Countdown to 30!

Yesterday was my 29th birthday. It was the best birthday I've had in a long time!

It started out VERY ROUGH! For the first time in my entire teaching career, I completely overslept....by over an hour! I didn't even wake up until 7:15, fifteen minutes past the latest time I ever walk out the door! I was thinking it was going to be a rotten birthday, but I got to school and my good friend had a Starbucks Caramel Macchiato (my very favorite) waiting on me. My desk was covered in presents, my kids had written the sweetest cards, and I kept getting text messages (thanks Greg) wishing me a happy birthday. Greg and Connor brought lunch and 29 roses that afternoon, and my intern surprised me with the cutest pink cake that I've ever seen. She made it herself! My team dropped by for cake and serenaded me in the loudest rendition of "Happy Birthday" that I've ever heard, so loud that my friend came from next door to see what was going on in my classroom! We had dinner at my favorite Knoxville restaurant, Puleo's and headed to Mom's for homemade cheesecake. It was such a great day.
Honestly, it has been a long time since that many people actually seemed to care about my birthday. It's nice to feel special every now and again!

Now we count down six months until February when we can start our adoption paperwork! I'm so ready to get Claire home and we haven't even started yet! Who ever thought someone would look forward to 30?

School's Back in Session

Take away the paperwork. Take away the stress of trying to meet No Child Left Behind standards. Take away the meetings. Take away the fact they expect me to teach in one day, what to really be taught well, should be taught in two. Take away all the.....well, let's just say it, CRAP, and I really, honestly LOVE my job.

I love my kids. I love being creative. I love making them laugh. I love it when I can see their minds growing. I love, love, love teaching. I just need to remember all those things I love this time of year, when there is just too much going on, and the mound on my desk keeps growing!

These pictures are from a lesson I did, trying to teach students sequencing and steps in a process. We were learning how to tell someone how to do something, using good details. I blindfolded students and had them tell me how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Sounds easy, right? Well, not if you forget to tell the teacher to take the bread out of the bag and the peanut butter and jelly end up all over the plastic! Not if you forget to tell the teacher to open the peanut butter and jelly and spread it on the bread, and the jars just end up laying on top of the bread. Students got a great lesson in using rich details, especially since they couldn't see what I was doing...and I did exactly as they said! I wish I could post the pictures of the students. They all had big smiles on their faces. It was a fun day, and I forgot about the mound of papers on my desk, if only for a moment!

Tired... so tired.

I've been back at work for a week now. Today my students came back, and it seems like I will have a pretty good class this year. It seems like almost all of my kids have a terrible story this year. As an inner city school teacher for the past seven years, I'm used to it, but this year, they just seem a little more extreme. Only a half day with the kids today, and I'm already exhausted. This first full week back has been so long! Monday seems like a lifetime ago!

I am hoping that this is a good year. There will be so much going on! Greg will be on the road now and then when his new album is finished, I'll be volunteering at a Parenting Center for Junior League on Thursday nights beginning in September, in February, we'll finally get to start paperwork for Claire,and somehow I've gotten myself into teaching a dance class two afternoons a week, which will be a lot of fun, and extra money for the adoption. It is a much better option than my original plan to wait tables two nights a week, so I could make a lot of extra money. We're desperately trying to avoid taking out an adoption loan. This year, if there is extra money to be made, we'll try to find it!

Off to bed.....5 a.m. comes way too soon! I miss summer!