It''s not really goodbye...sort of...

Yesterday was a great day. I felt good. I got my hair cut and it looks good. I hung out with Misty after she finished cutting my hair. Then I went to lunch with my friend Kim at Palms and the food was good and we talked and talked and talked for 3 hours. We don't get to get together very often and this was the last time we would get to get together for a while so we had a lot to talk about. It was so much fun and she is such an encouraging and uplifting person. She genuinely, actively listens and cares for you when you are in her presence. The very first time I went to the hospital with all this almost 2 years ago, when I got out she took care of me. I went and lived in her basement for a couple of days and she was my "mommy" and she cooked for me and it was awesome. Since then we have done the living Christmas tree together, we have chaperoned at Caswell together, we have talked and we have had many hugs and encouraging moments. She is awesome. After our 3 hour lunch we parted ways, but she said she would stop by my big farewell dinner tomorrow night and if she doesn't I'll see her in December when I come back.

After lunch I had coffee with the teacher that when I did YoungLife Capernaum, the kids in that group were in her classroom. Those kids are the ones that made me want to be a speical ed teacher and if teaching was all about those kids and my kids that I taught I would still want to be a special ed teacher. But that is not what teaching is about. Teaching is about rules, regulations, paperwork, staff meetings, deadlines, doing things you wouldn't normally do to please your supervisor, more paperwork, staff developments, parents yelling at you, teachers yelling at you, media mis-portraying you and all the hard work you've put in (sometimes), leaving no child behind which really leaves EVERY child behind, money, testing, and then a little bit about the kids. This is not what teaching should be about, but it is. I am sure I will find some of this when I become a dietitian, but probably not as much. Anyways. Karen and I had coffee for 2.5 hours. We talked about the serious trouble our educational system is in, why it is ok that she made me fall in love with teaching and now I'm not doing it, and how I can still work with these kids. After talking to her I realized, maybe for the first actual time, that I really am ok without teaching. I had been saying it to people and been saying it to myself, but after some of the stuff she has told me has happened in the short month and a half I've been out I am so freaking happy I am not a teacher anymore. Amen. And then I gave her some stuff from my classroom that she could use. Then we hugged and promised to keep up.

After all this I was completely exhausted and my throat hurt, which some people have determined the cause to be all the talking I've been doing lately with all my lunches/dinners/coffees, etc. So I rested until about 2 oclock today. Today I went to lunch with Amanda one of my friends. She used to work at my favorite coffee shop which is no longer my favorite coffee shop but I still go there some. And she is also a Catawba student. Her mom goes to my church and has been an amazing help with the move as well as Amanda and just someone who I could tell is genuinely nice all the time. She would always ask Amanda to ask how I was doing when she worked at the coffee shop. So we had lunch and talked and had fun.

Then I went over to Misty's house and had the last "family" dinner with her and the kids, which turned into me and her and Katie because Bradie was in a really bad mood and sick and so he went to his room. We decided it would be best to tell the kids goodbye now, while we were alone together, and it wasn't as sad yet. So I won't see them until Decemeber, but that is ok. It will come fast. Then I went to church. I saw a lot of my favorite people in the world for the last time today but it is ok because I will see them again soon. It was so hard because they would leave in like waves so it was like every 5 minutes for a while there person would come up and hug me and be like goodbye, then random person would come up and hug me and say goodbye, and so on. But most of that happened in the library and there is chocolate in there so I only got teary eyed once and the tootsie rolls fixed that right up. And now I'm home. There is still a ton of stuff that needs to be done before I leave. Including more packing, cleaning, etc. But there are people coming to help me Thursday and Friday so hopefully it will all get done well enough to leave on Saturday. I can't believe it is so close...but that just means we are that much closer to December :)