Snapshots without the Pictures

This is a picture of three laundry baskets filled with student portfolios, almost 100 of them.  I dumped the real laundry on the floor, and Nora and I minivanned it up to the school to hand out the chocolate chip cookies we'd made this morning and pick up the final projects from my classes.  Apparently each of these laundry baskets holds 16 gallons, so I collected over 48 gallons of student work today.  Grading deadline:  Monday.  Like my students, I may be looking at an all-nighter at some point this weekend.  Luckily, they contain fiction writing, and poems, and reflection essays, and this sounds lovely to me.


Here's a picture of Nora's portfolio cover.  I like how her name is centered and how the blue and pink dots are equally distributed around it.  When she saw me grading today, she wanted to make her own portfolio, so we collected pictures and glue and preschool workbook pages, and she got to business.  "I can't believe I'm making my first portfolio!"


This is a picture of Nora drawing kitty pictures on the board in one of my classrooms.  She calls on me:  "Miss Nora, how do you draw a kitty?"  She starts and winds up with three ears.  "Oops!"  A little laugh.  And my heart leaps, learning, remembering my own nervous laughter at that very same board when I spelled a word incorrectly early in the semester and thought I was doomed.


This one is of Nora sleeping in her room right now.  And another of me typing in bed.  And here's one of the world getting along because it's Christmas, and that's how I want to picture it.