Cramming the Cat Back in the Bag

So, I got a Vice Principal gig. I will officially be starting my career in middle management in September. I now huddle in a ball on the floor, hyperventilating about how I will deal with the 10 years worth of crap and teaching supplies that I have in my classroom. I'm telling staff at the moment that I will be leaving, but not students. Frankly, I need to sit on this news until the second last week of June so that I don't listen to students who can talk about nothing else from now until then. I actually have a couple for whom this would be the major topic of conversation. And none of us need that. Especially not me. I almost cracked this morning. I was talking with one of my classes, mentioning that I would need to box up my stuff in June. They wanted to know why. Oops. Tap dancing around the truth, I went with "I want to be better organized in the fall than I was this year." An incredibly true statement, seeing as I spend lots of time now wondering what I did with things. My room is a black hole into which many things fall. It's the Bermuda Triangle of classrooms. They came back with the obvious question, "Is something changing in the fall?" Uh oh. I told them that yes, things would be changing, but I wasn't ready to talk about them yet. Which of course prompted the question, "Are you leaving us?" Eeeee. Before I could answer that, one of the other students asked, "Does this have anything to do with Mr. S?" They know he's home right now, not working. Thankfully, the answer to that was no. Before they all start thinking that J has a new job that will take us to a far-flung reach of the province from which I cannot commute. So I finally told my students that other than J will have to live with me and my news (and my new exhaustion and stress), it had nothing to do with him. And it doesn't. That did it for one girl in the class. "Well," she announced, "we know Mrs. S isn't pregnant!" Thank heavens for small mercies.