Busy, Busy

It seems that in the last couple of weeks, life has gone from being pretty boring, to being totally crazy.

One of the crazy aspects of my life lately has been my job. I can't complain because my work days have been flying by, but they have been crammed full of lots of different things. Last week I spent my mornings at my old school, meeting with my clients and telling them goodbye, and then heading over to my new school in the afternoons for training. Saying goodbye to my kids and their parents was a lot harder than I was expecting. Part of it was that I probably told 30 people individually that I was leaving which is wearing for anyone. The looks on some of my kids faces when I told them I was leaving were hard to take. It was like a mixture of shock and disappointment. At the end of one session, a girl told me, "there's just not enough time with you." Some kids have had to switch counselors 3 or 4 times before me, and that's hard for me to know that I'm just another counselor that left. I'm going to miss a lot of my kids at the school, but hard goodbyes mean that our relationship mattered and had an influence on their life, and that's the important part. The one good thing about the goodbyes is that I got to leave all of my clients with positive messages about them, and that was fun. I know a lot of those kids probably had never heard anyone brag on them, and the looks on those faces when I told them how great I thought they were usually made up for the disappointed faces. I felt really sad leaving, but Matt reminded me that I'll build relationships with students at my new school and I just have to be patient.
So after emotional mornings of telling countless people I was leaving them, I spent my afternoons soaking up new information about the new school, teachers, counselors, staff, and job responsibilities. I've been exhausted leaving in the afternoons, but I know transitions are stressful and that eventually things will settle into a new routine.

Life outside of work has also been pretty busy. Last week I went to Stillwater one evening to visit friends, Matt had friends from work over another night, AWANA started again filling up another evening, and we were gone all weekend in Weatherford with our families. We started going to a couple's small group a couple of weeks ago that meets on Sunday evenings. We also started our date nights up again after a sporadic summer. Hopefully we can get in a routine again. On Tuesday we went to dinner at a steakhouse that is only a couple miles from our house and then headed to the mall to find Matt a new OSU shirt for the game on Saturday.

I don't know where all our down time in the evenings went, but Rhapsody hasn't gotten a walk in the last few days because we've been so busy with other things. We'll have to make it up to her with a trip to the dog park soon. Things don't look like they are going to slow down any time soon either. Next weekend we're headed to Iowa to visit my brother and sister-in-law and the rest of the Saturdays in September include a trip to Stillwater for a football game. Good thing I like being busy. We have absolutely nothing planned on Monday for Labor Day and are looking forward to a lazy day.