Counting Down

After Easter Break, there will only be 38 days left to go in the strangest job I have ever held. This is including the summer spent working at a bakery from 2-10 AM with a sociopathic midget, and the holiday helper job at Pier 1 where my manager insisted I allow a woman to charge up a storm on her senile, wheelchair-bound mother's credit card. Even after the credit company flagged the transaction and I ended up on the phone simultaneously with the FBI and the credit company. Ah, those warm Christmas memories of giving a physical description of a senile, wheelchair bound woman to the FBI whilst my manager, eyes all aglow, hisses in my ear that she is NOT going to lose this sale, as it would bring our totals for the night at an all time high.

Yes, this has been one doozy of a job. Not because of the kids, to be sure- my students are perfect in every way. No, this year has truly been unique in that I've never been hired by con artists before. Let's just highlight by summing up what was said at hire, and what has been discovered over time:

At hire: "You'll have about a dozen students."
Reality: Five students, until late October. Then the walls really started to bulge out as the sixth was added.

At hire: "Main Director has created schools before for corporations."
Reality: It seems I am the only one in the building with a teaching certificate for this state. In fact, it seems I am the only one with a bachelor's degree in the building, save another staff member from another country.

I could go on and on, but that will have to wait until I extract myself from the uber-intense, syrupy-sweet, Gothardesque-fake-smiling, money-grubbing claws of this place. In the meantime, some more silliness from the super fantastic students of mine!

As one might suspect, my current gestational state is a large topic these days. While they know I am planning on somehow acquiring a baby in the summer, some seem to have no idea where it is. H2O asks me on a near daily basis, "Is your baby in the baby room?" while Theological Boy (who gained a baby brother last summer, and seems to know quite a bit about the process) yells out, "It's in her UTERUS!" So in the meantime, little bobbly heads ricochet off my belly on a daily basis, and still half the kids look around and wonder aloud, "Where will you get your baby from?"

Yesterday we were exploring the world of subtraction. Very Young Boy kept eyeballing my rather large belly and raised his hand.

Me: "Yes?"
Very Young Boy: "Um... um... My dad is really fat. Like this (holds hands in front of belly). He has a really fat belly."

The toy horses have also been very busy in the small toy area. Apparently it was plastic equine orgy night some odd months ago (what the hell is the gestation of a horse, anyhow?) because each and every one of them is birthing, every day. Thanks to the extreme detail of Theological Boy's birth knowledge (he may have been present at his brother's birth), the toy horses are guided through the loud and vocal pushing stage each day by six very intense midwives. Each birth of the same miniature plastic red horse is greeted with cheers, tears, and the passing around of cigars.

I decline, obviously, as I currently cannot partake.