Full Circle

Yesterday, Suspicious the turtle was very active. Over the last two days he really came back, swimming a lot, eating, running on the rock, etc. About an hour after Kaylee went to bed, I went in to check on her and the turtle. The lights were off, and I looked in and saw the turtle floating on the water. I gasped and pulled him out, Kaylee woke up and said "Don't worry, Mommy, he was really active right before I went to bed just a bit ago. He's okay, he's just sleeping hard." He wasn't, but I didn't tell her that yet. Instead I waited until she fell back asleep, then took the turtle out to the kitchen and in the middle of the night was trying to resuscitate a turtle as best I could with everything I'd read on how to do it. No luck. I put him back in the tank on the rock, heat lamp on to try to wake him up just in case, and attempted this morning to keep her too busy to mess with him, because I didn't want her school day, Monday, to start out this way. Didn't work. She came in and said "Mommy, I think Suspicious is gone." At that point I told her the truth. However, I will say that she handled it better than I did. I'm in a dark kitchen at 2 a.m., working on and sad over a stupid turtle the size of a silver dollar, and upset that if he was going to die, the time to have done it would have been when we all expected it when he was all weak and sluggish, not make us think it was going to be okay then drop dead anyway. That's just mean. Kaylee said "I don't want any more turtles." Me neither. Now she wants to get a fish. Not me. We have two cats; that ought to be plenty for one kid. But the other two people in the family are out voting me, and we'll be getting some fish of some kind. I'm not going to take care of those things this time though....hey, maybe that's what they'll need to survive around here. ;)

I didn't get a lot of sleep last night, thanks to that, so I was pretty groggy this morning, trying to sleep a little more after my lesson cancelled thanks to a thunderstorm. Still don't feel very good, and I'm not sure if I'm coming down with something (Kaylee's throat hurts and she's not acting quite right either), or if it's a simple lack of sleep thing. I buried the turtle this afternoon and took out the tank and all the stuff and put it on the deck.

After school today, I took Kaylee out for ice cream at Scoops. They have one called "Bearclaw" which is dark chocolate, caramel, and chocolate-covered cashews. Yummmmy. Kaylee had "Almond Joy", and we sat on a bench and ate ice cream and made up jokes and fake talked in Spanish and had a really nice time. We were on our way home, and she said "Stop! I want to climb that hill!" Okay. I stopped the car, she jumped out, ran all the way up to the top of the sledding hill, stood at the top like "Top of the World, Ma!", then ran down the hill and all the way back to the car. I don't know why. Sometimes "Because I felt like it" is good enough.

Tonight I had a school board meeting, which went well. The school is doing great, it is growing so much that space is an issue, which is an excellent problem to have, the teachers are great, and the whole thing is just running so much more smoothly this year than previous years. It's great to see it all coming together so well. On a humorous note, we are interviewing for a new elementary teacher, and one of the candidates that the administrator interviewed was my 2nd grade teacher, 32 years ago, in Wisconsin. She gave me TONS of punishment sentences to write, almost every day, for talking too much in class. Thirty-two years later she's here at 'my' school in Indiana looking for a teacher's position. Should I warn them that she's an evil teacher who likes to hand out sentences to sweet, innocent, um, friendly little girls like I was? ;)