Tag Archives: School

Concerts, karate, and mini golf (oh my!)

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We are once again in a busy upswing around here. Lex had is “Concert Grande” yesterday. It was only postponed due to snow once, unlike the 6th grade concert that was postponed so many times they ended up just not doing it. We’ve had a lot of snow lately! Concert Grande is 7th-12th all together. It was fun. Lex once again dressed nicely and I, like a dope, took a few pictures in SnapChat but not the camera app and, like even more of a dope, didn’t save them to post here. Oh well. Imagine Lex at the holiday concert, only slightly taller. :)

Today he had a belt test and got his solid purple belt! He’s a powerhouse!

 

 

 

Lex is doing stage crew for the middle school play too and that will pick up in April.

Eve has several roles in the DBS play and rehearsals are in full swing. She is busy rehearsing during recess and many days after school. The play is April 12th! I’m looking forward to it!

I am elbow deep in an PTO mini golf fundraising event we are orchestrating. Each class has built a mini golf hole with a book theme. Tomorrow they will all be setting them up (in the library, which I have been prepping and clearing all week!) and Saturday families will come play 18 holes of mini golf! I’m sure it will be a blast, but right now it’s a ton of work! Being a teacher and VP of the PTO puts me right smack in the middle of all of it. Also, ’cause it’s in my space. I had eager 4th graders today clear out all the tables and chairs from the library, so now it’s a huge open space. They wanted to move bookshelves too, but I had to put a stop to that! Right now it’s 9pm and I’m brain dead from PTO work, so I thought a blog post was in order. :) If you’re local, come by and check it out. It will be awesome! The kids are SOOO excited! If you’re not local, check out pictures on Facebook. :) We might even LiveStream for awhile.

A “day off”

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Today is Martin Luther Jr. Day and a day off from school.  I have come to the conclusion that all weekends should be three-day weekends.  Saturday to get caught up and run errands, Sunday to relax and enjoy, and Monday to prepare for the upcoming week.  Especially those of us in careers that take a lot of “at home” work before we are actually ready to go to work!

This weekend I have written my lesson plans for the next three weeks, figured out how to use Do Ink (green screen software), set up Google Classrooms for six classes, prepped for tomorrow’s in-service day, came up with plans to teach Dash and Dot to my second graders, Lego WeDos to the third graders, and author studies for kindergarten and first grades.  I did a big grocery shopping, organized the pantry, helped both kids clean their rooms, and managed to eat healthy and stay “on plan” with Weight Watchers.  I EVEN managed to go to a yoga class and have brunch with a friend! I’m on fire!  I don’t even remember what I did on Saturday!  That was all just yesterday and today!

Seriously, all weekends should be three days.  Two days just isn’t long enough in the education world.  :)  Although…. maybe we need a rotating schedule because the kids don’t need three day weekends!

Growing up, and the holiday concert that was

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Lex had his winter concert tonight. Their concert dress code is black bottoms, white tops, dressy. Last year he wore black sweats and one of Alan’s white Hanes t-shirts, and I thought things were fine. Last night when I was putting him to bed he said to me, “Mom, I think I should get some nicer clothes for the concert tomorrow.” Turns out he felt awkward in his sweats last year and although no one commented, he said he got a few funny looks. Imagine my surprise when he suggested a Polo shirt! After school today he came to DBS to help me set up some robotics kits, then we tried to work out shopping, karate, Girl Scouts, and the concert. I kept waiting for him to bail on the shopping, but nope, he suggested skipping karate so we could go shopping!! We ended up dropping Eve at home (to walk Arlo) and then Lex and I headed to JC Penney. I wish we had better clothing stores around. Penney’s and Khols both have very small kids sections. Plenty of adult clothes and baby/toddler clothes, but my kids are now at that age where they can’t quite wear grownup clothes, but have outgrown the kids section. It’s tricky. He tried on almost a dozen different pants and four shirts before settling on a pair of black jeans and a white collar shirt. He was happy for the entire time! He was a little worried that the jeans were a bit big around the waist, so I suggested a belt. Guess what?! He said OK! Ack! Who is this child?!

We inhaled some pizza, got Eve out the door to Girl Scouts (cookie time is right around the corner!), then rushed off to the concert. Lex was a few minutes later, but we agreed that at least he’d look slick walking in. :) He was happy and the concert was awesome!

