School's Over!

This year the last week of school was more frenzied than usual.  Every day I had more things scheduled to get done than I could possibly get to (plus more things kept getting added on as we remembered them), so they'd get bumped to the next day.  By the time Friday arrived, everything HAD to be done.  A lot of this involved shopping, so took place after school: gifts for my parent volunteers, rewards for our science fair winners, thank you cards, picking up photographs of the students, and the like.  Every year I vow that I'll start all of this earlier.  And every year I don't and end up with this insane mad scramble that doesn't stop until the final bus pulls away at the end of the last day of school.  Except this year, it was worse (a huge added element was deciding to perform a musical with 43 students last Tuesday). 

In the midst of all this activity, a frog decided to come to my classroom for a visit.  I'd potted up flowers as gifts for my parent classroom helpers and given them a good watering the night before.  In the morning, I put them in a box, loaded them, plus a Pacific tree frog hiding in the foliage, into the car and brought them down to school.  When I set them out on the bookshelf in my classroom, the frog popped out, hopped down and led me on a merry chase, much to the hilarity of my students (they all wanted to help, but were sternly ordered not to move -- I could see the bedlam that would have ensued, and I'm pretty sure the frog would have been unintentionally flattened).  I eventually caught the frog (this one act at last earned the respect of several students who, up until that moment weren't, I don't think, all  that impressed with my abilities).

At the end of the day, the frog and I drove home together.  I sat in the driver's seat while he worked at escaping from the bucket he was in on my lap.  At one point, he squeezed around the bag I'd rubber-banded around the top of the bucket and hopped up on the steering wheel.  I'm glad that I was on a country road because there was a bit of swerving around before I pulled over to the shoulder and got him deposited back in his bucket.  This excitement continued all the way home.

When I finally pulled into the carport, the first thing I did was haul him out in his bucket and invite him to return to a potted plant.  At first he wasn't sure he wanted to do this and just sat on the edge of the bucket.  I eventually convinced him otherwise.  And so the frog has returned home and is back in a plant on his carport. 

Life at Frogpond.  Always exciting.

And so begins my summer break.