Delay Doldrums

There are certain advantages to teaching in a rural area. Lots of nice, educationally minded, intact families is one. But running a close second is all of the weather delays and cancellations. With all of the country roads in our district, which spans almost half of Union County, it doesn't take much snow, ice, or even fog to induce at least a two hour delay to ensure the buses can get to school safely. Even though teachers have to report to school when "reasonably safe" on two hour delay days, it still makes for a more easy going morning and time to get work done at school without the students there. So two hour delays are almost always a happy occasion.

This year has been weird as far as delays go. If we ignore the two days we lost due to the hurricane winds in September, we've only have 2 days with two hour delays. This is a very small amount - usually we have much more fog in the fall. But this year we only had one fog delay. It happened to be on the day of Sam's pumpkin farm field trip. I had taken a half personal day to go with his class. When we delayed, the trip got cancelled and luckily I was able to cancel the personal day and take another on the make-up field trip day. But it was a huge pain and I really just got lucky that it worked out.

Today is the second two hour delay of the year, due to ice that has finally turning to plain rain. And guess what? It's also Sam's "Mom's Craft Day"at kindergarten, and I took the morning off so I could attend. So I had to e-mail his teacher to find out the new times, then make sure I could still do it and have time to eat lunch before my sub leaves and I have to teach the rest of the day. I think it'll work out, but the 2 hours I was supposed to have at home by myself this morning is gone - I'll drive the kids to school and then just hang around for a half hour until the craft thing starts. Which means that I won't be finishing my wrapping this morning like I had planned. But at least we didn't cancel - both kids would have been so disappointed. And I did not want those teacher gifts hanging around for two weeks until we go back in January.