Respect

Today I was given an arm band, think yellow livestrong for this. (Quick side note for those of you who do not know, I really like arm bands. They give me an opportunity to connect with others I believe.) The giver told me to think about myself when I looked down and saw the band looped around my arm. I kind of thought the giver was a little strange for giving me the band and I honestly did not think I would put it on, but I told her thank you and pocketed the band anyway. The band has written on it one simple word, RESPECT. There first thing that comes to my mind when seeing or hearing that word is that Aretha Franklin song here, you know the one I’m talking about. Google will pop up about 221,000,000 hits if you search the word respect. That is huge! How does one word have that much information? This post has a point but to see the point you have to try and follow along with me. So here it goes.  How often on any given day are you given a chance to show respect to a stranger, a close friend, a brother, a sister, a mother, a father, a teacher, a student, a co-worker, an employee, a child, yourself? The list could go on and on. From my own experiences with respect, I tend to give people around me a lot of it. I believe that everyone deserves respect. It is not something to be earned like a medal or an award. You deserve respect and that’s what you’ll get from me. You can however lose respect. It takes a very talented person to lose respect in my book and only a couple of people are in that book. My biggest challenge is respecting myself, the person God created. So today and everyday hence forth I am going face this challenge head on and respect the person God created me to be and all the other people, places, and things God created. I challenge you to do the same. You may mess up and fail but keep on trying. RESPECT!

Convivial

Here's to hoping the interweb doesn't crash on me before I get this written. I have not posted in a while, I apologize for that. It is not from lack of ideas, I seem to have plenty of ideas, I just don't know how to finish them. I have a folder full of unfinished post on my desktop.
Today was convivial! I just googled synonyms for enjoyable and that word seemed most fitting. It started out as just an average Thursday. I got out of bed at 8:38 and made it to work by 8:52. I typed sign in sheets for the classrooms to get ready for the fall semester and then I went to my older kid classroom to help with naptime duties, all part of a normal days work. I even went to lunch at my usual 1:36 time. Enough about the mundane part of my day. When I got back to work just in time for snack time the kids came up to me and said guess what Miss Amanda we are gonna get ice cream. Oh my goodness, I was excited almost as much as the kids were. It wasn't the ice cream itself that I was excited about. It had more to do with the fact I was getting to go on another great adventure with my little friends. About thirty minutes later, little flutes in hand out marched 8 little three and four year olds along with myself and the two lead teachers. The ice cream shop was only about a ten minute walk for us but it was convivial! I am surely going to miss these impromptu field trips and outings my class takes. I am truly blessed to be able to work with such great children and two very willing and able teachers. It does sadden me a little bit because when I mention these spontaneous outings to other labor students they tell me that they wish their teachers would do things that my class does but they are unwilling to step up and do different things with the children. Nobodies perfect, I know that, I just wish that some people would just take the initiative to get up and do stuff at least for the children s sake.
Tomorrow is my last day with this particular group of children. Never again with these same exact children be in the same classroom together and that is a bit sad. I have been with some of those kids since before they were two years old and watching them grow up and move on is hard but also rewarding experience to watch. I wish there wasn't strict rules or I would take a group picture of my kids for yall to see them but unfortunately no can do. Well I am getting sad thinking about children transitioning and moving on so I better stop now.
Signing Off,
Captain Something Fun

Insomnia

I am not really sure what constitutes as insomnia but some days I feel as though I may have insomniac tendencies in me. Lately I have been up way past my normal bedtime, typically eleven pm is when I will go to sleep. I got sick of laying in bed staring out into the darkness so I decided to turn on my computer. In retrospect that was probably not a wise decision. The first thing I did after watching several YouTube videos for the movie Frozen was to figure out a definition for the word insomnia. I love Google! Anything that pops into my head can instantly be searched and found out. It is truly amazing. So back to insomnia (A professor of American History once told me that Wikipedia is a reliable source for basic information and understanding. Ever since that class my junior year I have used Wikipedia as a jumping of spot so to speak in many researching endeavors.) the internet as given the basic definiton of insomnia to be this,Insomnia is trouble falling asleep or staying asleep through the night. Episodes may come and go (episodic), last up to 3 weeks (short-term), or be long-lasting (chronic). This simple search led my brain to start thinking about the origins of insomnia and why is it prevalent in a growing number of college students. (Sometimes I astound myself. I love doing research and finding out new things that just pop into my head. I can spend hours reading academic journal articles and case studies. When it comes to doing a research project for a class however I just cannot bring myself to sit down and just do it. I wonder why that it.) Brown University recently did a study on college students and found out that more than half of the subjects were not getting adequate sleep which led to poorer performance in class. Another interesting study I found while surfing the inter web followed students at a large southwester university. The group of researchers from this study took a different approach on sleeping patterns. What they found out was that 57% of the students studied had other pre-existing medical conditions that were linked to the insomniac tendencies of these college students. I think that information is interesting. Typically I just think of insomnia as a problem all on its own not one that might be linked to another. And now this gets me thinking about labels because to have insomnia in the first place one must put that label on their self or someone else. Are labels a bad thing? Are labels a good thing? I think that the answer is both yes and no. I am going to stop writing now because I've had to erase many of my thoughts typed out that just aren't making sense. Signing off until next time.

Captain Something Fun

p.s. If any of y'all have any research links on insomnia or other interestingly fun things share please.