I’ve taken this week off from teaching in order to rest and recuperate before school starts up next week and my new teaching schedules goes into order. In typical fashion, however, since Louie was still working and we couldn’t go anywhere, I ended up signing up for another online training course, which I thought was 3 hours a day (it is) but then had 8 hours of video observations on top of that. Between that, getting things ready for next week and a few other little things here and there, I don’t feel like I’ve had any sort of break! I suppose I never planned it to be a fun vacation week, simply a week off from my normal schedule.

I have had a break from teaching, which is nice, and means I’ll be happy to see everybody again next week. I hope the schedule works out well, and I’m especially excited to start my Creative Ability Development (Improvisation) Classes up again.

Unrelated, I have a few new potential students and some who have been wait-listed. I do turn students away as well, usually with a recommendation if possible. I realized that sometimes those students will find their way back: I’ll turn them away one year, and a few years later they will contact me again, and I don’t always remember until I am searching for their email for some reason and come across the original one! Then I wonder what if I could have fit them in a few years earlier, how would our relationship and their skill be different? I can’t take everybody though, there are only so many viable teaching hours in a day!

My early morning teaching job starts up again in early-mid-September and I am both looking forward to it (we’re in person, it’s back to normal which I’ve never taught in, masks ARE required) and dreading it (it’s really early, COVID fears, I don’t know what normal is so I’m a little nervous about it). I’m sure once it gets started it will be lovely: getting up so early has changed my wakeup time throughout the summer—7 to 7:30 am is now my normal, and while that’s still usually with an alarm, without an alarm I might wake up anywhere between 6:30 am and 8 am. The truth is it has also changed my normal bedtime, which is now around 10 pm, sometimes staying up reading after that, and I’ll have to bump that up a little if possible during the year. I don’t know how much of my sleeping pattern changes are due to aging, and how much are due to having to change, and I never will.

When I was in my 20’s people always told me once I had kids I wouldn’t be able to sleep in anymore. While I’m sure that was true, for me I never was able to sleep in again after the election of 2016…the stress got me up early for months after that and then I just couldn’t anymore. I do usually wake up much like I did as a kid, ready to go and get doing things, though sometimes things means checking email and doomscrolling a bit in between writing emails, and drinking coffee. Anyway, so people without kids will never know if they would have lost their ability to sleep in as they aged, or whether they would have enjoyed continuing to sleep well and long.

I’m rambling a bit, so maybe I’ll let you go now. Do you find yourself able to sleep more or less as you’ve gotten older? Do you get up the same time on non-work days as you do on work days? Do you get enough sleep on a regular basis?