake up in the morning. Hey, j/k, I never take more than the suggested amount of any medicine or supplement, unless a medical professional has advised me that it is safe to do so. Case in point, I routinely pop four Ibuprofen at a time (200mg.) at certain times of the month and on back to school days. My mind is also racing, because I spent a good deal of my day checking out blogs. It is a bit of an artistic venture and I really like looking through them to see what people do with them. How they title them and set up their various pages, how they write and what they write are fascinating to me. But then, I suppose, I am easily fascinated. I’m also stewing around about the fact that tomorrow is the last day of July and then it is back to school month for me. While I don’t have to head back to school till the 25th of August, it still feels like it is coming up so quickly. Too quickly. I have so much to do. I have more to do this summer than last (Yes, teacher’s always have stuff to work on over the summer. If they don’t they are dead meat by the second day of school and the school year becomes very brutal very quickly.). This year I am changing grade levels from first grade to fourth. I’m excited about it, but this means all my forms, letters, graphic organizers and things I usually post in the classroom have to be recreated with the “cool” grown up fourth grader in mind instead of the wide-eyed, nearly petrified first grader. (It’s really sad that the first graders don’t get that the teacher is often just as petrified on the first day of school as they are, well, for a few minutes anyway.) This year, I am also changing classrooms so that will requires some additional effort in terms of thought and unpacking. Then there is that reality that all the stuff I’d created digitally over the last eight years, powerpoints, lessons, plans, schedules, templates, forms, etc. were lost when my jump drive gave up the ghost. Sigh. Everything has to be recreated from scratch. I haven’t even started that project yet.
And it is so silent out there. Even the tree frogs are still and the crickets, while I can hear them, seem to be a long way off. These are the things I ponder in the middle of the night and even after pondering, I am still no sleepier than when I began. I mean, I really tired hard to bore myself. Now, where is that Valerian root? |
The Wild Mind 