2 down, 1 to go!

Today is the last day of my school year's second trimester! Spring break is next week and I am almost done with my report card grades (thank you, field trip to the zoo yesterday, that gave me an 80 minute chunk of time to grade work!). I had my sixth graders for the last time yesterday. I have known those kids since they were squeaky first graders. Eighth graders start my class the day we return from break. I haven't had them since first trimester of last school year...they have all changed so much since then and so have I!

All teachers and staff received a "Reduction in Force" letter this week, stating that because of declining enrollment of the school and static/declining church offertory, the school/the affiliated parish is facing a $150,000 deficit for 2014 fiscal year. Even though I am almost certain that I will not be returning, I got an eye twitch just reading the letter. That is equivalent to approximately 5 teachers' salaries for a school year. Not good. Not good at all. Those affected by the cuts are to be alerted by early April. Reduction in force will begin in mid-April.

Yesterday I again realized how very lucky I am that staying home is even an option for our family right now. In the midst of this reduction in force, my husband had a great quarterly review at work and may be up for a promotion...one that would mean a raise that is almost equivalent to 1/3 of my current salary. That makes me feel pretty lousy about my salary, but makes me think staying home is definitely the right choice at this point in time. If he gets that raise and I am home (eliminating childcare costs, cutting down on fuel costs for commutes) it is really almost a wash when you think about losing my pay.

Back to the main positive here: SPRING BREAK! I am hoping to finish the last of my grading before leaving school this afternoon so that I don't have to worry about it over the next 9 days. Over break I will be doing some curriculum mapping, photographing some student work for their portfolios, and selecting/mounting works for the fine arts night show coming up in May, but most of my time will be spent visiting friends, cooking from scratch, and playing with this funny girl:

Lent

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Much to my husband's delight, I decided to give up Facebook. He HATES Facebook (or pretends to, anyway...he benefits from me having it because I show him all of the pictures worth looking at, read him the best status updates, and he gets to attend functions where the only invite goes out through fb). Anyways, I am hoping that I will see my time seeming less crunched and that I will have more time to update this little blog of mine over the next 40 days as long as I can think of things worth sharing. Life has been none too exciting in these parts.

Happy Ash Wednesday (is that okay to say?)!

Thank you! (pros and cons)

Thank you to those of you who commented on my post about Pros and Cons when it comes to staying home vs. working. I appreciate your ideas and input!

Allison - Staying busy will be something I try to do! I have done a ton of reading about toddler/preschool art* and have some experience now that I have taught preschool this school year...so I hope that wherever we end up house-wise, we will have neighbors with kids and I can host a toddler art group! I also plan on taking a Music Together with Felicia. As for free stuff to do: library story time, visits with my sister and her 2 kids...I'll have to come up with more, obviously!

Colleen - Thanks for stopping by - hope you come by again and see this:) I won't know exactly how it will go for me until I try it, but I was home full-time with my daughter for 7 months before I returned to my teaching job, so I got a little taste. We found that we automatically adjusted our spending (I only had 6 weeks paid out of those 7 months). We put the same amount in savings every month and easily paid all of our bills. Our checking account wasn't quite as plump at the end of the month, but it was nothing shocking. Maybe if I made more money at my job, the drop in income would be more of a concern, ha! I don't make much as I work at a Catholic school and haven't had a raise in 4 years! I hope I don't get bored or become unhappy - the isolation part of all of this scares me most! I think that working part-time would be ideal (best of both worlds) but my current job doesn't allow for part-time. I like how you pointed out that what I decide now isn't a decision for the rest of my life. I can return to work if the SAHM thing doesn't work out.

Erika - The school is getting more stressful by the day :( Ugh. Our new principal walked in at a very hard time for the school financially. I really feel for her; it has not been an easy year to lead and things are sort of falling apart. There is talk of about 5 teachers planning to leave after this school year (which is a big percentage as we only have about 30 teachers!). Our enrollment is down - we were at 360 my first year and we are at about 280 now. Our school day is being lengthened after Easter this school year to make up for the 5 "cold days" we had off in January and the lengthened day will be standard next school year. So, an extra half-hour each day next year with no raise...not too enticing. We have even been told that teachers may be asked to take a pay cut to keep more of us employed - it was pitched to us as being "team players" to keep the school going. So, high stress, longer hours, and not only no raise, but possibly a pay cut? Not looking so good :(

