Cold and Flu, Cold and Flu

When I experienced my allergies last April, when my face swelled up like a over-ripened plum, I went through a bunch of tests to figure out what it was. Mainly it felt like I figured out what is wasn't -- no food allergies, no pet allergies, we ruled out dust and pollen and even some weird heavy metals. Finally, we narrowed it down to three things, none of which I can spell but are found in the rubber of my Jockey underwear, the conditioner with which I condition my hair, and, of all things, vitamin B12.

I'll admit, I was addicted to the Airborne supplement I put in my water bottle every day and even to the Emergen-C packet I sometimes slipped in my morning juice. Ann always told me to back off, but it tasted good and I thought, "What harm can vitamin C do?"

Well, it wasn't the vitamin C that got to me, it was the Vitamin B12 in its mega-doses that eventually did me in. So I went off the supplements cold turkey and now there are very few vitamins I can take that don't have some form of B12 or B Complex in them.

The end result? I got walloped by a cold bug this past week and I mean walloped. Coughing, sneezing, runny nose, weepy eyes, aches, pains the whole snot-ball of wax. Ann got the cold first and I thought, three days after her "outbreak" I'd avoided catching it. But then WHAM! Like someone injected the virus straight into my bloodstream (okay, I know it wasn't a virus, but that's what it felt like).

Today Ann made me lay on the couch and do NOTHING. This is hard for me, this doing nothing, but I obliged her and eventually fell fast asleep breathing heavy through my mouth. After hours and hours of doing it, I'm feeling remarkably better, but still get short of breath if I walk too long with the dogs or haul laundry up the stairs.

I miss my B12. I miss my Airborne and my Emergen-C. Now I feel like those actors on the Cold and Flu season commercials and instead of healthy vitamins to ward off the bugs, I'm popping DayQuil and Sudafed and cough syrup.

It's not fair, I hear myself whine. Just like my 5th graders who most likely exposed me to the germs in the first place.

It's just not fair.

Excuse me while I go blow my nose.

October's Patience

As we approach October, life and work are slowing down ever-so-slightly. I'm feeling the rhythm again and my days are spent teaching children and my nights are spent training Rubin. Rubin is a far easier student in many regards, but I'm slowly getting to know my new crop of students -- their quirks, their comfort zones, their pet peeves, their rough edges -- so it doesn't feel as foreign as it did in the beginning of September.

It's taken me 22 years of teaching to realize I'm good at it and just when I start to own that, I'm feeling the need to change. I can do this work, this teaching work, but every year I am amazed by the amount of energy it saps from me. I already have my first cold of the year and though it hasn't walloped me, I feel drained and in need of sleep/rest/a vacation.

Meanwhile, I've been lucky enough to take Rubin to school with me 3 days a week. He loves it, my students love it, and the rest of the school (faculty, staff, other students, parents) are falling in love with him. He is darn cute, if I do say so myself, but I realized yesterday that part of my "exhaustion" is keeping my eye on the students and what I'm teaching them as well as keeping an eye on a 7 month old puppy whose patience runs thin at times.

Today he spent the whole day with me at school. This is a rarity. Generally, I take him home at lunch and let him get some sleep and then retrieve him in the afternoon for a long walk. Somehow that never happened today so he was with me the entire time. He should be tired. He got only a smidge of sleep and was ever-alert as the girls moved through their day dropping pens and shuffling their feet, all of which perks up Rubin's ears.

While I know it's going to be a good year, I am so ready for it to be my last year of teaching in the classroom. I'm not resentful. I'm not bitter or burned out. I'm just done. I need a new challenge in my life and now that everything is lined up with the dog trainer, I'm ready to just begin and not simply begin in tiny increments.

I suppose I am an impatient person. Okay, let me state that more as fact than as a pondering: I can be and often am an impatient person. Not with my students, not even with Rubin, but definitely with myself. Some say I'm a perfectionist though that's hard for me to see, but I will admit that I'm the first one to beat up on myself for any hint of failure and the one who punishes myself longer and harder than anyone else who may have been affected by my "mistakes."

It's funny how, if I were my own teacher -- in other words, if I were a 5th grader in my class -- I'd know exactly how to deal with me. It would be endless positive talk and lots of humor and lots of encouragement to make mistakes and be myself. But I'm much better at giving the lesson than I am at receiving it and so, I grow impatient when the world doesn't spin on the axis I've set forth.