On the Eve front, she was going to bed last night, climbing up her bunk bed ladder. She stopped, looked seriously at me, and said, “Mom, puberty is doing weird things to my body.” She then raised her foot up behind her and I looked, expecting to see bumps and blisters, but instead I saw a big googly eye! Stuck to the bottom of her toe! I cracked up! She started giggling and crawled into her bed. Not too grown up yet! <3

The holiday concert that wasn’t

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Eve had her last holiday concert last night.  We didn’t make it.  She’s had a cold and sniffles for a few days now.  She woke up in the morning saying her neck hurt.  I had a long meeting after school and by the time I got back to her she was cuddled up in the chair, covered in my jacket.  She told me she was too tired and cold and stuffed up.  I rushed her down to the nurse real quick (who was also in the long meeting with me) for a fever check.  It was low-grade but “within the range of normal for an evening temperature.”  The nurse also checked her throat because apparently strep is going around her classroom!  The throat was red, but not too red.

That left me with the eternal parent/teacher dilemma.  I was signed up to run the raffle table and Lex was going to come help me.  What to do, what to do.  I talked to the music teacher who assured me they could find someone else to run the table – though I know that’s the last thing she wanted to be thinking about an hour before the concert starts!  I negotiated with Eve for a bit, but she wanted nothing to do with anything.  I even told her it was lights out at 7:30 if she didn’t go to the concert.  She said ok.  And was in bed at 7:30.  I read her a few Christmas stories so lights weren’t quite out, but close.  :)  She was asleep fast and slept late this morning.  I felt bad about bailing on my teacher commitments, but damn, we are tired around here!

When I broke the news to Lex he was completely indifferent, but then he told me how excited he was for his own concert on Monday and I said, “what?”  Concert Monday?  Crap.  Not on my calendar!  So Monday will be karate -> Girl Scouts -> concert… while hoping someone can pick Eve up from Girl Scouts for me!

Anyway, I did go to the dress rehearsal and took a few videos of Eve’s band performance.  I didn’t stick around for the chorus part, thinking I’d be back again in the evening for the actual show.  Silly me.  This family isn’t very good at the concert thing.

 

Halloween and other updates

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Happy Halloween! We have been pretty neglectful of this holiday (admittedly not my favorite) this year. Lex had some grand plans for cardboard costumes, all Minecraft related, which would have been awesome but none of us had the time or motivation to make it happen. Eve wanted to be Mad-Eye Moody (from Harry Potter), but we ran out of time for that as well. We ended up at the costume store Sunday where she decided on some Gryffindor robes and orange hair spray to be Ginny Weasley. Lex was not motivated to come with us to the costume store, and he was easily swayed when Alan suggested staying home and playing Minecraft together instead of trick-or-treating. Eve offered to share her candy. All was decided. Ordinarily such a milestone would make me sad, but since I don’t like Halloween anyway, I’m just fine with this decision.

I have no idea how many trick-or-treaters to expect this year. At the old house we got 150-200 most years, but I think it will be far less at this house. I bought a few small bags of candy, and by “small” I mean regular size, not the gigantic Halloween bags they sell this time of year. Eve decided to package them into goody bags, sooo…. I hope we don’t get more than 20 kids coming to the door. LOL!

My little witch making Halloween goody bags.

What else? We are settling in to the new house. Hanging blinds, rearranging things, unpacking boxes, setting up drums, building bunk beds, making messes, and generally living here. We closed on the old house on Thursday and it went off with only a minor water bill hitch. I was able to remedy that quickly and all is well. It’s nice to be able to pay off some of the debt we acquired while building this place!

Three beds?!? The world’s best fort? A room to drive mom crazy? We’ll see. :)

I am running a book fair at school this week. It’s exciting and exhausting and the kids LOVE it! The book fair made over $1200 the first day! I don’t know if that’s a lot or not, but it seemed pretty impressive to me! We’ll see how the rest of the week goes. It was fun to see kids so excited to buy books.

This whole summer/fall has been a mountain of things piling up (the house, the new house, the book fair, two grad courses, the 5K I was training for, Lego League, field hockey… other stuff….) and now things are starting to close/end/ramp down. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. We moved into the new house and sold the old house. I quit the 5K training and was never so happy as on the day the race was to take place and I didn’t have to be there! Field hockey ended last week. Book fair will end after this week. My grad course end in mid-November and Lego League ends in mid-December. I’m not longer pushing the boulder up the mountain, it’s now just a gentle ride back down!

Ok, off to school now. I’ve got a book fair to run! And also library classes, a K literacy group, and a reading group! Oh, and did I mention, it’s Halloween!! LOL!

My life, in bullet points

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  • We are closing on our new house next Friday (Friday the 13th, to be precise!)

We have a lot of mirrors in the master bath vanity!

  • Everything is coming along swimmingly!

We were here for awhile, making faces in the mirrors.  :)

  • We hope to get all the moving done in one weekend. Alan says one day, but I can’t even imagine that. :)

I”m sure she’ll be super helpful!

