It's Monday morning, and I'm excited to get back to work. Right now, "work" means tying together the loose threads of schoolwork - getting down to business after wrapping up my second of two solo weeks in the classroom. The solo weeks proved to be tiring and exhilarating, often at the same time. I like those kids, and due to the different types of personalities in the classroom, it has been an excellent classroom for me to learn in. Now, I'm scaling it back again and focusing on teaching social studies, although I'll be involved in other things as well. This week, I'm going to be spending a lot of time entering things into the grade book. If I'd been smart, I would have been doing that as I went along, but I didn't do that, so the papers have piled up. This will no doubt ensure that the next time I'm teaching full-time, I will be staying after school to take care of the paperwork in a more timely fashion. Ha.

I took Willow over the hill to the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk this weekend. We had initially intended to meet up with Terilynn and her son, but her son was sick, so it ended up being just the two of us. We'll all meet up another time. I met Terilynn recently, and we've been spending time together when our schedules line up, finding that we have an impressive amount of things in common. For now, I'll just say that I'm excited and that she's on my mind a lot.

As for Willow, she was excited too - about being at the Boardwalk. We went on the ferris wheel ("wow! You can see everything!) and the Cave Train ("that was awesome!) before going inside for some miniature golf. Afterwards, we walked along the beach, heading for the wharf. On the wharf, Willow was hugely excited about the sea lions, and we spent a long time watching them, even staying put when it started raining on us. We ended up buying an umbrella for the longish walk back to the van (I'd parked near downtown) and hanging out at Bad Ass Coffee so Willow could get some hot chocolate and thaw out after the cold walk back from the wharf. Then we went to the bookstore. Willow wanted to buy a Dora the Explorer book, but I bought her a couple of books featuring Native American stories instead - one about Crow, and one about Coyote. It was a good call, because although she initially resisted, she ended up liking them enough to ask me to reread them to her.

The next day, she was still excited enough about the sea lions that when we went to the birthday party she'd been invited to, she told and retold the sea lion story to each arriving guest.

We'll be visiting those sea lions again.

Now, it's back to work for me.

Currently listing to: Murder by Death "In Bocca Al Lupo"