I follow Priscilla Shire’s blog. It is pretty great. Every month she posts a new devotional in the section she calls the jewelry box. This month she posted about two letters. O.K. You should really go read it, but essentially she writes on how powerful those words can be. Not in a sarcastic, or dismissive tone but used in a way that says “I heard you; I trust that you heard me. I will not add any more strife to this conversation.” I have noticed how powerful those words can be  because I have spent the school year working under a principal who uses them well.

People come to him with concerns. Sometimes they are valid, sometimes they aren’t. When you work with as many teachers as are at my school you simply can’t make everyone happy. Teachers are notorious for having gone into the profession because they get to be completely in charge of their own space. They like to be the ones telling what to do…..not the other way around. Making decisions based on what one person is telling you is probably not the best route. So he listens and says okay. Then you have to let him decide what is going to be the best way to handle the situation. Sometimes, he has a really good reason for not changing anything. Sometimes, things get changed.

Lately, with the school situation. I have heard God telling me OK. In the exact same way Mr. Sims says it. OK, I have heard you. OK, I am taking what you say into consideration. OK, I need you to let me handle it now.

This year I also learned the power of OK in my classroom. When a student won’t budge, when they are being belligerent. When they are making decisions that I cannot allow in my room, and are refusing to see reason. The staff was instructed to not get into the argument, to simply say “OK” let the chips fall where they may, and let the consequences say the rest. The scary thing about this is I don’t win. I want the student to KNOW I am right, to hear what I have to say, to get what I think is an adequate punishment. But I can talk forever and still not get that from a student. Sometimes when you have had your say, and things aren’t immediately flipping to your side you need to trust that it will all shake out in the end and say OK.

I have been in situations before where I hear the Lord say to me OK. When I am refusing to do what He asks, when I know the better way but am not following it. When I have been railing against His plan I hear “okay” and no that God is saddened by the decisions that separate myself from Him, but that He is going to allow me to suffer the consequences, and be there when I finally decide to do it His way and ask Him to pick up the pieces.

But the OK that has been pressing on my heart most is the one that God has asked me for. The one I finally gave Him yesterday. Where I can say truly, OK. You want me at Roswell? OK. You want me to drive far and serve a suburban population? OK. And not OK…but I don’t like it. OK….but I have better ideas…but this is stupid…..but….but….but. Just OK.

I learned from someone that when a bride first steps into the church, where most of the people are looking is not where the show is. I mean, of course you want to look at her, the dress, the hair, the make up, the dress, the shoes, the back of the dress. But, there is time for all of that later.

The real show is up front. The best place to look when the bride walks into the church is at the groom. At his face. I have been to weddings where you could tell the exact second the groom could see the bride walking in. My breath has been caught in my throat or I have audibly sighed at his reaction to his love. I have been to weddings where Christian had to elbow me because the bride was half way down the aisle and the grooms face had not changed and it was becoming increasingly obvious I was looking in the wrong place as everyone else was slowly turning with the bridal march. That one was a bummer.

We were at a wedding this past weekend for Christian’s cousin Jessica. It was really beautiful. We sat in the back so I could make a quick get away with the Peanut if she decided she had had enough of this sitting quietly having people pay attention to someone who is not her business. Somehow between making sure the baby wasn’t screaming her face off and being in the back I forgot my usual behavior at weddings and turned to face the back of the church when I was instructed to by the minister.

The bride was gorgeous and looking wholly like a bride and completely like herself in the best possible way. I definitely caught the moment where she saw her groom for the first time. It was pretty great. But apparently I missed the big show. Christian poked me and whispered, did you see that? And when I looked at him he was looking at the groom who was still trying to recover from the moment his bride walked in the door. And Christian was wiping tears out of his eyes. “You missed a good one.” Yes. I did, and I also got a good one.

I have been hearing it, again.I have been hearing the voice again compelling me to write. Not just in my blog or on twitter (which I am finding way more fun than I thought it would be) but continuing to work on a book that  I have been working on, on and off for about four years.I thought it was just because I was being lazy, procrastinating. Hey it isn’t like I haven’t been guilty of it before.

Jill, ever the therapist, has asked me if I was afraid of success or failure….definitely failure. What if I write a whole book and no one is interested? What is they think it is stupid? What if no one will publish it?

