Anxious

So I think I'm a little stressed out. Yesterday, I took Lauren to the ped to talk about potty training, and I started crying. Not big sobs, but a steady stream of waterworks. (Note: I'm a very emotional person, and cry easily at stuff on tv or in books) I got embarrassed and said I didn't know why I was so upset. Luckily, she totally understood. "It's stressful!" She had a reluctant potty trainer, too, at just about this age. She worked on potty training for a year and a half. Dear God, can you imagine? I'm going crazy after two months. Anyway, I got some good tips, and will start trying them soon - we have a busy weekend, so we might wait to start in earnest next week. Or not.

My big stressor right now is work. I should find out today if Gibson (the school I worked at last year) will be back this year or not. Apparently, their whole future hung on one person who could give them an endowment that would keep them going for another year or not. The meeting was Monday night, and my friend who works at the Professor PC office (Professor PC is the company I work for - they send me out to the various teaching jobs) is going to find out today. Could I call Gibson myself and ask what happened? Sure, but I don't want to.

I'm torn about going back to Gibson. There are a lot of good reasons to go back:

• I enjoy working with the kids (it was so sweet, a couple of the middle-schoolers signed my yearbook last spring with "please come back next year!")
• it sounds like they got the TV monitor working, so teaching would be a lot easier
• it's very close to home
• it's six hours a day, twice a week
• it's guaranteed work through June.

Unfortunately, Gibson is also a lot of stress. In addition to having to come up with my own lessons (don't get me wrong - I like writing my own lessons, but it is a lot more work), dealing with kids is more stressful than teaching adults.

And since it looks like Professor PC is going to start having day classes again, that could be a good alternative. Working with adults, from a textbook, requires considerably less effort. But the office is farther away, I'd only get four and a half hours a day (also twice a week), and once a session is over after a month, it's not a guarantee that we'll have more people sign up, though it looks good right now.

So if Gibson didn't get the endowment, the decision is taken out of my hands, and I don't have to feel guilty about maybe wanting to do something else. I do want them to get the endowment, of course. I want the kids to have the school they need, and the teachers to have their jobs. I'm just not sure what I want for me.

At this point, I'm hoping I can go back to Gibson. Of course, if I do that, then I have to make the decision about working nights. Working two days and two (or sometimes three) nights a week doesn't sound like a lot, but it exhausts me.

But I'm not going to think about that today. I need to take this one day at a time, and stop borrowing stress. The interest rate is too damn high.