….as May comes to an end I can breathe a sigh of relief

May and June are two of the busiest months for me. Many people assume because the school year is close at hand that my workload starts to diminish as well. Nothing could be further from the truth.

May started with tryouts for the girls’ soccer team and then practices three times a week. Last week the girls played their tournament and won so practices continue for the next two weeks before they move on to the semi finals. I head up the Forest of Reading book club and last week we had our year end celebration. I wrote about that here.

One of my other pet projects is raising money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation by running a Jump Rope for Heart day. I’ve been doing this for 17 years. Every year I think that the fund raising won’t do as well as previous years and the children and the community always come together and surprise me with their generosity. Two weeks ago we had the kick off assembly for Jump Rope for Heart and sent home the pledge envelopes. On Thursday I was worried because only 12 envelopes had been returned. On Friday I was overwhelmed with the number of returns. Over 100 envelopes came back and according to one of the parents the on-line contributions were higher than previous years. Our goal this year was to raise $8 600.00. It looks like we’ve gone well above that number. I’ll know better in the next few days when the last of the envelopes come in.

Friday was a hot sunny day for our actual skipping event. Our office assistant and her husband supplied us with music for the hour while the entire school headed outside and skipped to their heart’s content. Despite the heat everyone seemed to have a good time. There were prizes for skippers who showed a lot of effort. I chose about 8 teachers to go around and select children who they thought were really working hard. These students were given a yellow ticket that they could redeem for a new skipping rope or small football. A special thanks to the Heart and Stroke Foundation for supplying the prizes.

The next two days proved to be just as busy. On Saturday we had our Fun Fair at the school and our daughter and granddaughter spent Saturday and part of Sunday with us. More about these two days in a post to follow.