The Family Leave Begins

Flowers from Valentine's Day and from my last day before leave.

The past month has been very full. I'm sure I missed several opportunities to write about the amazing activities happening in my classroom, but I never found the time to sit at the computer and compose my thoughts. In addition to getting ready for a long term substitute teacher, my students took a second round of standardized testing for the year, created newscasts or skits to showcase their learning from our novel study, created and presented projects displaying their knowledge of the liturgical seasons, observed and graphed the phase change of ice through water to steam, made and calibrated their own thermometers, and celebrated Valentine's Day during the past month.

Proudly showing off their custom thermometers.

My husband went back to work today for the first time since before Thanksgiving, when the foster kids moved in. He has been out of the office for 12 weeks. I will now be out of my classroom for 9 weeks (except for two days during spring conferences), taking my turn at home with the crew of kids.

I have very mixed feelings about the beginning of my leave. I am sad to be away from my students for so long, and anxious about what kind of "mop up" I may have to do when I return for the last six weeks of the school year. I am also worried about my ability to parent full time, to keep the kids' schedules straight and get everyone to their appointments and activities on time with a minimum of family discord. However, it's also very freeing to not have to worry about daily lesson plans and materials prep, meetings, and timely responses to emails for the weeks ahead at school.

But I also feel that this time with me at home is exactly what my family needs right now. The kids, biological and foster, need to know they rank a higher priority in my life than my students. The foster kids need time with me around to really get to know me as a parent so they can trust me and feel the love and stability I hope to represent in their lives. Somehow this all came together for me on Saturday when I attended the funeral of a former fifth grade student. He was not quite twenty when he died, and had been a student in my classroom a decade ago. As I sat in the church where I had taken him and his classmates for school masses, watching his parents sob for the duration of the funeral and beyond, I realized there could be no other reaction to losing a child. The gut-wrenching, soul-deep ache clearly displayed by the parents mourning for their son would be mine if I had to sit through the funeral of any one of the four kids I now call my own.