Then one of my friends sent me an email about her recent trip to India. She had a quotation from bell hooks. I should probably look it up but that whole laziness thing. It was basically about how if we are going to honestly write about our life, our situation, then we must face the darkest parts of our selves. We must own the things that we thought and said that were wrong. Admit that we did them. Only then can we move past it all.

It is why we need mommy blogs, well why people read them anyway. I don’t think it is an accident that the woman the NY times crowned Queen of the Mommy Bloggers is the same woman who checked herself into a psych ward because she realized her PPD was going to kill her. She wrote through it. People identified. It isn’t that being a mom isn’t life changing and incredible and completely amazing. But sometimes your kid strips off her diaper on the way all the way through the house and you have to wash her new dress and put on a clean dress. Then you have to go through the house and find all the turds she dropped on her way to find you while she screams her head off when we you try to keep her contained as you pick up her poop and try not to vomit. Those stories need to be shared so that when it happens to someone else, she can know she isn’t alone. And she will laugh about it later.

I want to write that book for first year teachers. The book I wish I had my first year. The one that admits that every thing you said you would never do in teacher school……you will do those things. Punish with homework, lose your temper, give up one day, give up on a kid even though you do truly believe that every student can and has the right to learn. I said things to students that I am not proud of. I had whole days that were unequivocal failures. My victories were smaller most days than I had ever dreamed. But I pushed through it, and after four years I am starting to become the teacher I was so sure I was when all I did all day was talk educational theory.

Now all I have to do is take these next two weeks and actually write that business. No problem………if I do it. Which I haven’t even before I had kids……Wish me luck.

Saturday we had our second annual “Shake at the Lake” memorial weekend shindig with our church family. It is pretty cool to see where God has moved you in a year. Last year, my kid was three weeks old and I freaked when I got stuck on a boat that was supposed to go back in “no more than thirty minutes” and stayed out for over an hour while Juliet was in the house, with Nonni, who knows more about babies than I could ever learn, even if I read every the ENTIRE contents of baby center. This year I was all “hey, the baby is in the pack and play, someone run in the house and make sure she hasn’t crawled out and jammed something metal in a light socket every once in a while would you? Thanks! See you!

I will say that if someone would have told me I would be in the same maternity bathing suit two years in a row (I was three weeks post partum last year, cut me some slack please) I would have slapped them. But I am more pumped every day to meet this baby. My family is going to be so FUN!

Anyway, Lake Oconee is beautiful and it was awesome to lounge in the floats swim. The Peanut would have spent the entire day in her floaty if we would have let her. But the bottom of the lake is…well…it is squishy. In some parts it is very squishy. I know I am lake spoiled because I grew up swimming in an Adirondack lake, that has a firm bottom and according to the EPA is cleaner than the stuff I shower in every day. But squishy bottom lakes kind of gross me out. On the plus side, as the lake isn’t fed by snow run off I didn’t turn blue from swimming in it before August.

It was a gorgeous day and a beautiful time. But sometimes trying to get your footing in that lake bottom can be exhausting. It takes a lot of concentration, you have to constantly be moving your legs, and every once in a while despite your best efforts you end up dumping yourself in the lake. I mean, whole exercise routines have been built around the idea that you use a lot more muscles, and your core gets a serious workout just by trying to stand on half an exercise ball.

And then Sunday Tim preached about the wise man who built his house upon the rock. (As I whispered the song and did the hand motions for Christian.) It reminded me about how much scrambling I had been doing lately. I find out sometime today whether or not I will be teaching summer school starting next week. I have about six back up plans. I have been obsessing about my chances of getting a job with a different school district next fall. Trying to figure out babysitting arrangements when I don’t know Christian’s schedule, nor how long it will actually take me to get home. I just don’t know. And as much obsessing I do, I am not going to know how it will all shake out. But I do know who is in control of all of this.

Building my future on the sand has been exhausting. I don’t know what my plans are monday, let alone August. I am so tired of dancing and concentrating on the shifts in the plans as I brace for the eventual times that I will fall flat on my face and have to pick myself up and hope that I can shift and move and stay upright a little bit longer this time around. But I don’t have to do that. I could sit back and say “God knew what he was doing last summer and He knows what He is doing now.” I wonder why it is so hard for me to stand on the rock of Christ Jesus. Maybe it is because the other way, while exhausting, I can fool myself into thinking I am somehow doing something, helping in some way. This way, I just stand. Why is doing nothing so hard for me? And you? I know I am not the only one.

