May is a crazy month – first, you have all the holidays – Mother’s Day, Lily’s birthday, and Kevin’s and my wedding anniversary. Then add in all the school things that I have to take care of as a teacher. Toss in a ton of events for Arthur who is still in school, and add to it all of my many doctor’s appointments. It is a whirlwind that makes “Maycember” too mild a word 😉.

The other day, I was sitting in my closet trying to figure out what to decide what to pull out to wear to school the next day. I was sitting there forever, because every time I chose something, I would have to regroup. You see, it had to be: Okay to wear to work; be spirit wear because it was for Friday (so either purple and gold for Las Lomas or green for Reagan High School); have easy access to my chemo port for treatment after school; and be easily removable for my radiation appointment right before chemo. So many complications and it took a while to finally figure it out. Good times.

School is also an extra adventure right now because of this bizarre mindset of a bunch of the students who think that since we finished State testing, as well as our MAP testing, that they don’t have to do any work for the last month of school. After yet another student mentioned this to me, I may have gone off on a tirade that as long as I was contractually obligated to be there, I was obligated to teach them and they would learn! I literally pointed to my calendar which still shows almost 4 full weeks of school left. And when I got home and saw this meme, I had to change it to say, “My students every single day, acting like normal routines are a brand-new rule designed to ruin their lives.” 😂😜🙄

We did have teacher appreciation this past week, which was very fun. They fed us a yummy lunch almost every day, the kids showered me with little cards and some small gifts, and other fun things. On Thursday, we had a special Bingo game that ran almost the entire school day. I have to say that games like this stress me out and may bring out the worst in me a bit. During each one of my rotations I had the bingo card that showed the numbers called up on my screen (since I wasn’t doing whole class instruction because we were on the fourth day of a project that I was giving individual help to students with). Some of the kids were so into it, and I was so close to winning so many times. I may have started sending smack talk on the chat, as well as yelling at my screen. I was such an amazing example oh how NOT to be a good sport. I may have been taking out other frustrations on a silly game of Bingo. Oh well. Eventually they had us stop clearing our board, and so I finally got one of the very last prizes – ha ha ha!

Friday was field day, which was yet another adventure, and an exhausting one at that. I was barely a week out from my last chemo treatment, and had barely finished the tend rounds of radiation on my spine, so I did not have a lot of energy. Luckily, I brought a cooler for all their drinks that we could drag from station to station, as well as a small chair for me to sit on, as well as my trusty whistle. The kids took turns pulling the coole and carrying my chair, and we were good to go.

Miraculously, we didn’t get rained out, but when we were outside, it only got up to about 65 degrees, and so we only did one of our two water activities so that the kids didn’t freeze to death. Then we went inside to change before we headed to our indoor stations.

It always makes me laugh how my competitiveness, childhood sports background, and experience coaching my kids’ teams come out at times like these. I make them follow the actual rules, even if it is just “blind volleyball.” We had three other teachers with us, because we had some kids from the ALE class join us, and it was great to have them there, and they definitely got to laugh at me a lot. At one point, one of them asked if we could play the kids, so we took off the parachute and played four against twenty. And we destroyed them – ha ha ha!

Our last activity before lunch was one put on by Mathnasium, who had the kids have a paper airplane competition. They kids loved it, and it was the perfect way to wind down for the afternoon.

After lunch, we had a special reward that we had earned as a class. A “Building Fort” party from an attendance award, and watching “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” because we had not only finished the book, but we finished all five State and district tests that we had to take the past few weeks. It was the perfect way to end the day and chill.

And they were all so cute and cozy in their forts.

And as we were enjoying the movie and I was grading papers, I had the most wonderful news. They had taken the leftovers from our catered Texas Roadhouse lunch, split it up into family meals, and raffled them off to the teachers. And I won one of them!!! It totally made up for the lame bingo the day before 😉.

And just to show that more happens than what happens to me at work, Lily, Derek and Arthur went to a 6am baptism session at the temple on Friday. They actually do this a couple times a month, but they finally remembered to take a picture for me.

I also got to listen to a really cool podcast where they interviewed one of my favorite professors from my study abroad in Jerusalem back in the fall of 1997. I knew that Rabbi Rosen was an amazing and impressive man back then, but since then he has done even more amazing things. Such a great listen.

And so our May has begun in all of its craziness and goodness. And it’s all good.