I'm hoping October brings more rhythm and more patience. I'm hoping October, contrary to its normal work, is a time of sowing the seeds of change. I'm hoping October washes away some exhaustion and allows me to fully breathe in each day as it comes, finding patience with each and every breath.

Meanwhile, it's teaching in the mornings and Rubin in the evenings and a sprinkling of chocolate in between.

Under the Influence

I don't drink alcohol. I never have. And I mean never. There were many factors that played into my abstinence, but now at 48 I have no desire to drink and so I don't. Without any wrangling on my part, most of my friends don't drink either. Some will have an occasional glass of wine, but others have chosen sobriety because of past encounters or just, like me, decided not to drink.

So when I take medications they hit me hard. Like right now. I took a Tylenol PM because Ann's cold has seeped into my throat and bit into my eyes -- both scratchy and dry -- and so to sleep soundly (in an attempt to get some rest and recovery), I popped the blue little pill.

Every once in awhile the pill wires me. I lie in bed feel as if I am 3 feet higher than my platform bed, unable to sleep and spinning nervously. Generally though, that doesn't happen. I crash, deep into something soft and weighted. Even though the bottle claims that the pill only lasts 4 hours, I'm able to get 10 hours of hard sleep out of it.

I avoid taking the pills though, as it can be a groggy morning not very condusive to teaching 19 ten-year olds. And at times in my life, I needed the pill just to find some bit of sleep. I don't want to go back there so now I limit myself -- only when sick or when I have been unable to fall asleep.

It's early, but under the influence I think I shall wander off to the blue soft sleep of one oval pill.

Work To Do

I have agreed to take part in a presentation for an Independent Schools Conference, but for the life of me, I can't seem to get started on that work. I'm supposed to be creating a PowerPoint showing how our work with Peggy and the horses helps our students build their leadership skills. I've started the PPT about four times now and it just seems like this extremely boring presentation, like Charlie Brown's teacher signed up to speak --- Wa, wa, wa, wa, wa.

I know that inspiration will come, but meanwhile, I blog instead of work. Meanwhile I listen to Rubin under my desk gnaw away on a big beef knuckle bone like he's digging through the earth hoping to get to China.

Work feels a bit like deja vu. I've had all these students before, haven't I? I've had all these conversations about patience and politeness recently, yes? Why do I sound like a repeated, looped message?

So tonight, to clear my head of the deja vu, I took Rubin for a long walk by the lake. Ann is kid-sitting for our friends tonight and so I went with her and then walked back home -- about an hour walk.

Rubin was frenetic, like the leash was electric and he bounced his electric pulses at the end of his tether. When we got to the lake I found a stick and threw it again and again and he swam out far and strong to retrieve it. I thought he was fairly worn out, but when we started walking again, he had more energy than ever.

Even now, an hour after our return, he's racing around the house tossing his stuffed toys and frantically gnawing his chew-toys as if he is fueled by batteries and not expensive dog food.

Okay, he's a puppy still (7 months tomorrow), but still, I thought I'd wear him out. Instead, he's wearing me out on a day when I don't need any more wearing.

Now Ann is home and he is wagging his tail so crazily, it's scaring even him.

My doctor said there are 4 common things that people who live to be 100 do:

1. They walk a lot and rarely depend on other forms of transportation.
2. They eat sour things like yogurt and sauerkraut.
3. They get at least 9 hours of sleep each night.
4. And when they go to bed at night after a hard day they say, "Tomorrow is another day."

I'm working on it...but that last one can be a killer.

Now

The seasonal flood of work has once again floated around my eyeballs for the past few weeks. I am tired, deeply, another seasonal affliction from the dramatic change of pace -- one minute I'm on vacation with nary a question to answer and the next I'm back at work fielding 100 questions a day and most of them repeats.

But underneath it all, I've been quietly working to change my life. Yesterday, I drove south to spend the morning with Peggy, the horse whisperer, as we prepared for our presentation at an Independent Schools conference. There is something about spending time with Peggy that is both ethereal and grounding. It was heady work yesterday trying to grapple with how we meld the classroom experience with the students' work in the arena with Peggy's horses. It's transformational, I have no doubt about it, but explaining how it works or why or even how we evolved to the methods we use is complicated and overwhelming. It doesn't help that we only have an hour and 15 minutes to present, which seems like a lifetime in some ways and like a split second in others.

