Once Upon a Child's Heart

There’s something you should know about me... I identify as a spiritual person. However, I don’t believe my sole purpose on earth is to convert everyone I meet to my exact way of thinking. Instead, I resonate more with the belief that God's greatest commandment is to love Him and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. This spiritual perspective has led me to pursue careers focused on serving others. It also explains why I cherished my experience as a substitute teacher in the public school system. Substituting ultimately convinced me that I would thrive in a full-time teaching role. One of my last substitute teaching assignments was the day before Thanksgiving break in 2023. I took a position at a small rural school as a 5th-grade teacher for a class I had filled in for at least twice before. I was familiar with the students, and we shared a good rapport. However, this class had a difficult start to the year, facing a series of substitute teachers due to the teacher's fami...

“‘The time has come, the Walrus said, To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings.’"  -Alice in Wonderland When I was a kid we lived out in the sticks and only had a used VCR with a handful of tapes that my grandfather had recorded from his cable channels.  Several of those tapes had been recorded over his old porn movies, something we did not discover until middle school.  Yikes! That is a story for another time. One of the kid-friendly movies he had recorded for us was Alice in Wonderland.  I must have watched that movie 500 times. The time has come to talk of many things…At least that is what I should have written when I pushed the pause button on this blog in 2015.  I loved writing it, and I’m not sure why I stopped now.  Except that life was complicated and I had a two, a seven, and a ten-year-old I was trying desperately to care for while navigating chro...