The blessings never end

"Our words, deeds, & their external effects are merely consequences of our mental actions. To bring peace and insight to the world, we must learn to purify our minds; and if with a pure mind we speak or act, then happiness will follow us as a shadow that never departs."

I work part time at Copperview Elementary as a Special Ed teacher and one of my 2nd graders, Kaitlyn, suffers from an eating disorder, among several other disabilities. She actually learned how to be bulimic from watching TV and yet the parents have no motivation to teach her differently or take the TV away. Anyways (because I'm not gonna start judging!), last year a school nurse was assigned to eat lunch with her and walk her back to class, in order to watch her movements and make sure she actually eats the lunch. However, the nurse quit and they haven't hired a new one for the school year yet. So yep- you guessed it! I am now the one assigned to sit in a stinky, greasy, booger infested cafeteria with 200 sweaty kids coming in from recess and eating fried chicken with 2 week old french fries and a dried up roll!! AAAHHH! I leave everyday smelling so disgusting!! I've started bringing a change of clothes with me so I can change in the car as I'm driving to Wells Fargo. I'm pretty sure my co-workers at the bank would gag if they had to stand around me and smell elementary cafeteria all day!!!

But of course my judgment of the whole situation was proven wrong and now I absolutely LOVE my 20 minute cafeteria sitting!!! Oh my!! The kids that come and sit with me are adorable and tell me the funniest stories. Kaitlyn comes across as "weird" to all the other kids so she always sat alone at lunch, but when they saw Kaitlyn and I laughing and telling stories, some of the other kids wandered over. Now there are 6 of us who sit at the "loser" table and it is the best 20 minutes of my day!

So there's this 3rd grader, Latisha, who is bigger than she should be at her age, and is a black girl who wears pigtail dread-locked braids everyday. I swear she's half Tongan because she eats like a horse and laughs louder than all 6 of us put together! When she first introduced herself to me, she came over to the table and said, "I'm gonna sit here but I can't look at you because I know you can read my thoughts." HAHAHAHAHA!!! I was laughing SO hard! And she really did come sit down next to Kaitlyn, with her back turned to me!! Kaitlyn kept asking her why she was sitting at our table and why she wasn't with her friends, but she would whisper back to Kaitlyn saying, "Shhhhh- she can read my thoughts." Hahahaha!! Then yesterday this little boy, the cutest blonde haired and skinniest boy ever, came and sat down to warn me that if I ate anyone's food it would be poisonous, and that he couldn't sit by anyone else because the poison might get on his food!!

That should give you a good feel for the people at our lunch table and this is where the whole point of the story comes in. Today started out to be a pretty rough day but ended so differently than what I could have ever expected. It was a crazy day in my classroom because one of my Autistic boys had an episode, so I was 10 minutes late to my lunch appointment. As soon as I walked into the cafeteria, a bunch of kids practically ran up to me and as they all talked at once, they told me how the school bully, Tyler, was being mean, calling people names, and talking about disgusting things (I can't BELIEVE how much trash these kids learn from TV). For those of you who know me well enough to know how much I HATE dirty jokes, it won't be a surprise that I totally yelled at the kid and made him go sit all the way across the lunchroom, away from my precious kids, and threatened that I was going to tell Principal Shaw (I just made that part up to scare the little punk).

So after he had moved and everyone was calm again, one of the boys told me that Tyler had said some really rude things to Latisha and had made fun of her. I stood up, ready to walk over and get mad at Tyler again, when Latisha rushed over to my side and motioned for me to bend down, so she could tell me a secret. And what she whispered in my ear was the most profound thing I have ever heard from a child, or from anyone else I know. This little pigtailed 3rd grader said to me, "I'm God's child. It doesn't matter what Tyler says." She plopped back down at the table and started talking to someone else while she finished her expired & watered down peaches, but I just stood there because I was stunned. I don't know if I was more shocked than I was speechless, but maybe those things always go together! The bell rang and everyone ran to class, but I think I stood there for a couple minutes before I realized that everyone had left the cafeteria. What a blessing it is in my life to learn the most sacred and important things from little children. I still can't believe that an 8 year old understands something that I haven't accepted in my life yet. It doesn't matter what people say to us or how horribly they treat us because we are God's children- and that's all that matters. I realized today that I am the luckiest girl in the world because I get to eat lunch with 200 hundred greasy & obnoxiously loud angels!!! =)