  • Lego League is going a bit better.  We have divided up into three teams, so the chaos is more manageable.  I have a bad habit of finding myself in charge of things, so I’m pretty much in charge of the Upper Valley First Lego League team.
  • School is good.  No, school is great!  I don’t always love going (so much to do at home!), but I always love being there.
  • I’m in the middle of two grad courses.  One boring and the other super boring!  I posted a minor vent on a closed Facebook group for librarians about my cataloging course and got over 100 replies, most all of them completely emphasize, but a handful who admit to absolutely loving cataloging. It takes all sorts, I suppose.  Glad someone likes doing that stuff and I’m double glad I won’t have to do much of it after completing the program!  :)
  • The kids have both had growth spurts and now have a whole lot of ankle showing.  ‘Tis the season, I suppose.  Probably should do some cold weather shopping soon, before the cold weather really hits!
  • I started a Battle of the Books program at school.  It’s for 4th and 5th graders and will take us through the end of February.  The kids were luke warm at first and I was getting nervous, but last week they got to pick their books and we officially kicked off the project and they were SO EXCITED!  I loved it!  It made me feel 100% more confident about the idea and I know it’s going to be fun!

The brackets are up!

  • I finished making the growth chart I’ve been thinking about for 10 years.  It came out really great.  I’m happy with it and now we can officially move.

Growth chart ruler

  • I am running my first book fair at school in three weeks.  I feel wholly unprepared for it!  The kids at school are very excited and definitely missed it last year.
  • PTO is organizing a Color-A-Thon again this year.  It’s supposed to be bigger and better than last year.  I’m the VP of the PTO and should be helping with this effort.  I’m not.  I do plan to show up for the event.  I hope that’s sufficient for this year.
  • We got flu shots last weekend.  Did you see the photo?  Lex was worried, of course, but didn’t protest too much.  He held my hands and cried a little, but he got himself there, talked himself through the whole thing, and didn’t end up no the floor even once.  Eve smiled for a photo at the end!  I think my babies are growing up!!

Alan says, “Flu shots for a happy family and healthy community.”

  • Eve is playing field hockey this fall and loving it!  She has practices three times a week and one or two games each week (sometimes a game replaces a practice).
  • Lex is belt testing next week for his purple belt.  He’s had the green one so long that the threads are coming out!  He said it’s time to retire the green belt.  We missed a few tests over the summer, so he hasn’t tested in many months.
  • Monday is in-service for me and no school for the kids.  I decided to sign them up for a rec sponsored trip to Jay Peak, a super cool (or so I’ve heard) indoor water park that’s two hours away!  We have talked about going for years, but never made it.  The kids are thrilled that I’m letting them go.  I’m nervous about the distance, but I had a nice email exchange with the parks department director and the details he provided greatly reassured me.  I still don’t love them being that far away without me (am I weird?) but I know they’ll have a great time and ya know, Alan and I have to work, so it’s a pretty good deal.
  • Alan is super busy at work, with town stuff, and, of course, taking care of all the important yet boring parts of this house process, like researching lights and keeping the finances moving forward.  He has been the detail man on this project and has done a wonderful job keeping it all on track.  I just show up with cookies and a camera when the mood strikes!

My growing girl

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Eve picked up her flute tonight. She is so excited! It was a crazy night at “instrument pick-up” where all the 5th graders in the district showed up for their new band instruments.

She also started sewing, all on her own. She sewed up a stuffed animal that Arlo chewed the eye off of, and today, after Arlo got her doggie, Eve went right to work. She does a great job too!

First day of school

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5th and 7th! Can you believe it!!

They both woke up happy and ready for school. We managed photos without anyone getting cranky, without any animals escaping, and without anyone being late for school! We’re finally getting good at this! LOL!

I had a good day at school. The superintendent even stopped by when I was teaching a 1st grade class and those kiddos were perfect! I was handing out stuffies for them to cuddle as reading buddies, were were naming the stuffies and discussing how much they like stories, and then he walked in. It was perfect! :) Earlier in the day I ran a fun scavenger hunt with the 5th graders. They loved it!

Macy scanning the QR code on my back. The word was “fire” and the kids laughed that there was fire on the librarian! :)

After school and popcorn for snack (it’s our thing) Eve went to play at Macy’s house for awhile, then they came back here and we all took a walk over to the new house. Guess what?! We have solar panels!!! And siding on the whole exterior. So exciting!! The developer told us (via email) that the landscaping crew was coming at the end of this week and the area will look very different soon. We are hoping they get that path carved out soon.

