Today is not a good day. Last night was a really bad night. I’m exhausted. I’m cranky. I don’t want to be here. I want to cry and scream and punch someone. But then again that might take too much energy. Today may be the first day when I literally put my head down on my desk and go to sleep during class.
Right now I don’t see how this problem shall be resolved. Right now I don’t see how I am in the wrong. Right now my whole body hurts. I’m tired of crying.
Well, uhm… so I’ve been looking at my stomach for a bit and going “There is no way I am only as far along as I think. No freakin way.” Yesterday I *finally* had an examination by a midwife (long story) and, well… I’m right. Looks like I am 17-ish weeks which means that if I actually judge from that last period more like about 18 weeks. I think I am probably going to get an ultrasound just so that I can have a more firm due date–still not finding out gender though. This means I shoot from being almost done with the third month to being more like start of the fifth month. This means I didn’t get a positive home pregnancy test until 11 weeks in. This means I had tattoo work done while pregnant. This means I drank enough to get drunk a couple of times while pregnant. This means I uhm celebrated my birthday while pregnant. Ah shit. No use crying over spilled milkshake.
Midwife said that I am heavy enough to start with that it isn’t a big deal that I still haven’t gained weight and I think this is a reasonable belief as well. She’s happy that I started on prenatal vitamins so early–which may be part of why I’m not having cravings. She thinks that I do need to stay on fish oil because flax seed isn’t as pregnancy friendly. 🙁
And this means that I was bitching about not getting pregnant quickly enough while I was pregnant. *blush* This means I got pregnant in June after going off birth control mid-cycle in May. That’s pretty funny considering how upset I was.
How do I say this. How do I believe this. But yet… Noah and I have decided to leave the bay area. We have been talking extensively for the past almost two years about how we would manage to afford the things we want while staying here and the options have never been pretty. Mostly what we figured out was all the ways we would have to compromise the things we want in order to afford the basics of life here. Of course it would be easy to stay here if I kept working, but that would be giving up on the most important things that we want for our children and that is to not put them in daycare and to allow them to homeschool. This is a difficult position to be in.
After a great deal of talking about our options we decided that having a certain standard of living is non-negotiable for us and the only way to have that is if we drastically cut some of our primary expenses. The only way we can make this happen is if we leave California. We have considered a wide variety of locations as possible destinations and have decided that Pittsburgh is the best option for us. Noah has friends there, job leads, and the cost of housing is simply unbeatable for places we would consider living.
We have been doing research on the area, but of course we realize that there is only so much we can do from our comfy California couch. If you have input on things we should know about different areas of town or specific helpful information about cross country moves (I have never done this sort of thing before) please feel free to tell us.
What I (and probably Noah too) don’t want to hear are complaints or criticisms about our choice, whining about how we can leave, dire predictions of failure, or other snotty opinion sharing of an unhelpful nature.
We don’t plan to leave until after the baby is born. Apparently home birth isn’t exactly legal (or illegal–it’s confusing) in Pennsylvania so it’s going to be a bit odd to deal with that once I’m already set on my option. I also have the convention in February to consider and I’m not going to flake on my obligations. (I swear Jon–I won’t abandon you too.) We will miss people, of course. But I believe that those who are our friends will handle the distance. Those who fade away probably would have anyway.
(Yes, I know this is public.)
Dear Ms. Gibbs,
Thank you for your explanation re: the rap song and your intentions behind presenting it in class. It does amaze me that it is hard to convince students that tragedy is still relevant today. I feel that they are overwhelmed with tragedy and tend to block out its reality. (Just listen to or watch the news daily.) Maybe it is a self-protection mechanism?
Congratulations on your upcoming delivery. I hope that all goes well, now and for the next 20 years!
D D
This is when I love parents. 🙂
A parent questioned me on my choice of teaching material on Friday.
Noah and I have been having conversations that are simultaneously terrifying and very exciting. Contemplating how different my life will be in a year no matter what means that thinking about adding on a huge additional change is… nervous making.
What in my life is going to actually last through the baby transition? How many of my “friends” are people I barely speak to now but they will disappear completely when I am kid-enabled? How many of the gatherings I attend will I be able to attend in a year? In three years? I noticed recently that even though an event I went to would be nominally ok with my kidlets attending, I wouldn’t want my kids there past about two because my kids don’t need to hear graphic conversations about anyone’s sex life. It really isn’t that I all of a sudden disapprove of people talking about their sex lives–more that I am thinking about context and who needs to hear that conversation. I wouldn’t be ok with demanding that my peeps all of a sudden sensor everything they want to say when my children walk into the room, but that means I have to self select out. What will be left?
