It has been a week of some profound changes around here. We have acquired another child. Through a long story which I won’t go into here, a student of Beth’s (who has been in her reading groups for 5 years now) has come to live with us. She’s been with us since Tuesday, after the relationship with her guardian family went south and the other teacher she was staying with got sick with the flu. She’s been with the guardian family for over 2 years but it’s over, so she was either going to go into the foster system or stay with us. Permanently. She and Beth have had a very close relationship for a long time, and after a period of several days of careful consideration, soul-searching and prayer we have decided to assume her guardianship and give her the permanent, safe home that she’s never had. Laura cried when I told her about it. There are still several legal hoops but none should be very difficult. We are just going to consider ourselves to have added a daughter. Anyway, otherwise it was a slow week for the most part, because school was cancelled due to heavy snow for the last 3 days of the week (when the students were supposed to be prepping for ISTEP), so everyone but me was at home most of the time, getting used to each other.