Today I found this hiding in my drawers. I post it note in my hand writing “And my God will supply everything you need according to His glorious riches in Christ Jesus”. Just (per usual) what I needed.

I just heard from HR. It looks like I will be placed at Roswell next year. Mostly, the thing that sucks about this is the commute. I will be in the heart of the Atlanta traffic you hear horror stories about. In my third trimester. Oh boy. It also means I will be needing to leave the house between 6:30 and 6:45 every morning. Gross. We aren’t exactly sure how child care is going to shake out with Christian’s new schedule and me getting home much later due to traffic.

But some of the other issues I have been having make me realize that they are MY issues, and come what come may I need to get over them.

1. My identity- I know I need to hold my identity in Christ, and I DO think that that is the most important thing in my life, but I probably have too much of my identity wrapped up in my job. I work in an urban school with mostly almost all minority students. About 80-90 percent of my kids qualify for free lunch. I like that my job is hard, that I tackle something every day that most people wouldn’t even try. Of the folks who do try my job, almost half of them quit within three years. I made it. And I am really proud of that. When I tell people what I do I feel like it communicates that I am tough and capable. I also feel like it communicates that I don’t just think equal access to everything for everybody would be nice, I am actively trying to reach that goal. I love that I have gotten to know and understand better a culture that is not my own. That some of my kids as a PART of that culture rather than an intruder. Saying what I do and where I do it communicates all of that, without me having to explain any of it. Plus, it makes me cooler, I am aware of (and sometimes use) fashion trends, phrases, and music far before most of my friends because I am exposed to it.

2. My role as a teacher- One of the things I think I do really well is expose my students to things that are outside of their every day life. I want them to understand that there are places just miles from their houses where the assumption is you go to college, places far away from them  where people would kill for the opportunities my students have. There are different ways of talking, listening, seeing the world that are so vastly different from theirs that it is frightening at first, but those people aren’t stupid or scary, they just have a different paradigm. One that you could benefit from if you looked at it. I don’t know how to do that with students who have broader horizons. Maybe that is because I have never tried….but maybe not.

3. My commitment to using literacy as a tool to “rise up”- The best book in college I was assigned to read was “Reading, Writing, and Rising Up”. It helped me understand what a powerful thing literacy can be (historically if we want to disenfranchise people we make sure they can’t read or write.) I love that I get to encourage kids to find their voice who otherwise wouldn’t. I know that in order to enact social change you need all types of people and therefore all types of teachers…….it is just I am more comfortable working from the bottom helping them realize they can rise to the top than working from the top teaching them to want to change the system that is set up to benefit them.

4. My comfort zone- Often I think that I have a very large comfort zone. I hear people say “God might want you out of your comfort zone” and think…..that would be REALLY far. I am comfortable in a lot of situations. Well, we found a hole in my comfort zone and I have been placed right there.

5. My ability to empathise with my students- If we are honest, we are just more sympathetic to certain situations than others. And I tend to be more sympathetic to kids who are taking MARTA to school, than to the students who drove their own car to school on their 16th birthday. It doesn’t mean God loves them any less, or I should love them any less……it is just my bias I guess, and I am running into it…..and I liked to think I didn’t have one……

Basically, I need to get over myself, my plans, what I pictured God wanting for me. I need to erase the picture of the next ten years I had drawn and wait for God to paint over that mess a picture that is more beautiful. It is just, I am familiar with the picture I painted….and not at all familiar with this new picture.

I am so annoyed with myself right now. And it isn’t because I am freaking out about next fall, or even next week (but seriously y’all I find out if I teach summer school on Friday….so pray for that would you?). It is because I let myself get sucked into a mommy war.

Okay, hear me out. Christian stays home with the Peanut on the days he isn’t working….and he is out for the summer so that is everyday right now. Anyway there was this hilarious set of questions posted in this article from a mom who felt like sometimes her husband didn’t get how being home with a two-year-old day in and out could possibly be that hard. I mean he has to go to work every day. Seriously, it is hilarious go read it.

Christian and I have talked about how hard it can be staying home, isolating, tedious, and exhausting while totally intellectually boring all at the same time. This isn’t to say that it also isn’t awesome, and he does feel super lucky to be able to spend so much time with our daughter. And I get jealous sometimes when I get excited about some new thing she is doing, and I learn she has been doing it for a week. But there are days when I am sure he wishes it was him rushing out of the house and me going into the nursery to peel the pee-soaked pajamas off our daughter and throw the sheets in the wash. (She soaks through more often then not, and this is now the only reason she wakes up at night. Anyone got any tips?)

