Fall Break 2018

Fall Break has sadly come to an end. While I am physically ready to go back to work tomorrow, meaning I am completely prepared, having done all my lesson plans and made all my copies before the vacation started. And I actually am feeling relatively less stressed than when the break began. Still, I don’t think I feel emotionally ready to go back to work quite yet. We really didn’t do much during our time off. We did go visit some friends sans kids that we haven’t seen in ages, but other than that we stayed home with the kids. I worked on creating their Halloween costumes out of cardboard boxes, while my husband plugged away at solving answer keys for his Geometry and Algebra classes. Now, in what feels like the blink of an eye we have to start work again tomorrow. 

I am proud of what I’ve gotten done with the costumes and I couldn’t have done it without both my husband and my brother-in-law’s help. I promise, I’ll post pictures for next week’s blog, since I still have the finishing touches to complete. It has been my tradition for the last seven years to make my children their Halloween costumes. Even now with having a full time job for the first time in over a decade, I’m glad that I managed to make them. It is fun, though this year was a tad stressful because of the time constraint and complexity of the costumes, but the truth is I love the opportunity to create things and Halloween is the perfect excuse to create something unusual. 

This year the boys decided that they both wanted to be Transformers. Turns out their little cousin wanted to be a Transformer too, and since my brother-in-law decided to take the costume design to the next level by having the costume actually transform from a robot to an automobile, I felt the need to do the same. Granted I didn’t take into consideration what a huge undertaking that was to complete in a week’s time. Maybe if I only had one Transformer to make, or two of the same Transformers, but instead I have two totally different little boys normally known as Captain Awesome and Lieutenant Amazing who will thus forth in this blog and the next be referred to as Optimus Prime and BumbleBee respectively.

Also we still have the little rat dog I found the Friday Fall Break began too, who BumbleBee decided to name Rex, short for T-Rex. Which is cute and ironic since she is a female and probably weighs less than two pounds, but was all bones when we got her, like the T-Rex Halloween decor I bought this year. 

The crazy thing is I think I really like this dog. I never considered myself a small dog person let alone a Chihuahua person. The best dog I ever had was a Rottweiler-Pitt Bull mix named Moki, who passed away in August of 2016. I’m not sure how one makes such a drastic change in dog choices. Maybe it’s because this little one just appeared in my life and she’s super calm and sweet. I like her so much I even went and retrieved the little dog from one of our neighbors after the neighbor took her from our yard while we were at the kids soccer game. Thankfully they had the courtesy to tell us they took her. I didn’t think that I wanted her, until she was gone. 

Now that I want to keep her, my husband is putting on the pressure to get rid of our crazy Husky-Lab mix Sweetums. He keeps stating, “we are a one animal household.” I hear him. And I know that I need to do something about Sweetums, either I need to exercise her intensely daily and train her so she quits jumping on everyone and everything or I do need to find her a better home, one more suitable for such a high energy dog. 

My problem is, Optimus Prime doesn’t want to get rid of either dog, even Sweetums, who he is pretty terrified of because she’s always jumping on him and knocking him down. BumbleBee on the other hand, could care less if we get rid of either dog, as long as we keep one. He’s my dog whisperer. If he were a little older and bigger, I would turn over all dog training to him. Unfortunately you can’t give a four year old that responsibility. Personally I’m torn. I do love Sweetums, she got her name because she is so incredibly sweet. She just got big and is always bursting full of energy. I don’t feel right giving up on her. I feel like she’s my responsibility. As for the little dog “Rex”, I feel like she came into my life for a reason. Maybe she will help calm my Sweetums. She certainly has created some balance already.