A good day!

Are you sick of reading my posts yet?  I told a good friend tonight (Hi Regina!) that I hadn't realized how much I had missed blogging!

Today has been a good day, for many reasons.

1.  My kids were RELATIVELY good today, and the activities and lessons I planned were good ones.  :)

2.  I do not have another IEP for two weeks.  After four in the past 10 days, I'm ready for a little break!

3.  I met with my mentor today whom I adore, and she gave me some positive feedback she heard about me from my Administration, which feels good!

4.  Chase has two (count em, TWO) friends who are spending the next four nights with us.  Their parents are out of town, and we are good friends with the whole family, so we trade kids often.  While I am extremely outnumbered in terms of testosterone, they are great kids, and we are anticipating a fun weekend with them.

5.  I got a belated birthday present today from my favorite daughter!  My sweet Megan and I share a love for many things, but the most recent passion we are sharing is for tea!   She ordered a travel tea steeper for me which was apparently back-ordered or brought over from France by carrier pigeon or something, but it took almost a month to arrive.  Crazy!  But, I love it!  It's very sleek and cool-looking, and I can't wait to try it out with some yummy loose tea in the morning.  Sometime, I will have to extol the virtues of loose tea...maybe tomorrow's blog!

6.  We are planning a trip to Hawaii for next summer, and I think we finally have figured it all out!  I'm excited - I was born in Hawaii, and went for a visit to "find my roots" when I was 16, but haven't been back since, and have never been to Maui!  Should be a fun trip.  :)

So, it was a good day.  I'm not going to lie; I wish tomorrow was Friday, but we can't have everything we want, now can we??  And at least, it's Thursday.

One last thought before Divine Hubby and I put the ten thousand children we have running around here to bed...I love my family!

Tales of a cross-country runner (no, not me, sheesh!)

Two entries in two days...I'm on a roll!  Now, I don't have to post again until 2013.  :)

Just wanted to brag on my youngest kiddo a bit...he is a cross-country runner.  Not just a runner, but a bonafide champion.  He can run a mile and a half in 9 minutes flat.  He's amazing!  To be fair, God created those long skinny legs for running, and we did name him Chase...

He has done very well in his meets this year, and we are prouder than we can say.  What we are most proud of, however, is not the shiny, new second place area-wide medal he has hanging in his room, but the comment I got tonight from another parent.  Chase has come in second in all of his meets this season.  Second to the same fast kid every single week.  Along with coming in second every single week, he has (without prompting from anyone) gone up to the kid who won the race and congratulated him.  Every. Single. Week.  The kid never says anything in return except a mumbled thanks.

Tonight, that kid's mom came up to me, and after a little small talk about our speedy kids, she told me what a wonderful young man my son is.  Now, that is NOT news to me, but since this woman really doesn't know us, I was led to ask why she said that.  She told me that she has watched him go up to her son every single week and congratulate him.  She said she has told her son to go up to Chase to congratulate him on a good race first, but he never did.  She was very impressed with my sensitive, thoughtful, long-legged action-verb of a son.

And I am too.

It's times like these that make a mama proud...

sniff

Second year teacher...

It's been almost a year since I last blogged!!! Yikes. Time flies when you are having fun...or are too busy pulling your hair out by the roots and not sleeping. :) I have news - I am officially a MASTER! UNLV has deemed me a Master of Education and I proudly answer to that now, so please adjust your address books to reflect my exalted position. ahem.

The Clark County School District drives its new employees insane with ridiculous rules, tests, events and classes we have to attend. Now that I am a second-year teacher, I see the light at the end of the tunnel, but the end still eludes me. Last year, during all of the crying (you remember the crying, don't you??), I decided there was NO WAY I was going to do to the stupid New Teacher Academy they "suggested" we all do. 45 more hours, along with full-time grad school, writing 20 IEP's, lesson planning, grading, blah blah blah, oh, and TEACHING full time. (I am tearing up just thinking about it...)

So I just said NO. I think there might have been an expletive or six involved, but I digress...

Now that I am a second-year teacher, I have been given the "opportunity" to do it again. While I am still overwhelmed and a little bit berserk, it's a raise, and as you know, we teachers don't exactly make the big bucks, soooo, I'm in the New Teacher Academy. (gag) It's a GIGANTIC waste of time, and tonight I got to start wasting time, I mean being enlightened and becoming a better molder of young minds. I am in a group of six 20-something first-year teachers who are with Teach for America. All of this to say, they are all fresh-faced, idealistic, enthusiastic young teachers and I felt like I was a thousand years old in this group tonight. One guy must have LITERALLY said the word "literally" 47 times. It was his favorite word! I kept glancing around to the rest of the group to see if any of them noticed how often he said it - they didn't seem to...

So, the second year of teaching is starting off much better than the first year did. There has been no crying, no panic attacks, no papers, classes or UNLV. Even though I am still overwhelmed, overworked and underpaid, in comparison to the H$#% I went through last year, this year is a piece of cake.

Oh, and not to toot my own horn, but I got a M.Ed with a perfect 4.0 GPA. Sadly, they don't write "Summa cum laude" on your Masters degree, so no one will ever know...but I wanted all of you to know! :)