The children in starring roles are as follows:
Flower - the girl with extreme separation issues who has started coming in every day with a handful of wilted clover that she apparently picks from some yard on the way to school. She wil clench the dying flowers in her hand from arrival time at 8:00 am until she leaves sometime near 6:00 pm (and yes, in all honesty I think it is horrible to have your kid in daycare that long every day. It pays my wages but I still find it about as detestable as the smell of a dead skunk on the side of the road on a 90 degree day).

APRF - yes the infamous Avid Power Ranger Fan has returned to my blog in the classroom setting.

Chuckie - he is adorable and angelic but it’s only skin deep

Sit Here - I call him this cause everything he ever says to me is prefaced with the request, “Korie, sit here.”

So the morning started off like any other. I sat in some traffic, head drooping and eyes rolling at every red light. I craved coffee but reminded myself that I’m too poor for a 99 cent cup of coffee right now. I parked, shuffled into the school, punched in on the computer and smiled sleepily at the families I knew that were dropping off kids. There were 3 other kids in my room (101) not counting Flower, who was busy playing with Lego dinosaurs with her father. Flower’s father is pretty nerdy but he seems nice enough, although he really needs to learn how to separate from his kid. Anyway, Flower was clutching her daily bouquet and entranced by her lego tower when dad decided to leave. But instead of just leaving, he announced it to her. Duh! He does it every time! The kid is totally distracted and he brings her attention to the fact that he is leaving her. So, in true Flower form, she went berserk and started howling. Her dad took her little sister down to the young toddler room and Flower continued to wail. She made a break for the door and I stood in front of it, holding the knob so she couldn’t bolt down the hall and make me look totally incompetant. So five minutes later she’s still screaming at the door and I’m holding the knob, which twists in my hand and who re-enters? Dear old dad. Dammit! Way to teach your kid that every time the door opens it’ll be you coming back to the room. Positively reinforcing negative behavior much? So he comes back in and holds her a bit, gets her distracted with blocks and then announces he’s leaving…again. Let the howling begin! This time he left for good and Flower screamed and cried for, no lie folks, I watched the clock, 90 minutes. My left ear went numb. I couldn’t hear right for the rest of the day. The repeptetive “eh, eh, eh, AAAAHHHHHHH…snort, choke, eh, eh, eh, AAAHHHHHHH” rang in my brain until naptime. Good way for Friday morning to start.

Anyway, we made it well through naptime and I decided, eh, there’s only 14 kids today, I’ll get a jump on things and do potty trips/diapers. This also went pretty well until I accompanied APRF to the potty. He was standing there, ready to drain the lil lizard when all of a sudden he says something that no one wants to hear:
“Kowie.”
“Yeah?”
“What is this on my penis?”
blink blink
“What?”
“There’s something on my penis. Get it off.”
At this point my mind flashed to the scene in Stand By Me where Gordie had the leech hanging from his junk and fainted.
I took a deep breath and looked at the lil lizard….and saw….

a string.
Thank friggin god. It was a string.

“It’s a string from your swim trunks bud, just pull it off.”
“I can’t. You do it.”
sigh. So I very carefully snagged the end of the string and pulled it off without touching anything that could conceivably get me in trouble. APRF finished his potty detail and ran off to retrieve his new red Power Ranger. Crisis averted.

Finally, it was the end of the day and we went up to the gym around 3:30. I got off at 4:00. So ten of the 12 kids left are jammed around the door that leads to the toy room and up front are Chuckie and Sit Here, jockying for a space where they could demand a specific toy from the student who was getting the toys out. Now, Chuckie is this cute, scrawny, blond little boy with a cute little voice and sparkling brown eyes. And I’ve seen him mow kids down one by one with a riding toy without even looking back at the carnage in his wake. Sit Here, on the other hand, is a pale, sensitive 3 year old in a 5 year old’s body. He lopes around like an oversized puppy and speaks somewhat broken English. He is probably one of the most genuine, good natured kids I’ve seen, but its hard to tell cause he gets very anxious and fretful when his peers aren’t willing to be reasoned with. Anyway, Chuckie was yelling for the fire engine riding toy (aka the weapon of mass destruction) and Sit Here was whining for a red bike. They weren’t even vying for the same toy, but that rarely matters with 2-3 year olds because they are all somewhat demonic. So the yelling and jostling led to shoving and the shoving led to harder shoving and as I made my way over to stop the ensuing chaos Chuckie hauled off and punched Sit Here right in the nose. Sit Here started crying, which he is apt to do when physically assaulted. First I tried to move him away from the door to chastise him for shoving, but then I saw the red drops all voer the floor. Shit. Sure enough, little Chuckie had bloodied Sit Here’s nose. It poured into his mouth and onto his shirt and his tears just made it worse, so I scooped him up (part of the reason my back is on fire right now, I’m sure…the kid weighs a ton) and took him to the stage where I had to put him in a headlock to get the tissue in his nose long enough to stop the bleeding. Got blood all over myself in the process. I finally calme dhim down, got him his bike and filled out an incident report while another teacher apprehended Chuckie, removed him from his fire engine, and gave him the rundown on how hitting hurts people while he went rabid and almost chewed his own arm off to get back to the fire engine, totally oblivious to the fact that he’d made a kid twice his size bleed.

And that’s how I left work for the weekend. I could go into my quest to legalize my academic records for Gent University, but that would just be anti-climactic. Suffice it to say, in the end, my parents decided to keep Rex another night (whee I can lounge around in just a T-shirt! try to erase the image of my bare butt on the computer chair before it burns your retinas out) and Cabana Boy even logged on from Utrecht late night to talk to me for a few minutes. I’m even prepared for class tomorrow, so I can zip through that, get the kitty and be back here with some time to skype my fantastic boyfriend before babysitting.

Booyah.