My baby girl is a teenager today. She’s acted like one for a while, but today she officially really is 13 years old. That’s hard to believe. Seems like just a year or so back that she was being born, pink and slimy and making me so happy to have a little baby girl. Today I tried to give her some birthday spankings and she’s gotten so big I can’t catch her and hold her still long enough anymore. That sucks. She’s a good kid, an excellent student, and I’m very proud of her. Even if she did run up the phone bill so that it’s more like the house payment this month.
Sara’s 13 and Alex is looking into getting a work permit to get a job while he’s still 15. It’s a conspiracy to make me feel old.
I’ve been swamped with school stuff. I have to stop assigning so much work. My juniors are still studying Hawthorne; we’re doing The Scarlet Letter now. My sophomores are reading Things Fall Apart and all but one are griping about it. They say it’s hard, but it seems the only thing they’re really struggling with are the African names. Well, and they’re own dislike of reading … anything. And my reading class is finding out how Bilbo found that pesky ring in The Hobbit. I’ve also had to take the sophomores through some review of sentence fragments and run-on sentences after reading their essays.
One of my favorite things this week has been the girl who asked why she was on the ineligible list with an F in my class. I said we’d talk later, and within 30 minutes she was asleep at her desk … again. Umm, duh!
I haven’t gotten any writing done for the past week. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a long way toward finishing Inheritance this weekend. I haven’t assigned any essay that need to be graded over the weekend. Just tests. Ugh!
Steven E. Wedel 
Leave a Reply