Infertile625 - Thanks for that link! Our school is taking state standardized tests for the first time this year and there is speculation that we will need to start "teaching to the test" next year to bump up our scores. We are a Catholic school, so we have not done the state tests in the past. We've done standardized tests in 3 of our 9 grades just to keep tabs on where our kids are, but now the scores will be published in the papers with our area public schools' scores. We are headed down that slippery slope :( Teaching evening art classes would be a good way to keep my hand in teaching! I've actually considered maybe trying some adult art classes like those "Wine and Canvas" gigs that are becoming so popular! Do you have those where you live? "Painting Pubs" are also on the rise here! I haven't tried either, but several of my friends have.

polycysticinside-  Thanks for the artist's perspective! I haven't had much time to do my own 
art since becoming an art teacher 6 years ago, so now working full-time and being a mom I
don't have ANY chance to do art! I am not expecting to get a lot done, but I do think that:
1. I will have more time without the commute, hours at work, commute to pick up my daughter, 
commute home 
and 
2. I might actually WANT to do my own art more (after painting, drawing, sculpting, etc with 
kids all day and washing literally HUNDREDS of paintbrushes in a preschool bathroom sink, 
I usually have very little desire or energy to work on my own stuff!)
I think this way I may have a fighting chance to lay down some paint at my own easel again! 
Time will tell, but after reading about your experience, I will try to expect that there won't be 
much time most days.


Abby - Glad you randomly clicked over from Erika's blog...not sure if you will see this! I hopped over to your blog for a bit...love your hair and your son is adorable! What is a MOPS group? Okay...back to responding to your comment: When my husband and I did our pre-marriage classes through our church, we did a lot of talking about our future together. At the time, at age 22, our goal was to start a family at age 25 after I taught for a year and to have me stay home. Not sure how we decided that! Anyways, the economy tanked the year we got married and my husband, although always employed, did not find his "career job" that he wants to stick with until mid-2011. Mix in a dose of infertility that, after we waited a few extra years for my husband to find a job he was happy at and waited for me to establish my curriculum at school (which I designed from NOTHING!), caused it to take 2 years to get pregnant. So, our daughter was born when I was 29. Things have not gone according to plan (we also, in our naivete thought we'd get a house BEFORE having a baby - ha!). SO, being a SAHM was a goal and dream of mine, too, but now I am scared after all of the twists and turns it has taken to get here! Deep down, I think I would love it. I am pretty sure we are going to try it out after this school year!! Thanks for the advice about being realistic...part of me thinks I will be Wonder Woman with all the "extra time" at home, even though during the hours that I already have at home, I get very little done when I am the sole parent home with our daughter!

Thank you all, again!

* I highly recommend these great books about art for little ones:
Young at Art: Teaching Toddlers Self-Expression, Problem Solving Skills, and an Appreciation for Art
First Art for Toddlers and Twos: Open-Ended Art Experiences
The Artful Parent 
The Artful Parent is also a blog (all the same content of the book, but online and free!):
http://www.artfulparent.com/
These 3 books have even changed how I approach art with many of my older students! The bonus is that now I will be ready for art with Felicia as soon as time allows! She has used crayons and markers so far and painted with blueberry juice, but that is it. SO EXCITED to do a lot more this summer! I'll have to post more about these resources another time.

Pros and Cons

Please feel free to add your two cents! Here is my list so far! Allison - I would love your insight regarding staying home! I know you are honest about how challenging it can be.

Pros and Cons regarding staying home as opposed to working full- or part-time:

Pros:

1. More time with babe
2. More time with The Bee
3. Our boundaries for where to buy a house would be easier to define (The Bee and I work about 20 miles away from each other, in opposite directions of the major cities. Me leaving my current school would make living near his office more logical).
4. When I am ready to go back to teaching, I will have an area near our home/The Bee's job to focus my search
5. Time to pursue my own art again
6. Grocery shopping during the day with the babe (instead of after work in the dark with the babe)
7. More time for whole foods, home cooked meals
8. Daytime used for some house work so evenings can be spent with The Bee
9. Story time at the library (for some reason I am really sad that I never get to do this with the babe)
10. The Bee coming home for lunch 
11. Less car/commute time for all of us!
12. Play dates with cousins and friends
13. Trading daycare with my sister so I still get a little time for my sanity
14. In the words of a co-worker, our school is a "sinking ship." I can bail out now before things get really bad.
15. I would be home when the babe was sick...no more scrambling to get sub plans done at 4am or arguments about who needs to adjust their work schedule (this was a disaster in December when the stomach flu hit. I was home with the babe for 3 days in one week. The following week, she couldn't go to daycare due to illness at my sister's house so The Bee stayed home with her in the morning and then the babe came to school with me in the afternoon...thank God it worked that day due to special events so I was not teaching regular classes!)
16. I would be able to take the babe to doctors appointments without having to miss work/make sub plans

