You know those mornings when nothing seems to go right? Yep…we had one of those kind of mornings. I got up early to do my workout and realized that my shoes were upstairs in a place where if I retrieved them I’d wake up the dog. Waking up the dog means we wake up the whole house and Mommy no longer gets to work out. So we made it work, shoeless. Normally, wouldn’t have caused any issues, except there was some kind of sharp plastic shard on the ground that I couldn’t see and I did a squat jump onto it bare foot…so that felt awesome.

That should have been a precursor to the direction our morning was headed.

The kids do a lot of work at home and they usually want me or Bryan to check over it. The night before I had checked Ellen’s science homework. This is an important detail because I knew she did it, and did it well, because I saw it. The next morning however, that same science homework was missing and we had an epic meltdown. Ellen was in a total state of panic. This young lady is so mature and so conscientious the thought of not having her homework (which I know for a fact she did) to turn in was something she couldn’t even imagine. Everyone sort of stood frozen when she realized it wasn’t in her folder because she was so panicked.

Fiona and Cooper immediately started looking for it, but weren’t even sure what they were looking for and I think were too scared to ask. Finley searched the car and Fletcher kept asking me to help him with his water bottle. Read the room Fletcher, read the room!

Poor Ellen. I have to admit, I was laughing at her. I felt sorry for her because she was so distraught. I kept telling her if worse came to worse she could just redo it in the car or (gasp) tell her teacher what happened. They know she is a responsible student who goes above and beyond in her work, I’m pretty sure they’d buy the story that her homework legit disappeared. I have many thoughts about where said homework could have disappeared to. The most likely scenario is that it is in the trash, which I rifled through looking for it, but with no luck. Another likely scenario is that Fletcher poached it and is hiding it in his room as some sort of treasure. I also looked there this morning…but again, with no luck.

Either way, our sweet, responsible Ellen had a giant overreaction to this small problem and I had to try not to laugh at her (at least not where she could see me). GOD bless her. That desire to always do her best will serve her well in life. We never found the homework, so Ellen redid it in the car and learned a valuable lesson in the process. She apologized for her histrionics and we all moved on.

As we left the house, late of course after all of that drama, Bryan told us to avoid K10 as there was a huge accident. Apparently a large truck fell off the K7 overpass onto K10 and it was on fire. So our main path to school was shut down. Huge prayers go out to anyone involved in that accident. I saw some video on it and it looked horrific. When I went out later this afternoon I could still see the smoke coming from where the fire had been. It’s very sad.

Because of this detour it took us a little longer to get to school and Fiona started to panic that we’d be late because she had mass. I assured her we’d get there in time but of course we got behind a cement truck on a one lane road and he was traveling at about 25 miles an hour…the whole way there.

We pulled up to Sacred Heart of Jesus at about 7:58, 2 minutes to spare. The kids ran out of the car without so much as a goodbye and I had to hurry back home to be in my digital classroom at 8:30.

All you can do about mornings like this one is laugh…and laugh I did. In the craziness of the morning we forgot to pull our Advent card so we didn’t get to do anything for that today. In past years I would have tried to squeeze that in and pile it onto the many other things I needed to do today and tonight once the kids go to bed, but I cut myself, and them, some slack today.

After teaching digitally, filling out some letters of recommendations, grading a few papers and getting ready for my in person classes tomorrow I accompanied my mom on a shopping extravaganza. Gaga has wanted to get her shopping done for weeks and I finally had a free afternoon. It is so nice to get to spend time with one of my favorite humans on Earth uninterrupted. Even though we live in the same house we are often on different schedules or just so surrounded by small humans that it’s not like we really get to talk. It was fun to help her find presents for my nephews and the kids but mostly it was just awesome to hang out with her.

After shopping we went to get the kids and came home to a record setting weather day in Kansas. It was 68 degrees and sunny…the most perfect day. So, the kids, of course, wanted to play more soccer. I may get better at this game with how frequently we are playing it these days and I need to get better…soccer was definitely not my sport.

So, a day that started with complete chaos turned out to be a pretty great day!

I get to see my students in person tomorrow for the first time in over a week and I am super excited about it. I know I’ve said this a lot but I’m so grateful St. James has been able to be in person school all semester. I am not a huge fan of online learning…I definitely prefer to see them!

Hopefully tomorrow morning will be a little less insane…but if not, I can pray the day totally redeems itself, like today did.

#dorseyshenanigans

#celebr8awesome