Melia passed the third grade!

I’m officially done with third grade — high five!

It’s a good thing, because I’m out of scary stories. I had to mine the Internet for stories like “The Hairy Toe” and “The Hook.” After three days of constantly performing, I felt like the kids’ little trained monkey, dancing on command. Turns out, that kind of popularity is exhausting. I hid out in the teachers’ lounge at lunch and enjoyed some grown-up conversation that didn’t conclude with the words “And she was never heard from again.”

I’m still not sleeping much, 5-6 hours per night. I’ve been going nonstop since school started and tend to write until the wee hours of the dawn. I may be the most workaholic elementary school student that ever lived. Tomorrow I’m stopping in at school to check out Picture Day, and then I’m taking the rest of the day off to do errands and pick up my boyfriend Darren, who’s visiting from Mississippi.

Here are a few highlights of this week, which I’ll try to expand upon in later posts:

• The most caring reaction I’d ever seen to a boy crying in class, and the cultural shift that I think may be responsible for it.
• A mini “School of Rock” in one third grade class that teaches kids a large part of the curriculum through music.
• The first school award I’ve gotten in many moons, and how I felt about it.
• Illustrating a story about a dragon and not wanting to stop when the teacher said so.

Next week, I’ll move on to being a big 4th grader, then a top dog 5th grader. It’ll be my last week of elementary school, and then it’s on to become an angsty, pimple-faced middle schooler. I see much eye-rolling and crying in the bathroom in my future.