Back to School (for some)

You're probably wondering why, as a card-carrying Mommy-blogger, I haven't yet given you the obligatory heartwarming post about my children's first day at school along with adorable pictures. There's a reason and it's not that my children are lacking in heartwarmth or adorability: it's that their school has a delayed opening this year due to renovations, and they don't go back till Friday. Watch this space, and all that.

Meanwhile, you will have to be content with a picture from MY back-to-school day. No, not a shot of me with my backpack setting off for school, but finally a picture of the mural on the wall of my office/classroom at work. Jason drew the houses and I painted them, and the background (Jennifer helped a little with the housepainting). It's still incomplete because there's a lot of detail work to be done on it but that's going to be added over time, some of it by me but hopefully a lot of it by students, who will each get their own windows and doors to decorate eventually (the two windows already decorated were done by my own children).

Newfoundlanders will need no explanation of this mural but for those from "away," it depicts an imaginary but typical St. John's downtown street scene, with the "jellybean row" houses for which the city is famous. The school where I teach used to be located downtown but our new offices are in a different part of the city, so the mural is to console me when I miss having Water St. just outside my window. Plus it's bright and cheerful and has many opportunities for further development.

We had our students in for orientation today. It's hard to tell much about the new students until I've met them in class: they look as scared and optimistic as any bunch of young people entering an adult-ed program, sometimes years after they dropped out of high school. What was really cool was going back to my room after the assembly for new students and seeing Paul and Freddy and Heather and Amanda and Ellie all in there ... great to be back with some of the students from last year. Tomorrow we have our first day of classes so we'll see what adventures that brings!