I need a new book...

I am absolutely exhausted today and I don't know if it's because I am fighting whatever illness has kept half of my work out this week or if the kindergartners are just pushing me over the edge...probably both. I am so ready for this year to be over! I can't handle the immaturity anymore. I was literally about two seconds away from searching for a new job (yeah right, like I could find anything in this economy) when I did have something sweet happen that made me (SORT OF) remember the "perks" of my job. We have this "Secret Reader" in my classroom where someone comes in to read to my class, but I don't tell them who. Today the Secret Reader was the mom of one of my students. Her daughter just learned to speak English this year, but she does not know it well (and by that I mean she is still WAY better than I ever was at Spanish after 8 years of class so I'm still impressed...). She came in today and brought a book with her. Apparently it was a traditional Korean tale about a wood cutter and it has a moral about the importance of telling the truth (which a few of my kids could use to learn!). This was really exciting for my class because two other students are also from Korea and knew the story already. Anyway, the mom read the story and then she asked the kids a couple of questions about it. She also gave the kids little pencils she bought in Korea when she went to visit a few weeks ago. The kids were so exciting and her daughter was smiling ear to ear. When she left she told me she had been nervous for two weeks about this because she knows she is not great at speaking English. She kept telling me how her daughter really wanted her to come and she was really scared and didn't want to. I think she had rehearsed reading the story and asking the questions! This got me thinking about all that mom's do for their kids. How they are willing to do things every day they are scared of, just to make their kids happy. Of course, I was so uplifted about this for awhile until I realized that none of my bratty children will come close to appreciating all of these things but hey! That's not fair though because this woman in particular has a wonderful, appreciative daughter who I am sure will be excited about what her mom did for her for a long time to come :)
In other news, since I can't eat cheese (although at this point I eat ice cream and greek yogurt, so I should probably just start eating cheese too and see what happens), I haven't eaten pizza in almost two years. Today I finally decided to make my own pizza, inspired by Meghan. I took a pizza crust, put on tomato sauce, black beans, summer squash, mushrooms and zucchini.
It was actually delicious. Of course it's been so long since I ate real pizza, I may not have a lot to compare it to. I liked it though. I was thinking of putting mango on my next one to make it like Kelly's version of a Hawaiian pizza, but who knows if that would be gross. I was too scared to risk it this time around, but maybe next time.
I also went for a 30 minute bike ride today. I was proud of myself for getting off my butt when I am this exhausted, however I also realized I am the slowest biker alive. I really have to work on that. Training for a triathlon is weird because you only do each sport twice a week. It doesn't feel like enough to really improve in any of the sports. But it also seems impossible to do more than that. It's very strange.
Lastly, I finished my book last night- The Red Tent. It was really good, nothing like what I usually read (as mindless as possible), but it was much better than I expected. I need a new book, anyone have any recommendations?