So I thought that he would appreciate the article, and he totally did. We laughed. But then I made the mistake of reading some of the 100+ comments. And this totally tongue in cheek somehow got the stay at home vs. working mom fans flamed. And then, one of the comments got under my skin and I was all “this lady doesn’t even know me how does she know I am not giving it my all. How dare she think that I get to sleep through the night just because I am a working mom. Why would she say she is giving 100 percent everyday to being a mom? Is she trying to say that I am not 100 percent a mom, just because I work?”

Slow down sister. This lady doesn’t know me, which means she isn’t talking about me. So get it together mommy. Turns out the person who is talking is just reacting to what she felt like was someone saying that her situation wasn’t difficult or valid. She wasn’t saying my life isn’t difficult. She was talking about her but I was reacting as though she was talking about me. And I put a defensive comment down, and then someone called me out on it, then I had to defend it.

But it made me start thinking about the “mommy wars.” And how these wars only exist online. I have never seen a mommy war in real life. All the stay at home moms I know are totally supportive of me and my situation. And have even sat for us when we are in a pinch. And I have never thought “what are you whining about” when the plethora of stay at homes I know are describing a particularly hard day or a specific issue they are having. We are all in this together. We recognize everyones life is hard. Because being a parent, while being incredibly rewarding, is hard. But online….somehow it all gets messed up. I don’t get that. And I really hate that today I somehow got sucked into it.

In light of my last post, and all of the good feelings being sent my way (thank you so so so much) I want to stop here for a second and mark a monument. For when God provided.

I remember when I was staying at home and crying because I didn’t know what I was going to do about child care when I finally had this baby. I was worried, but I heard God telling me that He would provide someone. Wednesday we attended a dance demonstration for Elizabeth’s daughter. When Juliet started howling in the middle of it, the little ballerina turned around from her performance and yelled “it’s okay Peanut! That’s my sister.”

I remember when I couldn’t seem to get a job interview and then I walked into my first school and it was so clear I had the job I went out to the car to call Christian and tell him I had one.

I remember when we moved to Atlanta, and we didn’t  know quite how we were going to make ends meet and a couple of “random” checks showed up in the mail.

I remember when we didn’t get THE HOUSE. The one I was sure was ours because of a technical glitch. I was furious, and my media center specialist looked me straight in the face and told me “God don’t keep blessings from us. If He doesn’t want you there then you need to be thanking Him.” She was completely right. The house we have now is better suited for us, and our neighbors down the street are more of an encouragement then I could have imagined.

I remember when I was praying that Jill would come live here… for a male duo partner who knew the Lord…..for  my friend in High school to come to know Jesus, and she did, and when she saw Jill at a wedding she whispered to her “tell Abby I know Jesus now.”

God did all of those things, plus countless others. Because He loves me and knows whats best for me. Even when I am feeling alone and in despair (the special pregnant hormonal kind).

Oh the crying stage of pregnancy, how I love you. I have never exactly been one to keep my emotions private. For me, it feels much better just to let it all hang out. Recently Jill and I were at a women’s bible study where we were both crying. We were the only two. It is genetic. Thanks a lot Dad. (You read that correctly, when I was taking a lecture class in college Dr. Stamp asked us which parent is more likely to cry. I was the only one to say dad and everyone of the other couple hundred students looked at me.)

Anyway, I have had a flood of things happen that probably would have made me cry anyway, but add 22 weeks pregnant to the list (hey, Priscilla is the size of a coconut!) and the tears are going to flow. I have been getting NO response from a few people at work, and I know they are busy. I get it. Testing totally sucks for the students, the teachers, the people in charge who will loose their job if anything goes wrong. It just blows, unless of course you get paid a lot of money for creating those tests. But I need to know if I am teaching summer school or not, at the very least I need to know when I am going to know if you don’t know yet to tell me. And it shouldn’t take a week and a half and four emails to find that answer. (Which was we don’t know, but we will let you know on this date.) And then there is some form that my lawyers need that I gave to someone in March and they say they gave it to someone else, but that someone else says they have never seen it before and have been waiting on me to give it to them.