Cons:

1. Lapse in my teaching license
2. Lapse in employment
3. Isolation of being home instead of in the working world
4. Losing touch with the real world (this doesn't happen to all SAHM's, but I know a few who are so out of touch with everyone/everything except their own little families)
5. Less income
6. No breaks (at school right now I get 50 minute lunches 2 days a week, 25 minute lunches 3 days a week)
7. Long stretches without adult conversation
8. No more Caribou and Starbucks giftcards at Christmas from students (Ha - I am seriously going to miss this! We haven't had to pay cash for coffee out for the last 5 years. Mind you, we maybe go to coffee shops once a month, but it is still a perk I will miss!)
9. Missing teaching. I do find some real joy in making art with my students.

Decisions, decisions...

So, since my last post approximately 2 weeks ago, I have started to come around to this whole "staying home" business. It still scares the s*** out of me, but there seem to be a lot of pros, and a few cons (although the cons seem REALLY BIG). The main con is getting back into teaching after being away. A second con is what happens to me if my husband turns out to be an awful human being like my dad and leaves me desolate. I don't think my husband would do that, but it is something that creeps into my mind every now and again when I am emotional, tired, when we are having an argument, etc. I mean, my mom never thought she'd be where she is, but here she is.

In my worry over the decision I have been talking to a lot of people...my husband, my mom, my sisters, my friends, stay at home moms that I know, working moms that I know, teachers at my school (only the ones I trust with the information that I am considering not signing that coveted contract in the spring). In a moment of freaking out while drinking my morning coffee last week, I posted to a teacher chatboard that I frequented as a new teacher and still check in on every once in a while. For your reading pleasure:

My post:

Our daughter (first and only child at this point) just

turned one this week. I was lucky to have about 7 months

off with her before I returned to my full-time art teacher

job in August. With my husband's long commute, our desire

to buy a house near his work (which is about 25 miles away

from my school), the cost of childcare, the reality that

enrollment is way down at my Catholic school and I haven't

gotten a raise in 5 years...

We are considering having me stay home next year. My

husband has much more faith in my art abilities (I feel

rusty at "adult art" and haven't been in a show since my

first year teaching 6 years ago) and thinks I could take

this opportunity to get back to what I love: making my own

art. This prospect both excites and terrifies me.

Have any of you taken a break from teaching and

successfully gotten back into it? I just re-upped my

license in June so I am licensed until 2018, although we

want 1 or more kids, so it might be a while...

And the 2 responses I got:

You are SO LUCKY! you have the support of your husband to

pursue your own artistic endeavors, you get the chance to keep

your daughter with you, all while trying to purchase a home.

This is a dream for many art teachers out there. Cherish this

new adventure, nurture and trust your artistic abilities, and

enjoy this amazing opportunity. Good luck!!! 

and

I did the same thing when my daughter was born. I worked the first

year and had such a hard time with it. My husband said we would

try a year with me home, and that turned into 2 which turned into

6. I was ridiculously lucky that I could take parental leave for 

that long (I had 2 more children and took 2 years for each child.

(It wasn't written in our contract that we had to return between

each child.) I did end up returning to my job when my oldest was

in 2nd grade, middle in kindergarten and youngest was 3 years old

(pre- school.) It was absolutely difficult financially and I lost

all of my seniority, but it was hands down the best decision I

ever made. I don't regret it for a minute and treasure that time I

had with the kids especially now that they are getting old (4th,

6th, and 8th grade.) I say go for it.... It could turn into a

wonderful opportunity where you end up doing something other than

teaching---something you would have never tried if you didn't have

a reason to leave. You DO have a reason---a big one, and if you can

swing it financially, you'll never regret having that time with your

children.

So, who knows how I will feel in a week, a month, when I get my teaching contract (or when I don't, it isn't a guarantee), on the last day of school in June? Right now I feel like staying home might be the best option for my family. I know we can't relive this year without being very stressed and unhappy. As Einstein said, 

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." We'd be insane to not try something different next year...but is staying home the right different thing to try?!

Eek!

Long time, no post (again).

I am home today due to the cold temperatures. School was supposed to resume yesterday after 2 weeks of Christmas break, but the governor closed all schools in the entire state for fear of kids getting frostbite while trying to get to school. Boo to the cold, yay for extra days with the babe (who is currently napping in her CRIB! 2 weeks of nap training are [slowly] paying off!).

