Things that go bump in the night

I had a terribly drowsy day yesterday. I spent a good chunk of my night wrapped like a pretzel in my eight year old daughters bed. She has legs as long and much bonier than mine, and a awefully lumpy mattress. It is almost too cruel to put a kid on, let alone an adult. I ended up there because she first came into in my bed and was digging her knees into my husbands back and he just couldn't handle it any more. Ironic, since it was his fault that she ended up there in the first place. My husband likes to read to her at night, a noble pursuit, you say, but he read to her from J.R.R Tolkiens 'The Hobbit', Last night. He read her the part about the terrible thunder storm and Bilbo and the dwarves take refuge in a cave and the goblins come upon them through a secret door and spirit them away into a horrible underground place or something like that. There was a thunder storm last night. This would have been poetic timing if it had not have scared the crackers out of her and sent her screaming, into my bed, with her knees in my husbands back. So much for reading to your kids.

Subbing today was particularly interesting. It is always new and challenging, but today, the teacher left me lesson plans which included teaching them how to tell if fractions are equivalent by using a number line. I think this is a ridiculous and convoluted way to teach anything, but plowed my way through it. I think she is going to have to re-teach it Monday, and give them a boost, if she really wants to instill it in their little minds as something they will remember in forty years and use on a daily basis. I can see them now taking an order at a restaurant or measuring a window or room for carpet, or possibly looking at some figures in their bio physics lab and whipping out a piece of paper and pencil and drawing little lines with arrows on both ends and little equally spaced dashes on them to determine weather 2/8ths and 1/4th are equivalent fractions or not. Brilliant I say. To top it off, I had a kid come up to me seventh period with a look of extreme stress on his face and told me that there was something horrible in the bathroom. "What are you talking about," I bark at him. "Um, somebody went number two in the number one thing in the bathroom". I just stared at him incredulously for a while and then smiled and said "thank you for telling me this", as the image of a clogged urinal ran through my mind. A few minutes later, another kid came up and asked to go the restroom, a common practice as a rule, with subs. I tell them it is because I scare the crap out of them. "Can I go to the restroom Mrs. Slaughter", I sigh and then the image of the urinal popped into my mind, "Sure", I tell him with a smile, go ahead.