But the icing on the cake is this. I was surplussed. Then I was given a placement in the north side of the school district that will be between an hour and a half to two hours to get home in traffic. I would get home at between 5:30 and 6 on a good day. The peanut goes to sleep at 7. On a bad day I wouldn’t even get to see her. With a four month old at home I will be getting up an hour and a half earlier than I do now to make it to work on time. Awesome. I was just wrapping my head around this when the principal from the new school emailed me to let me know that there must be some mistake. He doesn’t have an opening. This is good news. I am praying that I am put closer to my house (in my dream world they leave me where I am at). But it puts me in a limbo land I am not great at navigating.

So I get all this news pretty much at the same time and I am in the front office trying to figure out where this stupid form is and am informed no one has it. And I throw up my hands and sigh really loud and stomp out like the mature professional I am. And the totally gracious employee who is definitely NOT to blame calls me back in to let me know that if someone just gets her the form she will fax it where ever I desire today. Luckily that gave me the chance to apologize and tell her that I know she hasn’t done anything wrong I am just frustrated and overwhelmed. Then I cried in the front in front of the secretary and a co-worker. I feel awesome. I am going to taco bell for lunch. And I may have had a banana and some m&ms for breakfast. I just feel that awesome.

I know that God has everything under control. I do. I read the part in the Bible at small group last night about not worrying about tomorrow because the birds and the flowers don’t and they do just fine and all of that. And I get that. I do. I have a million stories of the Lord providing when provision seemed impossible. And with everything I profess to believe Him to have done, getting me a job where He wants me and making sure we are provided for is simply not a big deal. But right now I am frustrated and annoyed, and worried. Because what I feel like is not lining up with what I know.

What I feel like goes something like this: I am  not going to make any extra money this summer and the cost of gas is going to completely destroy our budget, and these forms will never be filled out right so we will never see that money and I will end up having to pay the stupid 600 dollar ambulance bill for riding in the front while someone was actually getting medical care only because they were going to the place I wanted to be and people kept asking me if I wanted to and I just wanted everyone to shut up. I will have this baby in traffic on the side of four hundred before I set foot in an ambulance again. I’ll just make sure I am wearing skirts when I come full term so when the birth is on the news off of footage from someones camera phone, they can shoot it from an angle that doesn’t showcase parts that have to be blurred out. (I realize I may have just crossed the too far line. Sorry about that.)

Just writing all of that makes me realize how ridiculous all of this is, how crazy I am being. So I suppose I will just continue to choose the truth over my insanely pregnant feelings. And cry. And eat taco bell for lunch. And pray pray pray that I find a teaching job close to home (if anyone has any leads on that let me know.)

Why can’t we all just get real with each other? This is what I have been asking myself lately.  Maybe it is because I recently spent a significant amount of time standing outside of church while my friend let me know that she was a terrible mom (so, so not true). Or maybe  it is because I recently found the facebook message my sister Emily sent me when I had told her I was fine and three hours later posted on here one seriously hot mess. She basically let me know (in a supportive way, Em never comes off as harsh….even when she is trying to be) that it wasn’t okay to fine her to death when I wasn’t feeling so fine.

And perhaps that is why transparency seems like a more natural choice for me. Especially in my personal life. Maybe it was because I was raised in a relatively small house with no TVs in the kids rooms and no basement to retreat to. We had to beg my parents to let us put a free phone in the girls room. Free, they didn’t even have to pay for it. And there was already a phone jack in the room. But this meant that there wasn’t a whole lot that could be hidden. If you were going to break up with your boyfriend, or have a fight with your friends, or feel bad about the zit that was so big is was closing one of your nostrils (seriously, how the heck was I going to hide that one?) everyone in the house knew about it.

So, though I think do have a natural bent to just let it all hang out it was also the way I was raised. And I think that the church suffers miserably when there are people in the pews looking around and fine-ing each other. I think everyone suffers miserably when we aren’t up front about what is going on.

Last night I exchanged a series of  facebook messages with a student I had my first year of teaching. This sweet girl had just finished her first year of college and was coming home and transferring to a local school because she is about to have a baby. She expressed some concerns to me, how she was feeling overwhelmed and unsure. How was she going to make good choices for this child when she hadn’t made good ones for herself? How could she separate her feelings of how this baby came about with her feelings for this baby? It was just all so overwhelming for her. And I let her in on the secret, the one people don’t tell you until you are crying in a public place. That is how a lot of us feel.

