Reprioritizing

This year, the start of school has been even more difficult than usual.  I moved to a new school and took on a caseload that is made up of the usual speech-language stuff like articulation, language, fluency, even a voice kid (!) but I also have somewhere around 25 kids who are in self-contained classrooms that are primarily for kids with autism spectrum disorders.  It is a challenge, to say the least.  I have an amazing assistant, but she's only with me 2 days a week.  My caseload numbers are higher than they should be, causing me to have to put kids in bigger groups than I like and causing incredible difficulties with scheduling.  Oh...scheduling!  I have spent hours and hours on scheduling this year already due to the high number of kids and the complexity of the master schedule of the school.  These are just a couple of the things that were causing me a LOT of stress in September.  It took a few weeks of late nights at work, a few episodes of crying, several big headaches that lasted multiple days and some major rants to Rudy and my mom before I realized that I needed to reprioritize.  So, now, I have made myself a promise to leave work by 4:30 every day.  I spend the hours that my kids are awake with them.  I refuse to bring work home every night and when I have to, I'll only work on it after the kids go to bed.  I reached my maximum stress level and then backed away.  It culminated with writing this Facebook post that brought me so much peace and comfort that I can't even explain the grace that I felt when I wrote it:

I'm constantly amazed by God's answers in my times of difficulty. Though I would like for Him to reach out His hand and shelter me from the lightning and rain, I somehow feel just as comforted that He chooses to sit next to me so that we can ride out the storm together.

Since then, I've taken one day at a time at work.  I see my kids when they are scheduled, do my paperwork, get a little stressed during the day sometimes when I have to deal with a tantrum-throwing child or difficult parent and then walk out the door no later than 4:30 with very little (if any) work in my tote bag. 



I won't say that I'm as relaxed as I would like to be.  That only happens in the summer.  I can say, though, that I have a balance.  I'm taking things in stride a lot better and enjoying my family a lot more.