When Life Gets Too Busy

When life gets too busy, what goes on the back burner for you?

For me, it is always exercise.

Always.

Exercise is something I do solely for me.  It is personal time.  It is 'me' time.

So, when the schedule gets overly full and I am needed by too many others, I sacrifice 'me' time.

I am sure I am not alone in this.  I know a lot of mothers who sacrifice 'me' time all the time.  That's why it is so hard to lose the baby fat and why it is so easy to pack on even more pounds as the years progress.

This is my way of confessing that I only got in my Monday and Saturday workouts this week.

I had my work evaluation this week.  Once every three years of my teaching career I am required to be evaluated by my principal on my teaching skills and techniques.  Once every three years is a long interval, so, when it crops up, my stress level shoots through the roof!  I had been dreading it and stressing about it for weeks.  The days leading up to it were consumed with worry and distraction.  I practically chewed my lip off I was so nervous.  I gave up exercise on Wednesday night (the night before the evaluation) in order to go over my lesson plan and design the worksheet to go with it.

That was after spending the first half of the evening over at the high school for parent/teacher conferences, of course.  Fortunately, Bill was able to come with me and we did manage to see most of the kids' teachers.  My kids both had some missing assignments/papers, so, Thursday evening (and night) was spent helping them catch up.  More specifically, in helping my son get a literary analysis paper done for his English class.  That was fun, especially since I had never read the book he was writing it on.  It's a good thing he did otherwise that paper would have been doomed.

Just a side note to all you parents out there.  If you feel like there was some part of high school that you did not learn thoroughly enough back in the day, never fear.  You will get a second chance to re-learn all of it when your kids go through.  I ROCK at Algebra 2, now.

So, how did the evaluation go, you ask?

FANTASTIC!!!  I got a perfect score.  I was giggling like a demented school girl in the car on the way home yesterday afternoon after finishing up the post evaluation debriefing.  Be glad you missed it, because I am sure I sounded disturbed.  It felt like floating on air to have all that stress and worry lifted off my shoulders.  I had known all along that it would be fine.  I would have had to do something majorly idiotic to be fired, but I wanted that perfect score.  Goofy, I know.

And, there is the fact that my principal had never done a formal evaluation on me before.  He asked me 6 years ago to leave my old school and come start up the art program when this school first opened.  When it was time for my eval 3 years ago, we had an assistant principal who stepped in and did the evaluation (and I wasn't happy with that.  He was new at the job and felt like he couldn't give a perfect score to anybody, so he fabricated reasons to mark a couple of things down to prevent it), so this was the first time since hiring me that my boss actually sat down and watched me teach with the purpose of evaluating how good I am as a teacher.  I'm glad I measured up.

I saw the cycle class instructor at the gym this morning and he mentioned that he missed me in the class this past week.  It is nice to be missed.  I promised him I'd be back at it this coming week.  I can't let myself give up 'me' time too often.  I have a date to keep.  Two in fact.  June 9th and August 25th!