Any and all poly/kink gatherings are going to be absolutely completely and totally inappropriate. Which also includes parties thrown by people I know through those communities and that seriously cuts back on the number of people I know in general. I’m not really involved in Dickens or Faire and I can’t picture that involvement ever becoming serious. I can’t go alone (no ditching Noah with the kids), I think dragging the kids along would be a nightmare by myself for the first five years or so and he doesn’t want to go so that’s not an option. Noah has uhm strong feelings about the dance community so I will never again be heavily involved in that. I’m not going to bother to go through why I won’t be heavily involved in the Burner community. What am I left with? A few individual people. Oh wait, and some of those individual people are not real into kids so they won’t want to spend time with me anyway. Right. Ok, let’s narrow down the few individual pro-kid friends I have. Busy, busier, and OMG busy. I am not procreating in a pro-kid peer group so this is going to be interesting. Some of the pro-kid people I know are thinking about moving away. That’s going to narrow the focus even more.
I know people who hand off the children so they can go have social lives. I have no intention of being one of them. Well, I’m sure I will hire a babysitter once in a while–but I intend for this to be pretty rare.
It’s just all so much to think about.
Given how brain dead and exhausted I am at all times I told my APs that I need to make the move to teaching part-time basically immediately. Luckily this was greeted with full support and multiple statements that can be boiled down to, “If you say you need this, then you need this. You are never one to shirk your duties.” My midwife is backing me up. My BTSA mentor is sad that she won’t get to work with me anymore and honestly I’m sad I won’t be working with her as well. She really is a neat person and collaborating with her would have taught me a great deal. I’m going to teach three classes till the end of the semester and then transfer all of my classes to this new person.
I sent an email to the credential program yesterday and received a response within a few hours giving me the contact information for an ideal candidate. I’m trying to get in touch with her today so we can work towards getting her started maybe by next week.
On one hand I feel like I am failing my kids. On the other hand, I *can’t* keep doing this. I physically hurt almost all the time from exhaustion. I’m going to try and keep this woman on my lesson plans through the end of this unit then let her work with me or on whatever she wants from then on. My kids will be upset because they will miss me, but I can’t let that influence deciding what is best for me physically right now.
God I can’t wait until I get to sleep more.
Sometimes I feel kind of idiotic because so many of my posts are trite and then I think, “but if I don’t post people will hit refresh dozens of times with nothing to see” then I try to convince myself that I am not lame; I am magnanimous! Anyway. 🙂
Today we drove our yuppie ass hybrid car to yuppie ass Whole Foods and bought yuppie ass organic food and granola. Whatever happened to being rebellious and wild? I bought fucking organic lunch meat and cod liver oil. I can’t believe the shit I do sometimes. We had to come home after that to refrigerate food and eat again. See, I weighed myself this morning again and noticed that after breakfast (normally I weigh myself before) I am… down more weight. Alright then, time to start seriously trying to increase my calorie intake. This is gonna suck cause food tastes awful in the main. We then went to yuppie ass Stanford shopping center where we bought some extremely yuppie Christmas presents. But they are so neat!! 🙂 We were joined by the always delightful for our wander through terminal yuppieville. I feel guilty that we were only able to stay out for about two hours before my body crashed and burned hard and we needed to stop walking around. (Did I mention that we stopped and bought more food twice during this period because I was hungry? wtf?) We then went to a birthday shindig where I walked in and said, “May I borrow a bed?” My wonderful Daddy tucked me in so I could lie there and be totally out of it for a while. I sucked it up after a bit and managed to be social for nearly two hours. 🙂 My lovely Noah got to be social and talk to people other than me and I felt happy that I hadn’t let him just take me home after shopping. 🙂
Then more food. Then the dance where we did registration for two hours, talked to one of my favorite kids (one of my awesome painters from last summer) for about 20 minutes then came home. I’m typing this in between bites of yogurt, granola, and fruit because if I don’t eat now I will wake up at 2 or 3 am with massive stomach pain. I’m jittery from having caffeine tonight to allow me to stay up for the dance. (That probably contributes to me babbling right now.) I found out that 1/2 of my classes did the lesson plan on Friday and 1/2 sat in the library doing nothing. Ah, shit. That’s gonna suck to fix.
Ok, it was my fault. So after the comment “You look good in rope” I needed to go through and remove a shitload of userpics. *beat head on wall*
A coworker sent out an email today about defiant students. I responded. I find the different approaches very interesting and worth noting. It’s a bit long.
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Why is it that when I am not really up for sex at all I am thinking about girls all the time?
If my life were to be better right now what would it look like.
I would spend no more than 9 hours a day at work and I would not work weekends. (7:30-4:30 is fucking long enough.) Especially because I only get paid for 7 1/2 hours.
I would get to be social once or twice every week in a way that felt meaningful which means not going to an event where I don’t know anyone and sleeping on the couch. (Not complaining about that event honey, just saying that I want to feel like I have a real social life.)
My stomach feeling ok would be an automatic cue to go have sex because I miss it when I can’t have it and that is most of the time these days.
