Teaching Primary

I taught my primary lesson today.  It didn't go too well.  I had a hard time preparing this lesson.  I'm trying to figure out teaching primary.  I haven't taught a class since I was first married . . . besides substituting. I do not like the primary manuals.  They are so boring.  I have a hard time staying awake while preparing my lesson, how am I supposed to teach it?  I didn't prepare as much material today as I did last week because I ran out of time.  Too bad one of the sacrament speakers didn't show up today and sacrament meeting ended ten minutes early. Why couldn't that have happened last week instead?  Oh, last week was fast Sunday.  Anyways, I felt like I was being eaten alive the first half of my lesson.  I feel really self conscious with the other team teacher in there.  I like her and I like having another teacher so I don't need to teach every week, it just kind of stresses me out.  Anyways, I finally stopped caring what the book wanted me to teach and was able to get a dialogue going with the students.  I tried to explain what it might have been like when Jesus asked to bring people who needed to be healed.  I focused on Luke and talked about his brother.  (Luke's brother didn't need to be healed, but we were pretending.)  Finally it worked and we were able to talk about these things.  The kids had a lot of questions and we went way off topic, but it was much better than before. Hopefully I can figure this out.  I'm teaching next week too. Fingers crossed it will go better than today!