Long, long days

Wet. Again. A second week of having the Preps inside every lunch time will send me completely crazy!

The weekend was also crazy. Actually, our whole life feels like madness at the moment... Too much work and not nearly enough sleep or time to talk. Hollie's hours are even more long and ridiculous than usual and in addition to the usual truly insane work hours, she had a paper reappear from the job she had two years ago that needed one final edit before publication. She is one of the toughest people I know, when it comes to just knuckling down and doing it, but her life is looking pretty crazy from the outside. I don't really know how she is feeling on the inside... That would require seeing her for more than the hour before bed when we try to eat dinner and catch up and do the dishes and iron and work out what to do about the fact that we have no milk and it is raining... again!

I have also been working stupidly hard. I came apart at the seams a week ago though (my threshold is lower than Hollie's but it is still only the second time I've ever cried at school), and since then I've sorted out some things that should help, with the ever wonderful Harriet and a little bit of footstamping in the Principal's office. The school stuff is all looking significantly more do-able now, with a few new strategies and resources and the holidays also coming very soon. More than anything, I was struggling with the emotional task of managing all those kids, parents and co-teachers. I know that I couldn't possibly teach any other way, but when people tell me that teaching must be some much more emotionally easy than counselling was (my previous job) I feel like running down the list of emotional work that I do each day and explaining just how much this job requires all the same involvement of heart and mind... only unlike counselling it's not all over in discrete hour long blocks, you never have any idea what is coming up next, you get all of them all at once, all day long, not one-at-a-time with a reasonably certain lunch break. And in counselling, my job wasn't kids. Wild, wonderful kids who bend towards you like plants if you water them with love, making it double, triple as important to do it right, treat them well, love them back. Oh well.

The problem is, even with school on the up and up, a brand new dishwasher and Julia the German exchange student - who  we've employed her to come and clean the house (and named the dishwasher after) - insemination #1 is approaching and we haven't really got much time for last minute getting ready. Emotionally, I mean. I remembered the other day that I have to find a needle-less syringe somewhere, but it's the emotional preparation I am wondering how we'll find the time for in the next couple of weeks, Actually, I feel prepared. Surprisingly, I feel calm - happy and quietly excited. But I think Hollie has a few last worries to work out. Obviously, it's not like we have ALL the emotional preparation to do in the next two weeks or I would be REALLY worried, but still. On the weekend, we should have talked about it, but we were so tired, emotions ran high, it was hard, there was arguing.

Anyway. Like school, the answer is always love, finding more time for love. I know this about Hollie: it never takes much. A head scratch and dinner. Flowers. Clean pyjamas. In the Complete Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy and Birth they say that before you have kids you should do this:

The Love Map (Truly! That's what they called it!)
- make a list of all the things that make you feel loved.
- from this list, prioritise and mark the top four ways of being loved that you absolutely must have or you start to feel stressed, insecure or alone.
- make sure something on the list happens every day.

I think Hol and I do a particularly good job at love in general, but the thoughtfulness that is behind this way of approaching each day is worth remembering in these days of 8pm finishing times. So, to dinner.

X

Six Weeks

Clear sky, cold night.

It's Week 6 at school - exactly half way through the term. It seems to have gone very fast this time. It's also six weeks until we give the baby-making a first go...

Six weeks!

I have all sorts of amazing opportunities lining up at work at the moment, with the potential that the school will take on the management of the Kinder that shares our school building, and that I'll be able to upgrade my qualifications to include being able to teach the really little kids (at the moment I'm only trained for P-6) and oversee the Kinder. I am a bit overwhelmed by how well it would all line up... Good part time work, staying in the school but not necessarily having to teach all the time, potentially being able to work from home a little. It's a job that should suit being at home with a baby very well. Now I just need to actually get pregnant...

Potentially in SIX WEEKS!

Back to school

Day one, Prep 2013! Cool and blustery, with a sunny time in the middle of the day.

First day of Prep was a success, only tears from one child (I'm not sure how the parents went, the Assistant Principal bundled them out once we'd got the kids in and singing Wheels on the Bus) and everyone seemed to have a good time! Five year olds are lovely, lovely creatures, I felt pretty lucky to have my job today, when they asked questions with such serious little faces, or cracked themselves up laughing when they were jumping from square to square on our carpet.

Recently an Australia Party hopeful in Victoria went public with this: "Paedophiles will be next in line to be recognised in the same way as gays and lesbians and get rights... I don't want gays, lesbians to be working in my kindergarten. If you don't like it go to another kindergarten...". Ouch! Welcome back to school everyone!

Thankfully for my injured feelings the paper published this in an opinion piece a couple of days later: "Christ almighty it must be frightening to be homophobic. I have my own issues with anxiety, so I can sympathise with the persistent and inexplicable sense of impending doom that must plague these people. But even with this insight, I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to hold a worldview in which the gays are forever lurking in a corner, waiting for the opportunity to explode our traditional way of life in a cloud of glitter and amyl before snaffling away our kids like the Pied Piper and marching them over some kind of horrible gay cliff. Being dogged by such thoughts must be utterly exhausting." Ha!

Xox, the lesbian kindergarten teacher.