I would spend time every weekend working on the con instead of my job so that I felt like I was being productive towards an event I am helping with.
How do I get there?
I think that I need to give up on academic detention. It makes my life harder and right now that isn’t worth my time.
Write the grader and start having her do smaller assignments in addition to the big essays because it would make my life better.
Figure out how to let Noah help me with some stuff cause right now I am not taking advantage of my resources. 🙂
Start actually going to bed at 8 so that I am getting a more consistent amount of sleep.
My busy social weekend is evaporating. The Friday night party was cancelled due to illness. I realized that Saturday is Homecoming so I have to go supervise the dance. Oh well, so much for me getting to pretend I have friends or a life.
Have I mentioned that I want to throw up? Yeah, today the nausea is awful.
In other news–the midwife thinks I may be further along than I think due to the intensity and timing of my symptoms. We’ll have a better idea after the internal exam. She’s neat. She’s sassy and a smart ass. I can handle that. 🙂
Waking up at 3am to a massive stomachache as my body demands food is really annoying. It did allow me to notice how OHMYGOD booked this weekend is. I think I am invited to six events. I told some people no-way-in-hell and others maybe-depending-on-ugg. It’s a bit galling that I can’t give a single “Yes”. *sigh* I hit 11 weeks on Friday. I have an appointment with a midwife today at 3:30. So far she seems like a smart ass–yay! Maybe I’ll find out how many weeks gestated I actually am so I can judge when the first trimester might actually end. Stupid irregular cycle.
Have I mentioned that I find it very bizarre that my most concrete symptom of pregnancy is that I am developing ‘mom’ nipples? Cause I often have weird stomach pain/eating issues–that’s just part of the joy of me. My boobs have hurt like this in the past when they grew on birth control. Going 11 weeks without a period is unusual but I’ve certainly gone longer than this. Being exhausted happened last year at the beginning of the school year (ok, nothing like this… but still). Yeah, for symptoms it is the ‘mom’ nipples for the win on convincing. I miss my nipples and I will never get them back. 🙁
Noah is talking to my stomach more. It’s massively cute.
Ok, 1/2 a sandwich, a glass of oj, and a banana later it’s time to go back to bed. zzzzzzzzz
To whom it may concern:
Kristine has demonstrated teaching strategies that motive all students by her ability to develop a classroom environment that’s pleasant and where students are cooperative with each other. She gives verbal instructions at the beginning of the period and informs students to check the white board for daily work assignments and agenda items. Her students listen when she gives oral instructions and participate as they work together in daily assignment.
She maintains high standards for student behavior when she lectures, students work individually, in groups and when they work on worksheets. Students are informed to listen as she gives instructions and she expects them to respond cooperatively. She commands respect and give them respect. Students are given time to complete the work assigned and once their done she moves around and checks their work. Students that do not complete assignments are issued it as homework. Students are allowed to wander out of their seats when informed to do so as a part of the assignment.
Kristine, knowledge the English language is extensive and she is also involved in extra curricular activities and a club sponsor. I observed her lesson working on the standard addressing writing a research essay and reading comprehension using the book “For Water Like Chocolate.” Her presentation established a controlling impression that conveyed a clear and distinctive perspective on the subject and a focus throughout the classroom discussion related to food. She checked students for their understanding of English usage and comprehension. Students demonstrated their understanding by their ability to use thoughtful concepts of food to explain their moods and ideas. She presents lessons by using power point presentation, questioning, discussions, checks student understanding orally and written work or through the use of a work sheet.
Her instructional methods to assess student work include the use of giving students allotted time to work in class. A variety of instructional strategies focused on objectives. She uses individual work, direct instruction, probing questioning, and classroom control techniques. She incorporates subject, curriculum frameworks, and content standards in organizing subject matter. She moves about the room to monitor student progress, communicates respect for student opinions and interest and at the same time gets them to focus on their work.
Kristine presents her lessons or ideas clearly and meaningfully to all students. Her demeanor toward students is to get them engaged in the lesson both their attention, and interest. She establishes a warm and friendly tone in the classroom. She moves about the room, directly engaging all students throughout the period with a look, or a gesture.
I have observed Kristine experience success with her English III students. She is organized and her students demonstrate that by following her example.
It is pleasure to write this letter in support of Kristine Gibbs for an early completion of the BTSA program.
I go to work. I come home and sit on the couch. I try to putter around the house but even that isn’t a sure thing. I haven’t been talking to people much and I rarely get to be social. I’ve been trying consciously to at least talk to people online a little bit more but my arms are hurting enough (go swelling) that I have reduced my typing time almost to half what it normally is. This is impacting my ability to talk to people. All of my friends spend a lot of time complaining they hate the phone and I don’t have the physical or mental energy to go hang out at parties. So I only see Noah. This is feeling pretty lonely. I’m not really sure what to do about it though. I am not physically capable of seeing my friends after they get off work at 7 or so at night because I’m already at home getting into jammies at that point. Weekends I spend trying to get a little bit of housework and a bunch of work done. But I’m lonely.
