Done

Well...almost.
Tomorrow is clean up the school day.
Time to take down posters and erase chalkboards and make it seem like we didn't spend the last 5 weeks pouring every ounce of ourselves into that building.
Our room, however, will stay as is at the request of our summer mentor teacher. The kids are invested in our system and are already upset enough about us leaving that to change the room would only remind them of the fact that we are not coming back. To hear that come from the person who sat in the back of the room as a bystander on both our best and worst days is possibly the biggest compliment we've gotten all summer.
In the process of investing our kids we also invested ourselves and in each other.
The feeling of having made it though this experience is impossible to explain to someone who hasn't been through it.
It's exhausting and inspiring and humbling and unbelievably intense.
I've ridden on 100+ degree school busses and eaten bagels with gross cream cheese and soggy veggie burgers for over a month now. I succeeded and failed and laughed and cried and I can safely say, as I near the light at the end of the tunnel grows near, this is the most important thing I've ever done in my life.
Don't believe me? Ask me to send you pictures of my students.