First day of school.

Well, I lived.

Let's list the points. They aren't necessarily highs, they aren't necessarily lows....just points.

-- Made it to work on time.
-- Forgot to buy lunch stuff, so I grabbed some TGI Friday's steak quesadillas out of the freezer. Pathetisad.
-- Our autistic boy threw a fit before school, but did fine. He wanted to go home about halfway through the day, so he kept telling us he didn't feel well. But each time, the pain was in a different spot: back, stomach, head, eye. So he had obviously just had enough and was ready to leave.
-- Another kid, who is overly affectionate, kept trying to sit in our laps. He ran up to me in the middle of spelling and kissed my hand. He spent most of the day crying. I said the word "math, " and he burst into tears. Then, a kid said the word "homework, " and he lsot it.
-- The kids wander a lot. Some can't help it. Others do it because they see everyone else doing it. It's hard to tell which ones are which. The ones who have to, we let. The others have to sit.
-- The room is noisy. It's kind of the nature of the beast, though. We have a "Yacker Tracker, " which is a traffic light that reacts to decibels. If it gets too loud, a siren goes off and the red light lights up. It works, in a way. But they're fascinated by it. They like to try to make it go off. So what we do is, we make them sit in silence for 5 minutes, and we set a timer. If they talk during that time, the time starts over. That's how I did time-outs at the JCC. Setting off the lights will get old after a while, though.
-- The library isn't finished its makeover yet, so the librarian had to come to us. But the kids were good.
-- Our girl from Thibodaux isn't coming any more. They were buying a house here, but the deal fell through. This was going to leave us with one girl. Another class only had one girl, too, so they moved her to ours. And, we had a little girl touring the classes today who will be in our class. Which makes the statistic correct: the ratio of girls to boys with learning disabilities is 1:3. We'll have 17 total, which is a big class.
-- To little boys fought over who I was going to sit by at lunch.
-- No one had to go to the Cool Down room or the Time Out room. So, YAY!!!
-- One of the other teachers brought us motivational cards with quotes from Maya Angelou on them and some Dove Promises. She's great.
-- You should SEE the supplies they had to bring. We spent most of the day switching off on who had to teach and who had to unpack. It was CRAZY. We ALMOST finished.
-- Stayed at school until 5:30.

So, in all, it was a fabulous first day. It'll take some time getting into it, but I think I'll be okay.