I know all three of my loyal readers are anxious to hear the latest from the mind and heart of the Preteness so I feel a certain amount of an obligation to satisfy the masses!!! My world has been very up and down lately! I'm usually a fairly stable person and free of high highs and low lows! Teaching has changed that for me! When I have a great day, I'll be flying all night long, but when I have a bad day when my students drive me absolutely crazy, I feel like locking myself up and crying in the corner! Of course, I'm a little too social to actually do that, but I have wanted to several times in the last week or two! It's really hard because I feel like, despite my best efforts to be a good teacher, I am failing miserably at classroom management. My students don't always take me seriously because I'm shorter than most of them, look younger than half of them and I'm a girl, which makes me appear easier to take advantage of! Unfortunately, they don't know the extent of my tenacity! I did have John for a brother after all!! That's saying something about my resiliency and determination to not get walked all over! John, I love you, but mostly because you forced me build character at a tender age!! In all reality, I do a reasonably good job, but I have had a lot of days lately when I have felt like a failure! I just need a slight attitude adjustment and if all else fails, the trimester ends on the 20th, so I'll have a fresh batch of guinea pigs to experiment on! My students think they get to do experiments in my class, but really they're the experiment!!

Apart from school, life is pretty good! I was having kind of a hard time after I decided I needed to break up with my latest boy! We have been trying to stay friends and I think that's what has been hard (and ridiculously awkward!) He is absolutely determined to make the "friends" thing work and I don't think he feels as awkward about it as I do (but perhaps he lacks the social awareness to recognize its awkwardness in its full glory!). It is getting better and I can infer that it will only continue to do so! I see him once every week or two and talk to him once in a while, which seems like a bit much sometimes, but usually it feels just about right! I have also been making a serious effort to meet other boys in my ward. This is not necessarily because I want to date someone new, but I want other guy friends to give me the testosterone I crave without any baggage! I'm finally getting to know people in my ward! I actually recognize people now! I wouldn't go to the wrong ward's FHE and not realize it anymore! (Yes, this happened once when I showed up with the boy and we didn't really talk to anyone else anyway. I thought it was a little strange that I didn't recognize anyone, but I didn't think much of it! I suppose I was slightly distracted!). It would be doubly hard for me to do this since I was recently called as the FHE co-chair! It would be very bad form if I pulled that off again!

It's amazing how even when I feel incompetant at my profession, and a lack of joyness with boys and their boyness (that's just for you Blake!) and overwhelmed with my calling (since all FHE are ward FHEs so I get to plan a ward activity every week!), I can still feel sontent and peaceful and have a great big smile across my face that only goes away when I fall asleep and the muscles in my face can finally relax (...well that, and when I have to be stern with my students)!