These thoughts brought to you by the fact that Dad found out through the grapevine that I am pregnant and he felt upset that he didn’t hear it from me. Well, I rarely talk to him because in the past two years every conversation we have had has been initiated by me and the only times we have seen one another was when I went up to Portland and I’m feeling kind of bitter. He has been in the Bay Area and still not bothered to see me. I sort of feel like most of my friends work that way. I initiate conversations. I go see people. I know that this isn’t true of absolutely all of my friends (thank you Sarah and Marcie and Chris and Crystal and Lee has been trying to talk to me lately) but it is true of the vast majority of people. So I’m feeling like me staying home is where I ought to be because no one seems to care about seeing me or talking to me anyway.
As I sit here lesson planning on my couch on this beautiful Sunday afternoon I have to stop and think about how very different my life will be soon. I feel like I am killing myself for a job that is counting down until it isn’t mine any more. I am trying my best to cram the most important work of the year into a smaller period of time. I’m trying to figure out how I can give these kids a more full year of English than they have gotten in other years despite the fact that I won’t be there for the last 1/6 or more of it. I care about this work, but it drains my energy and saps my will to live. Many people keep telling me that I will be dying to come back to work after staying home for the summer with a baby… I can’t say yet that they are wrong, but I really doubt that I am going to be eager to get back to this. Why would I want to come back to a job that barely allows me to have a relationship with Noah, let alone cleaning my house (no one is welcome in my bathroom right now), let alone going to the grocery store and making food sometimes instead of eating out, let alone have enough time to properly enjoy my growing child? I’m sure I will miss things about teaching but I don’t think I will miss it enough to want to teach. As I sit here designing lessons for the next nine weeks that will keep me up late at night making tests and quizzes and figuring out how to hook kids into giving me a decent introduction… No. I can’t believe that I would rather do this than be with my child.
Cause I know you like specifics.
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More to come…
I’ve been having a really hard time emotionally lately for a variety of oh-my-fucking-god hormone reasons. After the comment from my ‘friend’ I really haven’t felt safe talking to anyone about what is going on with me. I’m not real big on being judged. There have also been some points of friction with Noah that are totally exacerbated by the fact that I am seriously hormonal. I’ve been feeling more and more isolated and lonely and scared as I am shutting down any “real” conversation with people. So I did something crazy. I called my mommy.
The conversation went really well. We talked about a number of things that are going poorly for me (Oh wait–her easy pregnancys involved HUGE amounts of nausea so maybe I’m not breaking the pattern yet.) and ways I’m having a hard time emotionally. We talked about a few of the more hot buttony things from the past and nothing blew up. It was really good. I needed that. She’s nervous about some of the choices I am making (home birth, home schooling) but she is actually listening to my reasons for wanting them and has said that she has a lot of reservations but she can understand why I am making the choices I am making. That is literally the best I could hope for from her. That was supportive and friendly and everything. Especially because a lot of her reservations are from ignorance and her fear that I will get stuck at home with my children and give up my identity the way she did. That’s really not a horrible thing for her to want to spare me from. She did make the suggestion that given how tired and how sick I am that I should probably try to take days off more often. Her comment that my students are better off having subs occasionally than having me just leave work mid-pregnancy because I can’t work anymore is actually a pretty reasonable one. Even if I run out of sick days I can afford it.
Calling her was good. I’m pretty sure that it should continue to be a rare occurance but the calls have picked up in freqency (twice in a month? Holy shit) and it’s still ok.
We talked a little bit about her mother and how a week didn’t go by without her talking to her mother. We very briefly talked about how hard my grandmother’s death was on my mom but she had a hard time talking about it. Then we talked about why she has such a hard time talking about it–if she showed weakness in front of my father he would be nasty and hurtful. He would use it against her for years to come. I’m doing better at seeing how when I am reacting to my baggage she is reacting to hers. My father has been dead for nine years and twelve days (but who’s counting?) and he is still influencing so much of her life. He influenced her from the time she was 19 years old until she was 49. 30 years of hurting her. No wonder she is so fucked up. I’ve never stopped and thought about that before. I’ve always thought about it in terms of “well, she was an adult…” but now that I’ve been an adult for a few years I’m seeing how little that mitigates trauma. For all the things my mother didn’t shield me from she actually kept my father basically out of my life. That was the biggest kindness she could give me. The fact that when he did pop up he hurt me is just a sign that she did a great job of keeping me from even more and worse hurt by keeping him away most of the time.
Maybe I am ready to forgive.
Noah bought those pills for his friend Tao without talking to me about it.