So I’m back after a long hiatus. It’s not really too interesting what happened to me in these past, oh, four months. But there are two main reasons why I was so bad at updating this blog. So here’s the abbreviated version:
I got a job teaching 6 years olds at a brand new school where I had to create the curriculum for EVERY subject. Here in the UK that meant math, reading, writing, spelling, science, history, geography, art, computers, religion, and design technology (In the Bronx, we either has specialized teachers for some of those subjects or sadly they didn’t get taught!) This was problematic for many reasons. One, I have never taught art, computers, religion, or design technology so I was learning how to teach while coming up with lesson plans without any resources. Second, the school day was 8:30 – 4 everyday, and I was expected to eat lunch with the kids. I only got a half hour break a day where I was expected to do all my planning! Needless to say this time did not suffice so I stayed at school until 7:30 most nights and worked at least one weekend day. Third, the parents of some of these kids were so uptight! The first month of school I had three meetings with one child’s parent, plus three other meetings with different kids’ parents. The meetings took an hour of my afterschool time, so less time for planning, or sleep! I really didn’t mind the 12 hour days at first because my co-workers were wonderful, and so were the kids and I figured things would get better in time. Sure I was stressed and got no sleep, but I was happy to be teaching again. But then this leads me to the second reason why I haven’t been writing: I got pregnant!
While not a total surprise, I was still a little taken aback how quickly things progressed in the baby making department. My plan was to work a full year, and may or may not come back the next year depending on Dan’s job. But things don’t always go as planned. I was unfortunate to get very very sick during my first months of pregnancy. I was sick literally every day, morning until night. Throwing up, general nausea, migraines...it was a perpetual hangover. I lost ten pounds and became depressed. And to top it all off, I was too sick to teach 20 six year olds eight hours a day so with much sadness, I had to quit my job. I didn’t think it would be fair to the kids to have a substitute during my whole first trimester and I figured since I’d only been their teacher for two months it would be best if they just started fresh.
So there you have it. Two months I was working like a dog and two months I was sick as a dog. I am happy to report that I am no longer sick every day, only on occasion. I don’t have a job, again, but I try and remind myself that I am lucky to be in a position where we don’t need my income to survive. Plus I should enjoy all this free time now because heaven knows there won’t be any when the little one arrives!
I realized that I never wrote about Portugal. I can’t remember all the details, as it was last September, my bad. But I will tell you it was amazing. The weather was a gorgeous 80 degrees every day, the beaches were clean and not too crowded, and the town we stayed in Lagos, in the Algarve region, was so charming. The food was delicious and compared to the rest of Europe, it was a bargain. We stayed in a super nice hotel in town, which had a free shuttle to the beach where they had a beach club complete with lounge chairs, pool, and restaurant. We spent our days on the beaches, exploring the many grottos carved out of spectacular rock formations. It is a place I definitely want to go back to someday soon. There was one crazy thing that happened to us. When we took a boat tour of the grottos, we ended up saving a woman from drowning! Complete with Dan doing CPR! I’m not in the mood to get into it right now, but hopefully in a future blog I will be able to do the story justice. Sorry for the tease!
With the whole pregnancy thing, we will have to slow down the travelling. But we did manage to go to Venice, and are going to Bruges in March, so I will hopefully have those blogs up in a timelier manner this time around. Dan and I are going to take this opportunity to travel around England by train some more. So I’ll also have more to say about the UK in future blogs. For now though enjoy some pictures of beautiful, sunny and warm Portugal. I know I will as it’s freezing here in Blighty! Portugal
