First Day Jitters

I didn't sleep at all last night.  Not because of Back to School nerves.  Although I'm excited every year, this is my 6th First Day of teaching and by now I'm an old pro.  No, this year it was the critter jitters that kept me up all night.  It started with a cricket.  He somehow got into the space between the wall and the tin roof.  Which meant that not only was he chirping CONSTANTLY for 3 hours, but that it was magnified and echoing against the metal.  It was seriously impossible to ignore.  I contemplated going to sleep on the living room couch.  But then I remembered we have mice.  After weighing my options, I decided to stick it out in my room away from the rodents.  Finally, the cricket chirping subsided (possibly died?) Just as I shut my eyes I felt something crawling on me.  I screamed and turned on the lights to find a beetle crawling on me.  Can I not catch a break?  It shook me up and I kept imagining everything else that was crawling around.  I did manage to finally get a few hours of sleep.  When I woke up, I discovered that, in fact, there were some other creepy crawly things feasting on me all night.  I am covered in bites and one on my calf is swolen to the size of a tennis ball and hard underneath.  Hopefully nothing a little benedryl can't solve.

Despite my lack of sleep, we had a great first day of classes.  The school looked great with all of the hard work the teachers have been putting in the past week.  We have a wonderful group of creative teachers...

We had a formal Inaguracion de Clases ceremony....

Here are the teachers performing our rendition of "Lean on Me" for the students...

You may remember this post about Gabi, who got baptized on Christmas morning.  Today was her first day of school.  Hortencia, her mother, is one of my co-workers.  She's only 3 and can already count to 11 in English!...

Our enrollment is up at the school this year.  I was looking forward to a smaller class, but it looks like I may have about 26 kiddos so far.  It will be about equal to my class size last year (although this is a MUCH calmer group of students).  I am looking forward to "really" starting classes on Monday.