After Peggy's, I drove north to visit with Dave, the dog trainer, to see if he would be willing to take me on as an apprentice. We met at Starbucks and talked about our lives, our goals, animals, and teaching. In many ways, the conversation with Peggy in the morning was the same conversation with Dave in the afternoon though I can't give any concrete examples of exactly how it was the same.

Peggy talks about the four areas she works on with children and horses -- Connection, Intention, Being Present, and Authenticity. She also uses the term Claiming Space with the girls in reference to all of the four areas, and throughout the school year, we circle back to these concepts again and again. In addition, we add the concept of Intent vs. Impact, of how we can positively claim space versus negatively claim space by examining our intentions and observing our impacts.

See, it's really hard to explain, but the girls get it (probably through repetition more than anything) and by the end of the year, when we head back to Peggy's in the spring, they are able to create personal goals that are more genuine and real than most goals adult set -- I want to be friendlier, I want to know that my quiet way can still be seen as a leader, I want to be aware of how others feel, I want to be more patient...

It's powerful stuff so as I sat in the coffee shop chatting away with Dave about training and life, I could feel myself practicing all those things I've seen Peggy teach the girls -- connection, being present, authenticity, intention, claiming space, and intent vs. impact. I tried to explain it all to Dave and amazingly, he understood.

"It's the same when you work with dogs," he said. "I don't have any scientific basis for it, but if you picture what you want the dog to do, he reads your thoughts. It's that connection that I have to have with someone if we're going to work together. It's why this conversation with you is so important."

Dave is a gentle soul. He's a big, big man working his way through the South Beach Diet to lose 65 pounds or more so he no longer tips the scale at 300 pounds. He was a high school and college wrestler and his fingers are the size of bratwursts. At first glance, you'd think he was brash and loud and burley, but when he works with dogs, he is gentle, thoughtful, and quiet. He can get the most energetic puppy to fall asleep in his arms within 30 minutes of working with them and quiet the most angry of canines simply by slowly massaging his large hands across a dog's back.

I emailed him this morning to thank him for meeting with me and for agreeing to "train" me. He wrote back and said, "We're going to make a great dog trainer out of you" and I felt the same kind of magic bubble I do when I watch Peggy work with my students.

Of course, when I got home I was exhausted. My ass hurt from driving over 150 miles in one day and then sitting in a dining room and then a coffee shop and my head felt heavy with all the ideas and discussion and scheming of the day. I've had a hard time recovering today, but this evening I took Rubin on a long walk and tried, as Peggy so gently commands of my students, to be in the moment. About a mile from home, Rubin got very excited and when I released him from his "right here" or "heal" position, he raced like a crazed puppy back and forth across the grass turning at the exact moment he knew his leash would run out. He smiled and pranced and pounced, growling playfully all the while. A passerby stood a few feet from us and laughed with me as Rubin continued his wild frenzy until finally he flopped in the grass exhausted.

This year is going to be a hard year. I know that. Teaching will drain me as it does every year and the dog apprenticing will be like going back to school again, energizing but exhausting. While I look forward to the latter, I know I must muster up some serious energy to be fully functioning with the former and count the days as they slowly pass by.

Peggy told me, as we sat in her dining room planning our presentation, that if there was one word of advice she could offer me as I transition from one passion to the other it would be to be kind to myself. Forgiving was the word she used. Forgiveness has been one of my life lessons and when hours later I heard Dave say the same thing, "A good trainer must be able to forgive themselves" I realized this is one of those lessons that will present itself to me again and again, no matter how deep the flood of my life.

I shall end this ramble with a picture of Rubin, who along with Ann, is a great joy and a brilliant reminder of staying present, staying connected, being authentic, as well as being intentional while I move into claiming my new space in life.

Rattlesnake Ledge Photos

I meant to put these photos on my Rubinations blog and the current Rubinations blog on this one, but alas, they got switched and it's too much work to correct them...so, here are the photos from Rubin's recent hiking and swimming adventure. (If you want to read the other blog, click on Rubinations at the side...)

Rubin, a bit uncertain on top of Rattlesnake Ledge. There's quite a drop off about 20 feet from him...his toes are gripping the rock!

A bit more relaxed and enjoying the view...

Monty in the sky with a small child at his neck!

At the lake...chasing dreams of being a big dog...

Resting pose...

A dog, a lake, a tennis ball, and a good roll in green grass...does it get any better than this?