It’s a cliché that students, returning to school after their summer vacation, may be asked to write an essay on what they did that summer.  Personally, I’ve never been asked to do it.

And now I’m a teacher.

I’m not sure what I thought my teachers did when I was a kid, but it probably amounted to something akin to lounging on the couch while eating bonbons.  After all, when teachers weren’t teaching, they couldn’t possibly have anything else to do aside from, perhaps, vacationing, right?

Wrong!

This summer, I went to two week-long professional development seminars.  One was training to become a Circle of Security Parent Trainer.  This means I can work with parents to teach them the Circle of Security parenting ideas and methods.  The other was the ASM Materials Science Camp for Teachers.  (Where else can you pack into one week loads of hands-on activities, including everything from bending glass to mixing foam to pulling burning hot pottery out of a kiln and placing it into a bucket of newspaper, causing instant flames?  Muahaha . . .)

This summer, I also learned some self-sufficiency skills at home.  Between trying to keep up with my garden (vegetable soup, anyone?) and keeping up with food which providentially came my way, we were pretty busy.  At the beginning of the summer, our goats were producing enough milk that I had to learn how to make mozzarella to use it all before it spoiled.  And toward the end of the summer, others with peach trees who didn’t want to deal with all their peaches handed them to us.  My daughters and I set up several “pitting parties” to process the peaches into jam, ending up with many pints of bottled deliciousness.  (Not that we’re complaining.)

This summer, my daughters went to various camps, which meant, of course, I was driving them there.  Three daughters went to a church-sponsored girls’ camp, the drop-off point for which was about 2 hours away.  That wasn’t such a big deal.  But one daughter went to a camp located about 6.5 hours away.  As she had to check in at about 11:00 a.m., we went up the night before and visited one of my sisters.  Rinse and repeat for the pick-up at the end of camp, which was five days long.  Spending roughly 28 hours in the car within six days convinced me I’m better cut out to be a teacher than a truck driver.

And, of course, this summer I had some projects, such as trying to finally put away all that stuff still in boxes around the house from our very hurried and harried move a year ago . . . and working on my lesson scheduling for the next school year.

I’m thankful for the time I had to be able to do and accomplish all the things I’ve been able to do and accomplish, and especially for all the time I’ve had with my daughters.  I highly doubt I would have been able to do this had I been working full-time year-round.

That said, I am looking forward to the next school year.  As tired as I get on my hour-long commute, and as much emotional effort as it takes for an introvert to face six classes a day, it’s a work I enjoy.