Usually I do and then she tells me to just go ahead and buy them 🤦🏻‍♀️ but I’m trying again this year anyway!! I just made Amazon lists for all grandparents and anyone else who might ask.

I miss teenagers and cultivating a classroom that was welcoming and challenging, but that’s it. Teaching was a grind I couldn’t handle anymore. Now I spend my days blissfully alone doing a job I can close out of at 4pm and not think about. I can be with my family and breathe. No bra is good too.

I picked up a second job, working nights writing French curriculum for an online language company, hoping it would throw me a lifeline. It did. I quit teaching in 2022 and have been WFH ever since. They closed the French program and now I write English curriculum.

“post-pandemic” world with a new textbook and my county blocked all education websites and raise two children who were constantly home sick from daycare germs and it was wholly unsustainable and I was drowning. My husband is a school admin. Parenting was mostly on me.