Today I came to the harsh realization that the school year is almost upon us. Although, I should say it came upon me in my sleep last night - or lack thereof.

I went to bed around 10:30 like a good little teacher. I'm trying to get my body back onto a normal schedule so that I am not a zombie when the children arrive. I fell into a restful slumber that quickly turned sour. I started dreaming about whiteboards and folders and lesson planning. My dreams about school tend to be centered around me being surrounded by ideas, memories, etc. of things that I haven't done and still need to do. It's almost like in cartoons after somebody gets hit over the top of the head and when they wake up there's a circle of birds like a halo. Except my halo is post-it notes, and on each one of them is something that I forgot to do. I also tend to have incoherent thoughts about lesson planning, mostly anxiety driven. Blegh.

So, to combat this unfortunate string of dreams (which, I might add, does not leave me after school starts, but rather is a recurrence on almost a nightly basis) I learned during student teaching that I have to either listen to music while falling asleep, or read something until I fall asleep. My downfall: Reading a teacher's memoir till I fell asleep. Oooooops.

Otherwise, I think I have officially gotten to the point where I can stop doing mundane decorating tasks in the classroom and get down to the meat of it all - the planning. This strikes up a bit of anxiety since I feel rather out of practice, but I think once I get in the zone I should be able to produce some decent stuff for my kids.