A million different directions.

Finn's first plane ride :)
Finn at the Mall of America pointing at some fishies.

This weekend was...well, interesting to say the least. This is the weekend, this ONE weekend a year that I take students on a trip for the National Journalism convention. We spend four days together bonding and learning about what good journalism is. It is actually much better than it sounds.

Well, I have been dreading this trip for months, not because of my students, but because I would be going on this four day trip to Minneapolis with Finn, and my friend Chrisanne, and her little one Tenley. Now, seriously I love these babies so much, but two babies on a plane ride and trying to entertain them, and 12 teenagers was a little daunting to me...and by a little I mean a lot. Like nightmares a lot. Like, I was shaking when we left the house to go on this trip. I just couldn't quite wrap my head around how it was going to go.

Well, we are home, and we survived. That's really all I can say. The trip was...full. I took Finn to the doctor on Wednesday, well, not the doctor, because the doctor couldn't get me in (of course)...so we went to urgent care. They said "his ears are clear" in a thick accent. I thought "you're all full of shit" in an American accent.

Sure enough, we fly to Minneapolis on Thursday morning, and cart those wonderful babies around from 4:30 am to 7:30 pm and they were angels the entire time...we went on a school bus, plane ride, shuttle bus ride, hotel check-in, city bus ride, train ride, back on the train and bus again, they were AMAZING. But he woke up on Friday worse than I've ever seen him. It was awful. We then walked 8 blocks away from our hotel (through the GHETTO) to find a CVS minute clinic, I burst into tears when she told me that she could only see kids over 18 months, we walked another 2 blocks through the ghetto to get to another urgent care clinic, they saw him and...who would have thought? A double ear infection.

(Oh wait...I know who would have thought...me. That's right. That's exactly what I said on Wednesday...idiots).

So now my baby is in Minneapolis, where we are supposed to watch 12 teenagers, sick as a dog. He stayed in most of the day on Friday. Saturday the kids went to their classes, and after classes they wanted to go see a movie (well, really they wanted to go back to the Mall of America, but I told them no). So we decided to walk through the skyway (which Minneapolis has all around the city) because it had snowed about 3 inches earlier in the day. It was a labrynth, and completely annoying. But we made it.

About half of the kids wanted to see a movie, and the other half wanted to just go back to the hotel. So we went to Jimmy John's and tried to figure out how to get back to the hotel. Our three options were:

1. Wait for a cab for an hour

2. Walk 7 blocks in the snow and cold

3. Walk the half-hour back through the labrynth of a skyway.

Appealing options, right?

And it was at this exact moment, sitting in a Jimmy Johns with one of my best friends, who had just gotten yelled at because she didn't hear the Jimmy John's worker yell out my sandwich I had an epiphany. This is the exact thing that I've been trying to explain to everyone. This is a perfect example of how I feel almost every day. Right here in Jimmy Johns I am making decisions in my head about 14 kids and 2 adults. I had a sick, whining, almost passed out baby in his carrier who needed to go home, who shouldn't have been out of the hotel. I had 7 kids waiting for me to make a decision about what we were going to do, I had 5 more kids whom I had just made a promise to me to call me as soon as they were done with the movies, and that they would take a cab home. And I wasn't making the right decisions for anyone.

That's how I feel daily. Like I am failing everyone. My students really wanted to go to the mall of america, but I didn't take them because I didn't want to cart Finn & Tenley around all night. So my students suffer. I take Finn out while he's sick and crabby because I wanted my students to have fun while they were in Minneapolis, so Finn suffers. I was failing everyone all at the same time, and it was an awful realization.

I felt like I was being pulled in so many different directions---good teacher? Good mother? I was failing at both of these things. I felt like a bad mother because I was carting my sick child through cold streets while he felt horrible. I felt like a bad teacher because I wasn't letting my students have the fun they deserved to have in Minneapolis, and because I had them in two different locations. I felt like a bad friend because I was dragging my friend and her baby around to all of this as well.

I still don't know what the right conclusion is. What do I do? I don't know. I just want to be better. Because if there's one thing I learned from this insane trip is that these kids deserve it. All of these kids...my baby, Tenley, and all 12 of the teenagers who were with us (teenagers [who so many people say are dragging down this country] helped two crazy mothers carry their babies and their baby-equipment around the city for four days without ONCE complaining or being asked)--they are all amazing and they deserve the best, and I wish I could give them what they deserved.