When it's the last week of school....

And you're a person who craves order and structure and routine (and kids who obey, or actually just listen), the last week of school is exhausting.  It drains every ounce of energy, patience, and creative juice from your body.  You want to be super teacher.

But you find yourself more of a referee (and...yeah right, but a girl can dream, can't she?)

You find yourself  saying things like, "You are making me grumpy when I'm talking about Jesus!"  and  counting backwards from 10 entirely too much and resorting to putting a movie on the smartboard and playing movie theater.

You also find yourself doing a lot of this

and this...

 and this....

(but because your specials are cancelled for the last week, picture 21 six year olds crowded around asking you silly questions and tattling)

All of your foolish ideas that you were going to spend the last week of school enjoying each other

quickly deteriorate as you realize on Monday at 8:03 that your children would much rather do this.

And by the time you get home, you have no energy left to do anything but sit at the dinner table wishing you weren't on a diet and having "my day was worse than your day" competitions with your husband.

Good news, though!  Only 2 1/2 more days and then it is blissfully, thankfully, OVER.  And while you still have to come to school for the one day of post planning they give you, an almost impossible task considering you have to file every single paper from the school year (I swore to myself I wasn't going to do that this year, but why break an almost 20 year streak?) and remove the entire contents of your classroom into a storage unit for 6 weeks, at least you are that much closer to that time that all teachers look forward to from about February on:

SUMMER VACATION!