hace más que un año....

(Blog title: More than a year later....)

After one of the busiest years of my life (my first year of teaching... like real live 'My name's Miss so-and-so and I'll be teaching you Spanish this year' stuff) I remembered I had a blog. Then, after a summer and about a month I got motivated enough to go through the stupid "Forgot my login" process to log back into my blog and... well, blog.

Let's go back to what I was saying about how I finished my first year of teaching. It was one of the longest years of my life and at the same time it was one of the quickest years of my life. I kind of can't believe it's over. I am also SO HAPPY it's over. Now that my second year has been super successful ( :D to say the least!) I can say that my first year of teaching was mostly terrible and still hold my head high. There was just constantly so much to do! All the time! It never stopped. My life was probably 99.98% school last year and maaaaan was it unhealthy & no fun & draining.. For being a relatively easy major (in college), it's not an easy profession. Well, first year teaching isn't. If you're not a teacher, you seriously won't understand that. Not many of my non-teacher friends understood last year. Like there's lesson planning, grading, meetings, communicating with parents, communicating with students, actual in-class instruction time. I was working abouuuut 60-70 hours a week. That's not an exaggeration. And I was commuting an hour a day. I would leave my house at 6am, get to school at 7am, teach kids til 3pm, stay at school and plan and grade and respond to emails and write stuff on my board and create activities and brainstorm til 5pm sometimes 6pm sometimes 7pm sometimes (not joking). Then I'd drive home, it'd be 8pm. I'd eat and sleep and do it all over again. I somewhat liked the commute because I could spend time begging God to help me not die from how overwhelmed I was all the time. Well that, and praying about students, asking Him to make me a better teacher, running lesson plans by Him, praying for coworkers and administrators, praying through the occasional student-conflicts/classroom management issues, etc etc etcccc.

And you know what? He did help me so much. I look back on the struggles I had and know that God was with me because of two major things: 1. Things could have gone a lot worse. 2. He carried me through some things that I anticipated to be impossible.

Then I had a fabulous summer of rejuvenation with family and friends. I did some traveling and some netflixing. I said I was gonna try and do some schoolwork to get ahead for next year.... but I didn't. And I really didn't need to. I still have 392840234 things to do everyday as a second year teacher but I'm a little bit better and more experienced at doing those things & that tooootally accurate number is actually less than the amount of things that a first year teacher does everyday ;). Anyway, I had a fantastical summer. But it was also kinda short! Cause this year we're on the "balanced calendar", which means a shorter summer but longer breaks throughout the year!! One of those breaks is next week! Fall break is a week and 3 days for me this year :D!

Back to this summer: I moved out! In late July I moved to my own apartment in a city a LOT closer to my school. It was a bit heart-wrenching to move out..... but it was mostly awesome! I love my apartment. I have an awesome roommate. I have my own space. I have a brand new city to explore. I'm attending a different church that I'm slowly falling in love with. I'm making new friends... Things are kind of amazing for me right now. :)

If I would've written a blog last year it probably would've sounded EVEN MORE dramatic than this one about how nuts things were. Maybe it's a good thing that I took a year's hiatus? Anyway, I thought I'd show my good ole blog some love and I'm hoping to make posts more frequent. (Although I think I always say that and it almost never happens, I'm really gonna try.)

Thanks for reading... stay tuned. How's your life? Are you in a good season? A bad season? A dry season? A plentiful season? A transition?

Last year was definitely bad/transition. This year is good/transition.

Dueces.