Colored tights

have earned me respect from the French teachers I worked with, made me recognizable along my bike route to and from school, and have continued to add to my Ms. Frizzle-like reputation.

I'm thankful that I can wear colored tights in February in California and not freeze. Make it through another week of first-year teaching. Go to counseling and feel like I am connected to the counselor that I am seeing. Talk to my brother on the phone. Be in the sunshine and soak it in- on the fourth floor of my school during a yoga class, at the Grove on a sunny day, on the playground. Read-aloud books that I would want to read as a kid. Try to teach kids the way that I had been taught. Eat and share community with other people. Celebrate important events in other people's lives. And more than anything else, realize that by expecting nothing, I am always pleasantly surprised.