My Banana Bread is Burning...

Well, only the top of it is burned and through no fault of my own...clearly the oven is a bit uneven in dispensing heat because the rest of the loaf looks mighty tasty. We can all rest easy tonight knowing that my banana bread will be delicious, but that is not the important fact here in this post. The most amazing part about that banana bread is that I made it...and this is not the first time. Ok, it's the second, but the mere fact that I have been baking and cooking dinners (unless Craig cooks) and that I just fininshed looking up recipes for things like lasagna and meat loaf is kind of freaking me out. Where, between all of the college education nonsense and the summer break lifeguarding insanity did I grow up and start taking care of myself...and other people when need be? When did grocery shopping become one of my weekly 'things-to-do'? And it doesn't end there. Yesterday I sold a car! The car that I bought when I first arrived, the car that ended up sucking ASS is no longer my burden to deal with. And I sold it myself. I may have not gotten what I wanted for it, but I have enough to break even with this new car and paying off other car-repair related bills, so who cares? And yes, I've also bought another new car...which is manual. So driving stick is another fun thing that I will hopefully be able to cross off soon on my list of accomplishments by the end of this weekend. At least it had better be or else I won't be making it to work next week.

Right, just some of the little things I've been doing here in the 'real world' along with paying bills, budgeting and all that stuff they don't really tell you about when you're in college lala land. Oh well.

I am slowly getting healthier. This cold continues to linger but I am fighting it tooth and nail. Somehow, I managed to lose my voice this weekend--I'm not sure if it was the coughing or the yelling at children all week. It may have been a mix of both. Oh right, this past week. Best week of my life, hands down (read: sarcasm).

I finally made it back to work after three weeks off and if you've ever seen a deer standing innocently in front of two oncoming headlights, eyes wide with shock, ready to be railed by that careless Ford pickup--yeah that's me. And the pickup? 57 wild 5-10 year olds on summer holiday with not a single outlet for all of their energy. Except me and my sanity.

The other day we took 57 hyped-up kids to the beach. Yes, the beach as in the OCEAN. As we walked our group down onto the sand, I took one look at the waves and thought to myself "well, we're certainly not walking out of here with 57 kids, we had better think of what we're going to tell the parents of the ones who don't make it." Surprisingly enough, thanks to a lot of yelling, some interesting perimeter strategies, and a bit of prayer (and i'm not a religious person) we made it back with a full roster. Needless to say, I slept well at the end of that day. We also took the group out to a giant corn maze, which proved to be a lot of fun and since we split up into smaller groups of seven and eight, much, much easier. I was lucky enough to get a "good" group, but I still ended up chasing one of our notorious 5-year olds who like wandering off on a whim. Go figure. Dealing with this one girl has made me seriously question if I ever want children.

It's not so bad, really. It's only a 9 hour day. And three of the days the children are split between two different sights. But I work at the sight with more children. And my sight also has the three bad children. The children that hit others and throw toys when they don't want to participate in our really easy and fun painting activity. We have the children who are banned from everything but going to the bathroom and watching TV because they always break the toys and hurt other kids. And then there are the needy kids with the queries like "can you push me on the rope swing" after I've just pushed 10 other kids for two hours straight; the tattle-tales with the stories such as "Trent called me a dummy-face" when Trent has clearly been quietly watching TV; the "helpful" ones with the information that "someone left a puddle in the bathroom again" when we just cleaned up the last puddle of piss that some eye-hand-penis-coordination-challenged youngin' left for us.

There are positives though. I do get to play games with kids all day, and if the bad ones aren't taking up all of our time that day, playing with the good ones is a lot of fun. I've heard somewhere that teachers give a ridiculously high percentage of attention to the bad kids in class instead of the good kids because they spend so much time disciplining them. It's easy to see why that is. I have also found myself questioning whether or not I want to go into teaching now.

But it's the weekend now and the day is just MINT. I am hoping that the wind stays down until Craig gets back from work so we can ride together later. It felt good to sleep until, well, 8:30 this morning and just putter around the house making banana bread. I think it's time to see how tasty that stuff is...and then maybe later I'll go out for a practice in my little manual civic. Oh and did I mention that since we drive on the left side of the road, I've got to shift with my left hand? Yeah, who ever thought that when I learned to drive stick i'd be doing it with the "wrong" hand. Go figure.

-NMK