Divine Intervention

Hi. No, I'm not dead or gone. I'm here. I've been... busy.

Our Internet was out for, oh, I don't know, EVER. It was so freaking inconvenient. What did we do before the Internet? How did we get our information? How did we waste our time? I know I lived without the Internet for like 18 years, but I can't for the life of me remember how I did it.

Remember all the headaches I went through to get a job? How I was so grateful to get a damn job, any job? Well, I quit. A week before I was supposed to start. The principal who hired me was leaving, and I didn't get a good feeling about the new principal, and the school system was giving me this whole big runaround about paperwork and other random red tape and jumping through hoops. Since I hadn't officially signed anything with them (!) a week before I was supposed to start, I just gave them a big fat "screw you" and told them I wouldn't be coming to work for them.

So then I was unemployed. Which was freaky. It was kind of scary, but also kind of liberating. I swore I wasn't going to teach this year, that I was going to find a "real" job. I spent about a week scavenging job boards and postings, only to be told about 23498745029485 times that I'm not qualified to do anything but teach.*

Then, one day, while I was surfing craigslist, I stumbled across an ad that had my name on it. "HEY! JANE! You know you want me!" It was for a teacher, of all things, in my area of specialization, in my grade level, at a fancy-pants private school! In my city!

Naturally, I sent in my resume and cover letter, not so much because I thought I would get the job, but because you just can't pass up an ad like that.

Five minutes later, my phone rang.

24 hours later, I was sitting in an interview.

Five days later, I was organizing my classroom.

Yeah. I found my kick-ass, so amazing, never going to quit, going to retire from this awesome, awesome school, love it love it love it, wonderful, perfect job on *craigslist*, of all places. A week before school started. How unlikely is that? Some call it coincidence. Some call it fate. Some call it divine intervention. I call it "holy shit, this kind of stuff *never* happens to me!"

So I've been busy as hell trying to clean out, clean up, organize, and decorate my classroom, as well as get some serious lesson planning done. I'm so damn excited that it doesn't even feel like work, but it is a little crazy. Add in the commute from my in-laws' house, the fact that my house is still not sold, and that I need somewhere to live, STAT, and things have been kind of hectic.

In other news, my children have morphed from sweet, precious little babygirls into tiny little hellions. I am not pleased.

The Bear vacillates between sweet, clingy, nervous, and a screaming, shouting, defiant little dictator. (Dictatrix?) She's like Dr. Jekyll and Miss Hyde. A lot of that has to do with the fact that she went back to "school" (daycare) last week, and she's always super slow to adjust to change. Some of it also probably has to do with the fact that her Daddy is sort of back with us, sort of not, and there's some adjustment going on there, too. Top it all off with a wicked summer cold, and things are kind of hairy.

Tank isn't any better - she's teething like crazy**, and she's hit the Terrible Twos, just like her sister did, at 18 months. She can throw a tantrum with the best of them, will sit down wherever she is (think produce aisle, parking lot) in protest if she doesn't want to do what you want her to do, and has learned to say "I don't want to." Awesome. She's adjusting to "school" better than her sister (duh), but is still a little extra clingy when I get home.

Husband might as well be living on another planet. He's so involved with the old house and his new job that we barely talk. I don't know if that's... well, I don't know what to make of it, but fortunately I'm too busy to worry much about it right now. Either we'll work through it as things settle down, or things will fall apart. I trust that the universe will unfold as it should.

So, yeah, that's the (very) brief synopsis of what's been going on here. Life is good-ish, and hopefully will be getting better as we go.

*Note to any undergrads out there: major in some sort of career field. Journalism! Engineering! Public Relations! None of these esoteric, liberal artsy-fartsy majors will ever qualify you to do anything but teach. English! Philosophy! Latin!

**She cut those 8 front incisors, and then the bicuspids, and *now*, after all that, she's cutting her eyeteeth. So they have to squeeze up into that little gap between the teeth that are already in, and it just *looks* painful.