Day One

It's finally here! After all of the anticipation, training, and unpaid hours, I finally began work at my new school officially today.

I had not been in to the building in almost two weeks because of my trip and the floors on our hall being waxed. That second part should have prepared me for the state of my room when I entered this morning, but it did not. All of the hard work I had done arranging things, putting my classroom library together, etc. had been undone, and everything was strewn about on top of every available surface. Joy. So, most of the morning was spent redoing what I'd already done and rethinking the arrangement of things due to new additions to the room's fixins.

Around mid-day one of my teammates brought me my crack. AKA, my roll for my new class. I officially have 19 brand-new bundles of third grade joy. I have 8 boys and 11 girls. Two members of the class have first names I cannot begin to pronounce, and I'm on the fence about the pronunciation of about 4 more. (What happened to naming your kid something straightforward?)

Anyway, I am so excited to begin the process of putting students' names on everything, as well as finalizing the arrangement of the room and making everything just so. Then there's the whole planning aspect because, let's face it, I am going to have to teach them something - just making cute sh*t for the walls doesn't really cut it. My plan is to get my room in pristine shape ASAP and then spend the rest of the week I have before they get here (and, let's be honest, probably most of the weekend) focusing on the planning portion.

I am really happy that we will have an open house before school starts, so I get a chance to meet the students and parents before the chaos of the first day. With this being a new school, I feel like the chaos factor is going to be exponentially greater than the normal hair-tearing, teeth-gnashing, headache-inducing level of mayhem that marks the beginning of an elementary school year.

Anyway, I left right at 3:45 today (for the last time in nine months, in all likelihood) because my old friend Bryan the Orkin man was due at my house for our routine maintenance. Good news, folks! Bryan said we should not expect anymore rodent visitors, as all of the ginormous amount of poison he put downstairs in the basement had been eaten. Hooray for small victories and happy Wednesday.

Oh Mickey, You're So Fine...

... and by Mickey, I mean the mouse in our kitchen last night, and by so fine, I mean disgusting.

We are renting a beautiful old house in an area of Durham called Tuscaloosa-Lakewood. We have a GIANT backyard, a screen porch, and a beautiful, spacious interior. The owners moved to Brooklyn and obviously left in a hurry, as the house was filthy when we arrived. They even left us lots of surprises - like a drawer full of lipstick in the bathroom and several reams of paper in the office. Thanks, guys! In addition, when they showed us the house, we asked specifically about pest control. They assured us it was not a problem - they've had a few roaches and only one mouse in the ten years they've lived here!

Um, yeah. BS. We have been here two weeks and each already killed several roaches. We also found evidence that there might be some little rodent friends, so we had the Orkin man come and inspect everything. Not a week later, I am getting ready to make dinner - AFTER I spent 90 minutes cleaning the kitchen top to bottom earlier that day - when I see a rodent friend. Alive - better than dead - but scurrying across my kitchen counter. Now, I have had to learn to control my fear of crawly things being a teacher, because you can't freak out a room full of kids if a bug (or mouse - my old school was an OLD building) gets into your classroom. But a mouse ON MY COUNTER?? No way.

Of course, this was 7:45 p.m., so the Orkin people were closed. Hubs wasn't home from the hospital yet - which I can only assume will become a routine phrase for me to repeat - so I called my dad for advice / comfort. Then I stomped around like a fool to make enough noise so the little friend wouldn't show its face again. And promptly informed Hubs when he got home that I was not making dinner in a rodent-filled kitchen. The closest I got to the kitchen was grabbing a bottle of wine and a glass from our bar cart. I was into my second glass when Hubs got home and we immediately went out to dinner. He's such a gem. (Or more accurately, he didn't want to eat dinner from a rodent-filled kitchen any more than I wanted to cook it. Still though, he's just a gem in general.)

Here's the upside: having a house full of holes through which little friends can enter may be the only thing that will force me to keep up with the cleaning. Congratulations, family - I may just have learned to put my dishes in the sink right away! The downside: I have to completely re-clean the kitchen so that I am, in fact, able to stand being in there and preparing food. I did some reading on the internet - NOT a good idea, by the way - and learned that good sanitation cannot always prevent rodent friends, but bad sanitation will definitely attract them. So here I sit, a reformed leave-the-dishes-til-tomorrow sinner.

Trying to see the positive in this rather than the mouse droppings.