Life's been full with school, the holidays, The Bee's atrocious work schedule, and almost 2 months of continuous illness for the babe. We were so lucky for the first 10 months of her life...a few little sniffles and some diaper rash was about it. Now we've experienced a horrible bout of the stomach flu (3 full days of vomiting. You know you love a child when they can throw up peaches into your bra and you keep your cool to bathe them while only being able to change your clothes and wipe off with a clean towel until your husband gets home to give you a chance to shower), a seizure scare that led to an EEG (which, PRAISE GOD! revealed no seizure activity or abnormal brain activity), a horrible cold that only allowed the babe to sleep propped up with pillows or sitting up in our arms (3 cheers for co-sleeping,,,not sure how we would have gotten any sleep otherwise), and an ear infection that brought us to the ER from 11pm-3am.last Friday night/Saturday morning.

Our girl will be one on Monday. I cannot believe how fast the last year has gone! We are finding more joy in her every single day and still can't believe how amazingly blessed and lucky we are to be her parents. She is so close to walking, which is exciting and terrifying!

In other news: The Bee is fed up with his long commute to work. I am fed up with his long hours. We are both feeling the drag of the crazy running around we do Monday-Friday with drop-off, pick-up, working and normal life tasks. Seriously...cooking dinner feels like a chore after I get home with the babe and The Bee isn't around until 10pm or later. I also have extreme mom guilt about how sick the babe has been, I keep asking, "Would she be sick like this if I was home with her? Should I be spending so much of my time with OTHER PEOPLE'S kids when we waited so long to have our own baby?"

Which brings me to the generous and scary proposal my husband made to me recently: I can choose to keep teaching OR stay home with the babe and (eventually) work on my own art work again. Seems so appealing, but teaching has become part of my identity and I worked darn hard to get where I am. We are still paying off my masters degree and I don't want to lose my teaching license because I am away from work for too long (I just renewed last spring so I am current until 2018). Also, my mom stayed home with me and my siblings starting when I was 7. She had (and still has) her own barber shop that she runs out of her home, but it has always been part-time. After all those years of raising us and running her own business, my dad filed for divorce and took her to the cleaners. Now she is 55 and works 3 jobs just to keep from losing her house and barber shop. I know my husband is NOT my father, but I am sort of afraid of ending up in my mom's shoes.

PLUS, I know how isolating it can be to stay home full-time. AND, I know I'd need to get my act together if I actually want to have time to get back to my own art making (which I miss like crazy as I haven't had much time for it since I started teaching 6 years ago. I would love to be in shows again, but feel rusty and have no current work!).

One of my requirements if I am to stay home is that we need a house first. I refuse to stay home full-time in a 2 bedroom apartment! In a state where it is so, so cold, this size of space leads to serious cabin fever. Why don't you go out and about? you wonder...Because less than 5 minutes of skin exposure outside right now leads to frostbite. Not worth the risk with a little one. So, right now the plan (if you can call it a "plan") is for me to hopefully work part-time next school year, we'll start the process of buying a house while we both have income and then I will be home with the babe starting during the 2015-2016 school year. In a perfect world, we would have baby #2 on the way near the end of next school year, but we know that trying to plan babies is nonsense. (That is another fear of mine, staying home, losing my license and having to deal with secondary infertility and then trying to find work after the babe is preschool/school age. However, if it is in God's plan for us to expand our family, my income is too small at my current school to make it worth working with 2 kids in daycare. Arg. So much uncertainty).

Anyways, if you have stuck with me through my blogger absence and this scattered post, thank you. And sorry for any typos...this is being written in a bit of a rush. I will be attempting to catch up with all of you! Hoping 2014 is good to all of you!

I'm learning

In the last few weeks:

• I have learned to drive a manual transmission car. Out of necessity. I had been avoiding that like the plague for 6 years.
• I have become a preschool-8th grade teacher. I have never worked with preschool aged children, save babysitting in junior high/high school and hanging out with my own nieces and nephews. Now I teach art to them twice a week. 
• I have taught myself how to use GIMP (the poor man's Photoshop)
• I am being trained as a reading tutor. 
• I am realizing that I can't do it all. Lunches haven't been packed for my husband or myself for over a week. I haven't grocery shopped for almost 2 weeks. Laundry is done on a "as needed" basis. 

I am dead tired most evenings and so confused about the future that my school holds for me. There will be cuts next year, we've already been told. Do I plan on trying to stay? Do I quit no matter what they offer me and look for part-time work in a public school? Do I stay home for a few years? 

I figure all of the new things I am learning are protecting my brain from Alzheimer's (which affects people on my dad's side of the family). 

Thanksgiving break cannot come soon enough, though!