Today was a school day for me too

I had some no small difficulty dragging my self out of bed this morning due to a completely self-inflicted lack of sleep, went to bed at 2:30am. Ooops. Kids were 5 minutes late for school. I'm a bad mum :P

After dropping the kids off I came back home and did some laundry then grabbed my beading supplies and headed back to the school to add another volunteer role to my repetoir. Because I am an idiot. So, I'm now a member of the craft group and I'll be making a whole bunch of earrings for them to sell at the Mothers Day craft stall. I made a few different pairs this morning with the supplies I already had but I'm really waiting for my order from Fire Mountain to arrive so I can finalise designs and pricing (turns out I missed the FedEx delivery while I was out today, so they'll be here tomorrow - yay!).

After craft group it was straight to canteen for the 11am shift, fun but tiring, the canteen supervisior thinks I'm funny, she laughs at the way I deal with the kids and tells me she loves how I manage them - which I confess to being rather gratified by :) I finished up canteen at 2:20pm at which point going home seemed kind of silly so I plonked myself down on a seat in the playground and chatted with some of the kindy mums who had to be there for the early pick up and were then stuck waiting for older siblings to be set free by the 2:50pm bell.

I wanted to catch one of David's teachers for a quick chat because he's got stuck sitting next to a child - we'll call him Will - who has some issues which, among other things, mean he's completely hopeless at social interactions. Will annoys everyone. Constantly. He desperately wants to be friends with people and has absolutely no idea of how to achieve that. Sharing a desk with him means having him shove all his paraphernalia into your workspace, having him constantly trying to borrow stuff that he a) should have his own of and often b) doesn't really need at that point in time anyway, he jiggles the desk, he monologues incessantly about topics which are of no interest to his listener and generally drives people nuts.

Now, someone has to sit next to this kid and what he desperately needs is for people to be kind to him so when Dave told me he was the one in the hot seat we had a chat about ways to manage the annoyance, staying calm and polite and making allowances for Will's idiosyncrasies. Yesterday Dave ended up with his name on the "sad face" list on the board because he was talking when he should have been listening to the teacher, he was talking because he was asking Will to stop driving him nuts by shaking the desk. The fact that he told me it at all tells me Dave was upset so time for a teacher chat it was. And when I spoke to his teacher she said straight away that they were aware of the problem and I'm sure it'll turn out ok (not least because I plan on making sure it does) so that's all good.

The really cool thing though was that in the course of our conversation Dave's teacher told him how impressed she'd been by the way Dave was managing Will, how mature and calm he'd been and that most kids would probably have "lost it" several times over already. Picture me with my proud mum smile on.

The rest of the day was taken up with swimming lessons, a bit of grocery shopping and the cooking, in the rain - thanks Adam! - of a BBQ seafood dinner which we shared with Di and Brendan who today moved house and now live a mere stone's throw away in the next suburb.

And now I think I'd better go to bed.