I don't drink.

But I swear after last week, maybe I should.

Let's see.
Wednesday morning, I had a zoom meet with the chief operations officer. I wanted to know if there was a chance for me to take time off this summer. I don't like working summer program unless it's MY summer program and my stuff and my site. After the utter mess that last summer's larger programs were (three of the four sites I worked in were just... astonishingly bad) I am not willing to be in the middle of that shit again. Crazy people should not be working with children.

I told her what had happened, although I know that she had already been informed. I cleaned up that post a bit and sent to company VP last summer. Profanity entertains me, and sometimes I really need to sprinkle in some unsuitable for polite company words, but I do understand the idea of trying to be professional, so I fixed before sending.

Apparently some feedback from parents has been added and there will be some more training on the adults trying to be a little more... calm.

It looks like I can be on seasonal leave for summer. I'll have to show up for end-of-summer trainings, which is fine, but I will be off when school is out and not back on until August. Which suits me.

Then I drove out to my school. 35 minutes. That's the quickest possible, I think, although I might be able to shave off about 2 minutes by taking a different route to get on the freeway.

The madly spinning revolving door I've seen at every child care business affects this one, too. No one who was hired when I was has remained with the company.


The very young manager who was hired in July and was overseeing my program is no longer with the company. No idea why, and I don't care enough to speculate. She was nice enough, but a little clueless. She did not answer emails or texts in a timely fashion and I think I only saw her at my site twice in 5 months. Not that I need someone looking at how I do things, I have it handled. More or less.

So the VP of operations is temporarily my manager.

On Wednesday afternoon, she visited my site.

Thursday was my virtual meeting with her, although it ended up being a phone call 'cause she wasn't able to be in front of the computer.

She sent me a check in sheet in advance, and although she didn't really say a lot while she was at my site, that check in page showed me that she saw everything. She had a lot of positive feedback for me regarding how things look and how things are going.

No surprises for me in that, things are going along as they should be.

The surprise came when she asked if I can help with program development/training and stocking sites to make them more like mine. 

Not only are things running smoothly (or as smoothly as a room containing 24 kids can run)  the site looks nice. Each activity area is separated by several feet so they don't get in the way of one another, there is a colorful trifold board with bulletin board stuff on it for each zone, there are matted and cropped photos of some of our activities on another black board that's displayed during program. 

We have more books now.
This was the beginning of the school year.

I took the photo cutout thing Matt made for me YEARS ago and we did astronaut photos, they're on another black trifold board. My program keeps growing, so I have to take some more photos this week.

I don't know yet what that will look like, but I would love to help this company grow and take over some of the schools from the Evil Kindercare/Champions Empire and the 'Yep, Mostly Clueless Airheads' non-profit.

This organization is so much better than those two. Not only do they care about the people who work there, (one example, they sent me a beautiful flower arrangement and a card when Dad died) they care about why we're there. The upper people really want the kids to be taken care of and supported as much as we can. The crazy of the summer program happened because of several factors, including a lack of proper training. 

So, yes. Yes I will. However I can help. The better the company does, the better I do.

I got to my school a little after one, as usual, only to find a school-wide celebration going on, complete with an assembly in the gym and cafeteria. So we weren't able to start setting things up on time.

Once the assembly was over, the honorees (OBOB or Oregon Battle of the Books participants) were invited into the clean cafeteria for cupcakes. Those were some cupcakes!

Internet photo, surprisingly accurate

Bright red, purple, blue, green, orange, yellow icing in large globs ended up on the floor, on the tables, being tracked down the hallway on kidshoes... so then we had to clean before getting our program out.

We made it.
*just*

My gang showed up en masse because of the assembly. They were already in the hall at pickup/dismissal. Chaos. Not as controlled as usual, but they're good at our routine.

Jason (1st grade) had a little cough all week. I work with kids. They do that a lot. He had no other symptoms, he was cheery and friendly and interesting as usual. His dad emailed me Thursday morning to let me know he would be at program, but would be picked up by his grandfather early.

But Thursday afternoon was different.
He checked in, I put his bracelet on, and he said, "Do I have to eat snack?"
"No, of course not. It's up to you if you want to eat."

He gave me a wan smile and walked away.
As I said, I had all the kids at once, so I didn't notice at first.

Once the furor died down, I saw him lying on the carpet in the construction area with his back to me. It had been about five minutes, I think. I walked over to check on him. He was sound asleep.

I immediately called his dad. Got sent to voice mail. Identified myself, stated, "This is not an emergency," and told him I was just verifying that Jason was being picked up soon because he had immediately gone to sleep and was obviously not feeling well.

I didn't get a call back, but his grandpa was there to pick him up within 20 minutes. It was really hard for Grandpa to rouse him, but he got him moving and out the door.

Friday morning I received an email from his dad giving a rundown of symptoms. He said that the little guy was doing better on Friday morning, so that was good. The email was sent to Jason's teacher and some other school staff and to me.

The tone of the email was polite, but after reading it, *I* was pissed off. I couldn't understand how someone who spent most of the day with the kid wouldn't have noticed how ill he was. No way did he get that sick while walking from his classroom to my program.

Then one of my older girls wet her pants on the way to the bathroom. She was mortified. I was able to go to the school office and get her something clean to wear. When she came back to program, no one even noticed she was wearing different leggings. She put her wet stuff in a trash bag and I put it into a paper bag. Sat it next to the parent table. I had texted her dad, so when he picked her up it was easy for him to just grab the bag and walk out.

There was boy/girl drama, too. Which is always just soooo fun. I have a 4th grade boy who has only attended mornings this year, but due to a recent parent job change, he's attending three afternoons a week. My three oldest girls all have a crush on him, so they behave foolishly. They laugh loudly at his jokes, they follow him around the room and do whatever he's doing, game table, fidget station, LEGO rug. They snipe at each other. Apparently there was some name calling (even *I* can't monitor everything) and Jamie got really upset. When her mom came to get her, she jumped up and ran out the door to the car.

I wasn't sure what had happened to make her upset, so the next afternoon while we were outdoors, I sat with her at a picnic table and asked her what was going on.

I didn't get a lot of information, but the gist is that she and the other two girls were annoying Logan, so he called her a doofus and embarrassed her.
::sigh::

I emailed her mom and made sure she knows I'm aware of what's going on. It's important for people to know that I actually care about their children. Makes all kinds of things easier.

This week, we're making tiny aquariums.
Want to see one? Of course you do.

So I suppose the short version is, they'd like programming to look more like what I've been doing with my little group, I'm being appreciated and respected, and that kids harass each other. Often.

Also, my job is not boring.