My first full week in my classroom!

Ahhh....must love the weekend! I woke refreshed this morning, which is a feeling I haven't felt all week. It just seemed like I was never going to catch up on my sleep. I slept for almost 12 hours and it was glorious! It is almost noon here and I am still in my PJ's. Good times. The weather here has been crap. Those two weeks of sunshine and bliss were a mean trick. We were expecting the weather to stay that way, but aparently that is not the case. It is just gloomy. We have a few hours of sunshine here and there, but mostly overcast and drizzly. Gross. It makes you want to find a good book and curl up in bed. I must venture out today to return a dress in the Mannheim shopping district. I am thinking about bringing a book and finding a cafe to park myself for the afternoon. This will allow me to feel a little better about doing absolutely nothing on my Saturday. :)

The week in review:

Sunday we went to Ramstein, which is an air force base that is about 10 times better than ours. These are some pictures taken along the way. My intention was to take pictures of Ramstein to show as proof of the awesomeness, but my camera died after the third picture I took along the way. Whomp. Whomp.

The first thing we did once we arrived in Ramstein was eat at Macaroni Grill. Of course it was delicious. The best part was that everyone spoke English. Don't get me wrong, I love learning German. It is just nice to be able to speak in my native tongue and not feel ridiculous for trying to pretend that I know what I am doing. I didn't find anything while we were there, which is probably a good thing because I won't recieve my first pay check for a month.

I decided it would be best to give you the highlights of the week instead of a daily breakdown. Let's see.... Monday was spring cleanup. All of the flowerbeds were spruced up with fresh flowers. The ghetto trash sitting along some of the buildings such as old bikes no one rides, were hauled to the curb for trash pickup. The new found beauty of spring clean up lasted about 5 days before the ghettoness returned. It didn't take long fo the hoodlums to kick up the newly planted flowers or leave their trash scattered along the streets. Ridiculous. I have decided that I am going to like my co-workers (as in the people on my team that work with me in the preschool room...I am not so sure about some of the members of management). They seem like genuine people, so I think we will get along. It is kind of hard/weird for me to be in the lead position. I had wanted to ease into it, since I am still learning the routines, but this was not the case. I have already done two weeks of lesson plans, updated bulletin boards, set up conferences with parents, etc. It is all me, but my team is really great. They do anything I ask, and are eager to help. I am pretty excited. The only thing I am not excited about is the crazy amount of kiddos in my room. Ahhh! I would say that about half of them have some pretty intense behavior issues due to terrible parenting. It makes me want to say a few choice words to some parents who are refusing to parent these kids. I think the craziest thing is that for some reason I thought that soldiers would be very diligent parents who would reinforce more structure into these kids lives. This is not the case. They pretty much let their kids do whatever they want. I would sort the parents into two groups....really good parents and parents who should not have kids. There really is no middle ground on this matter. With all of this being said, it makes for a really tiring day when I am chasing kiddos around for eight hours. I come home and zone out. Eventually my body will adjust and this will feel normal. I can't wait for that!