Then we got home and Eve crashed on the floor! She was literally asleep on the living room floor at 6:15pm! I tried to get dinner in her, but no luck, I tried to get her to shower and brush her teeth, but no luck (yuck!), and by 7:30 she was sound asleep in bed… with me by her side! I woke up an hour later, remembering I still had another kid to put to bed too. :) He didn’t mind the extra Minecraft time!

Here’s hoping we can pull it all off again tomorrow!

Last day of summer vacation

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Today is the last day of summer vacation before the kiddos (and me) start back to school tomorrow. I wanted to do something fun and celebration-ish, but sadly that is not our life these days. I did let the kids watch Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix this morning as a fun start to the day. Eve decided a few weeks ago that she wanted to start watching them and we’ve been jamming through them ever since!

Yep, tv, laundry, and my laptop hard at work on the last day of vacation.

We had the woman who is *hopefully* buying our house over today for an inspection. She brought her son and parents to check out the place as well. All was good, I think. Waiting to hear back from them now.

Then I dragged the kids to school for just one hour, I promised them! ‘Cause there’s nothing a kid wants to do more on the last day of vacation then go to school! They were good helpers and we got out of there fast. I’m feeling totally stressed out about how much there is to do this year! I really just wanted to make sure the library was clean, organized, and presentable before the kiddos all come back tomorrow. I really wanted to do a lot more than that, but I keep reminding myself that I rearranged a good part of it and did a full inventory this summer — so it’s not like I’ve been slacking!

The fish had babies again. Lots of them!! Just in time for back to school. Good fishies. :)

Afterwards we went to the sports store and dropped a lot of cash on new cleats, shin guards, mouth guard (and case!), eye wear, and field hockey stick for Miss Eve to start field hockey again. She played two years ago and liked it, but took last year off. Back at it today!

Don’t mess with this chick!

All geared up and ready to go. I think she said, “No, don’t take a picture of me, ” but it’s hard to tell with the mouth guard in! LOL!

My Mondays and Wednesdays for the next ten weeks will be field hockey/karate taxi runs. Luckily they have nice staggered times and don’t start and end at the exact same times. When I picked Eve up she said, “I forgot how much I like field hockey!!” When I picked Lex up he said, “My gi is getting too small. We need to buy a new one.” Good thing I’m going back to work!

We got dinner at Panera. That’s a fun celebration, right?! I even got them a cookie (to share). Alan joined us and we had a nice time together. On the way home we stopped at the new house. They have a roof on the porch (oh, and a porch!), the doors are now locked with a key, and we saw they even put up the first two pieces of sheet rock!!

Our porch is tiny, but cute. I like the green wrapper around the post. :)

Drywall! Sheet rock? Is there a difference? Anyway, there’s the laundry chute. It will open on both sides so you can put clothes in from both bathrooms. Sa-weet!

Lex noticed that you can watch the neighbor’s TV from our kitchen window! LOL! They were both watching together (it was the news and they said they could see Trump’s head), but when I tried to take a picture, Lex ran away.

We also met a couple who has just put a down payment on Lot F (the lot next to the magazine home being built). That was cool. They have a daughter who was in Lex’s class at DBS and is now at the middle school, though he was quick to tell us that she’s not on his team. I know for a fact that she is a very sweet girl though. Hopefully that bodes well for the parents as well. :)

Let’s see… what else is going on… Eve lost another molar today. Her second in less than a week. I’m hoping one of them is the molar with the cavity the dentist wanted to fill! Arlo has a hurt paw. Not sure why. He’s been chewing on it for a few days. I have to get him to the vet, eventually, but I’ll say, as much as I love our vet, I feel like I’ve seen more than enough of her lately!! Between the cat with allergies and the dog with whatever he’s had going on… I’m ready to stop spending money on these pets!! I’ll be good though and take him in soon.

Tomorrow is the first day of school. I have nothing to wear and only asked this kids at bedtime if they have anything to wear. Lex found an outfit. Eve swears she’ll come up with something. They both have full dirty laundry baskets. I think my days of “let’s look perfect for the first day of school,” may be behind me. I even remembered this evening that I packed up their “first day of school” photos, the ones we use each year for them to hold for the new year’s photos. I dug them out real quick!! I’ll keep that tradition alive… for a little longer. I was hoping to have a new front door for the photo this year, but alas, one more year with the old front door. :) I considered driving over to the new house for photos, but I already know I won’t be that ambitious tomorrow morning!

First day of school photos — all packed up! Oops!

Now I’m off to do more prep work for tomorrow. I don’t even have lessons plans fleshed out for my classes tomorrow. Eeek!! I will though, I promise!! Lex and I had a long chat about having a positive attitude. We’re both going to keep that in mind as the new school year starts. :)