God I am so Screwed!

This is for you Doug.

Last week, because I must have been on crack at the time, I bought pizza for the entire third grade. Why on earth would I do this? You mean aside from the $150 price tag once juice, grapes and paper goods were figured in? Here's why.

The thing is this is a testing year for my kids. That means they get tested by the state this May. But we test the shit out of them before that. My kids, the ones in my class, there is no reason at all that they can't pass every test. They are all on or above grade level, so I thought a little incentive would be a good thing. I settled on pizza. If everyone hit the benchmark at 75 or better I would get pizza for the class. Which turned into everyone else offering their class pizza too. Soon it was pizza for 70. Lucky us. All my kids passed btw.

So there I am last Thursday dishing pizza to 70 and I was starving. So while my fabulous partners were pouring juice and handing out grapes and carrots, I grabbed a couple pieces of pizza and crammed them down.

In an hour or so, I wasn't feeling so good.

And three hours later I was really not feeling good.

I got The Kid to piano and waited in the car. It was all I could do to drive home and make it to the toilet before the barf fest began.

Friday was a work day and I did not go in. I lay in bed wanting to die.

Saturday I woke up fine though. It was Ricardo's birthday weekend so we decided to go ahead with the plans to go to DC for the night and have a brunch out for his birthday. So we did. As we were driving home Sunday, I felt a little more tired than usual. I chalked it up to having lost 6 pounds in 36 hours.

By Monday I had a cold. Tuesday I dragged myself in to school and barely made it through the day. But I soldiered on. Wednesday I woke up thinking, "This is not good." I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. I was so tired and so achy and coughy. But I figured, one of my teaching partners was out that day with a bad migraine, I could make it through. By 10 am it was clear that was a very bad idea. The school secretary told me to stay home the next day and my principal told be to leave after the buses left. So I did. I left my plans on the back table, and went home where I climbed in bed for an hour before taking The Kid to soccer, leaving him there and crawling back home into bed.

The highpoint of the day though was that during our reading class, my group of high readers was looking at maps. This is the group that includes my own Kid. And they came across the Yellow Sea. And my own son started giggling. And then I heard it: "Hold on, wait a minute, let me put some yellow in it." He had taught his group mates the chant from the Yellow Sea during this summer's Semester at Sea voyage. And soon enough, 24 third graders were alphabetizing and writing up their cause and effect charts, and practicing their sentence combining while threatening to "put a little yellow in it." And when I told them that that was enough, my son, my only child, the premie from the NICU, the infant I stayed home with, nursed through illness, worried and fretted over, the boy I took this job for, taught them the next cheer: "We are the Yellow Sea and we're gonna pee on you." It was an elementary schooler's dream come true. A veritable fantasy of potty and one that GROWNUPS had come up with. I knew I was sick, because I just sighed and went over the parts of speech with the group I was with.

The next morning, I was watching the Today Show in my Nyquil induced haze when I saw the school closings at the bottom of the screen. I looked out the window. It wasn't snowing. What was going on? I couldn't figure it out. That's when it occurred to me, maybe I was really sick.

Turns out some nutter was out on 64 shooting at cars over the night. The high school locked down. The county closed schools. Everyone was in a tiz. And this meant the plans I left were no good because the kids were supposed to go to the high school to go to the Art Show. No dice there. And no outdoor recess. It was going to be a loony bin over there.

And the difference between being 26 and being 36? I was just glad it wasn't me over there at school.

I slept all morning, got up, made popcorn, and slept all afternoon.

And I took today off too. I still feel like utter crap. I blame the testing. It's a good thing we've got more coming up this week.