Being a mom comes with a LOT of weight to it. For me, more weight than wife, more weight than teacher (and I seriously almost cracked under that business). It just feels like as a mom you are supposed to know everything, take care of everything, and be happy about everything all the time. It feels like that but it isn’t like that. It is okay to have complicated feelings…it is a complicated relationship, mother to child. Throw in everyone on the internet’s opinion on breast versus bottle, working versus stay at home, co-sleeping versus crib and you are a basket case. And then you have to wake up every few hours. At 19….I could barely take care of myself…. I just think she needs to know that everyone is struggling. I think it does her a complete disservice for us to run around with a smile on our faces with “fine” coming out of our mouths when we don’t feel like it. I think it does everyone a disservice.

I have been having a pretty crap-tastic day. A day where nothing is really wrong per say…..It is just that nothing seems to be right. And the worst part is I can’t even blame it on anyone. That’s right. I said it. I always feel better about my circumstances when I have someone to rage against, sometimes even say bad things about, at the very least be smarter than.

It started on Friday. My principal called me into his office to let me know I was being surplussed….again. This time last year I was on maternity leave, so I wasn’t made aware of the fact that I would no longer be working at the school I was familiar with. Instead, my name would be thrown into a pot where principals would pluck people out as they needed them. I would have a job, and I would find out exactly where a week or so before I had to report. Awesome nothing like reporting to a new school with a new baby, leaky boobs, and a breast pump. The first conversations I had with my department head and my principal were about my boobs and my need for a pumping room.

This time it turns out there IS something like reporting to a new school talking about your boob-related needs. In August of next year I will report to a school in the “visible and hugely pregnant” stage of pregnancy. My first conversations will be about when I am going on maternity leave (at the last possible second) and what will  happen if that second comes before I thought (when I had Juliet everyone was sure I was waiting “too long” and I would have the baby on the floor under my desk while my class listened to me scream in agony…yeah they weren’t huge on natural birth. I had to get my midwives to assure everyone I was in fact perfectly able to continue to work.) Awesome, Hi! I am your new teacher….see you in January! Way to build a strong reputation with my students…..a population that needs a lot of face time.

I managed to ignore the fact that I wouldn’t be at the school that I have ADORED working at this year the whole weekend. But today I had to submit my top three choices of where I would like to move next year. This doesn’t mean I get them. This just means I am allowed to state my preferences. So I started today by choosing the place I don’t really want to be moved to next year.

Then my department head dropped by and let me know that the EOCT was being given and one of the teachers was out. Since you have to have a certified teacher to be in the room, a sub couldn’t cover. So third block instead of planning (read: occasionally falling asleep in my car) I would be administering a test. Now between the pregnancy and this being Juliet’s first year I have had to call in so last minute there was no sub. Which means the people in my department have had to cover me so I am NOT complaining about having to cover someones class. The issue is I forgot my lunch today. And since I didn’t have a planning I didn’t have time to go get anything.

Still, no problem. I’ll just eat the old bag of microwave popcorn I randomly found last Friday and Hey! I think I have some change in my wallet, enough for a can of coke. Perfect, I can just pretend I am at the movies. So I wander down to the teachers lounge, start the popcorn, put my money in the machine and hit the button. When I reach my hand in to get the can it gets wet. And there is a tiny line of coke spraying out of the corral that holds the newly dispensed drinks. On the way to my hand my coke has sprung a leak and I am instructed by the head janitor to throw it directly in the trash behind me. And anybody can tell you, you don’t screw with Miss Vicky. So into the trash it went. And I had no more money, and nothing to drink….and less than fifteen minutes to eat my crappy popcorn lunch.

I was pretty thirsty when the bell rang. I asked my kids if they had change for a five but no one did. Crap. Out of luck. But then…..One of my amigos gave me a dollar, so I could get a coke. Which makes me feel like my kids appreciate me. And on my way down to the machine I ran into a teacher in my department who assured me she was trying to “scheme a way for me to stay” which doesn’t give me a lot of hope but makes me feel like someone cares I am leaving. I had been feeling like it didn’t matter to my co-workers as I had only been there for a year.

And all of this reminded me what a brat I was to God about being surplussed the first time…..so here’s to hoping that either the schemes work, or I will be even happier with my next placement (which I couldn’t imagine…..but God is bigger than my imagination.) Cheers (with my coke, that my kid bought me.)