Back from the E-Dead

So, despite all my best and naïve intentions during the summer to share all of my experiences with Teach For America via blog, I soon discovered a few weeks into Teach For America training that my life was soon to be sucked into oblivion. And thus it was. A very satisfying, chance-to-help-others, good-karma type of oblivion, but still. Especially during those first few weeks, it was hard enough to find enough time for five hours of sleep a night, much less blogging. And though in the time since then I've finished training, gotten halfway through my first year as a 4^th grade teacher in Washington Heights, prepared my kids for and led my kids through one of their big annual standardized tests (the English Language Arts one) and started preparing them for their second (the math one), and improved significantly as a teacher (through the throw-you-in-a-classroom-and-pray training method), it still took me a long time to even want to think about restarting a blog.

Not to mention the other amazing happening in the life o' Rolf, which most of you folks that read this should most surely know about—I got married to the most amazing person on earth, Kristy Money, an astoundingly loving, empathetic and caring woman, who for some reason said yes to me. She's the product of two academics as well, and has moved around a lot—she's currently a doctoral candidate in psychology from BYU. And did I mention she's the most amazing woman alive?

So yes. Time management over the last six months has not yielded much blogginess. But in the spirit of new beginnings (more so in terms of new beginnings as a married person than new beginnings with a new year—I never was much of a New Years' resolutions type), I am determined to try to remedy that.

Today I missed a couple of my favorite kids, who were absent today—especially Jaabar. Jaabar is about four feet tall, walks a kinda crooked line because he doesn't have very good balance, and is the most hilarious and mature 4^th grader you've ever seen. He's the kind of kid who forgets to bring his lunchbox home almost every day, yet has the most insightful questions of all when we're reading a book together. His handwriting is atrocious, but the ideas in his essays are the most complex in the class. And he's about the most endearing little duder ever. We give each other high fives a lot.

Kristy and I are ensconced in our New York apartment for a quiet evening in this Monday—we tend to have lots of those. Mainly because we don't have anything we'd rather do than be with each other. Married life is AWESOME.