a scrap of beauty.

for you, friends. happy autumn monday.

as the sky fades.

do you ever get that feeling when you just want to type...not because you have anything to say but because you like the way your fingers feel as they flow over the keys? (maybe you don't. i get the idea that i just sounded quite distinctly like a pianist there. anyway...) i have that feeling.

and i've been considering doing nablopomo again this month. (remember last year?) i posted yesterday just in case i made up my mind to do it. i haven't made up my mind...but i'm posting again.

i wonder how long i could go just "in case."

i've been sitting here in danielle's living room watching the sky fade into shades of violet and indigo...the light melt into softness. puttering at school with my feet up - a preschool activity here, a chapter read there. realizing that while there are only three weeks left of practicum (yay!), my portfolio is due in four weeks. and since i want to be relatively free in that fourth week, i'd better get on it.

"on it" should be said with a brute enthusiasm, in which case i suppose it should have an exclamation point following...but i'll just let you imagine. i don't appreciate the way exclamation points look in my writing.

my blog seems to have taken a lighter turn in the past couple of months. i toy with censuring that and waiting for deeper or more profound words or revelations to come. but the key is to stay real. that's what i keep telling myself. and if real is the lighter side of things that i need to balance this busy/heavy life i'm living right now, then so be it. hopefully the deeper lessons i am learning will process and surface after thanksgiving when i have time to breathe. when that does happen, i don't want to have to learn how to talk again. (in other words, there is a point to this rambling, if only to keep the channel of communication open.)

i just made a kinda good case for nablopomo. hmn.

do you ever get that feeling that you just unwittingly worked yourself into a corner and even though it's a good corner you wish you could sneak out of it before anybody realizes what you just said? mhmm. welcome to the party.

you know you teach preschool when...

...you are driving down the road in the morning - actually not to preschool - and you catch yourself singing the "good morning" song to yourself. "good morning, good morning, good morning to you...good morning, good morning, good morning to you...our day is beginning, there's so much to do...good morning, good morning, good morning to you." (see why it's called the good morning song? :P)

...you can stand in the middle of the classroom and identify where each child is by the various noises they make: guttural humming, clapping, tongue clicking, a hissing intake of breath, bossing others, etc.

...you come home and, upon getting excited at the dinner menu, realize that you are producing a somewhat inane laugh while clapping...just like "so-and-so." oops. you immediately stop because you are becoming your student.

...you have so perfected "the look" that kids from the classroom next door are more responsive (read: compliant) to you than they are to their own teacher.

...you come home at the end of the day and the first thing you do is shed your "teacherish" clothes to get into something comfortable. (ok, maybe this is actually more of a college-girl thing. teachers might actually think of their clothes as comfortable. might.)

...you find that by evening, your brain has been on three-and-four-year-old level for so long that your college level homework requires some serious concentration...aaaand you resort to your blog to ease the transition into communicating in whole, meaningful sentences.