Confessions of a Blogaholic

Back to the daily grind tomorrow, and I'm certainly a mixed bag of emotions. I'm excited for all the reasons I've already talked about on here: can't wait to see the kids, get to feel like I'm fulfilling my life purpose, enjoy teaching my subject, yada, yada, yada. But I'm also a little freaked because of all the ridiculous stress that comes along with the job.

If I could go to school, teach, enjoy my lunch, finish all my grading during my conference period, and come home to enjoy my life outside of being Mrs. H, teaching would be perfect. But, there are so many other stressors that go along with the job: dealing with parents who cannot see that their child might have done something wrong, giving up my lunches to fulfill other duties, sometimes not getting to eat all day long, meetings during conference periods, being asked (more like told) to do things outside of my contract responsibilities, grading all night just to hand the papers back and watch the kids throw them away, emails, emails, emails all day long.

This year, I'm going to find a way to balance all of this. There are more important things going on than my job (MUCH more important things!). I'm going to try to come up with one "de-stressing" tool for myself each week. Last year, I lived by the de-stressing rule that you should only touch a piece of paper once (either file it or pitch it, but don't put it in a "need to look at later" pile). This helped a bit. Some of the things I think I'm going to try this year include...

1. Only checking emails twice a day, once right before school and once immediately after school. I am not going to be a slave to my emails this year. I am not going to spend my conference period (when I could be doing more meaningful things) reading and responding to a million emails. They will wait.

2. Put a recycle bin next to my desk. I am much more likely to throw things away (instead of letting them pile up) if I don't have to walk across the room every time I want to do it.

3. When an email makes me mad, upset, stressed, or doesn't apply to me, I'm going to delete it before I have the chance to fixate on how it makes me feel. "Oops, I didn't get it!" is much easier than spending my entire night obsessing about how mad the email made me.

4. My mantra for the year is: "This is just my job. I am having a baby. I'm going to be a mom. There is nothing, NOTHING more important to me than that."

5. This is the unfortunate one...I'm going to spend less time eating lunch with the other teachers in the lounge. I find there are things that happen that I don't think twice about...until I go to the lounge. Then, I get all fired up about stuff that never would have crossed my mind! There is nothing more stressful than that.

Any other de-stressing tips you can think of that I can implement this year? I'm seriously thinking about printing a little list out for myself and keeping it next to my computer (I have a cubby cabinet), so I am always reminded about my plan.