The Dog in the Hat.

These are two videos McKenna and Josey made one day last summer... I love watching them... It makes me glad I have such smart, funny kids... and it sure makes me miss summer! (Raise your hand if you are sick of this weather!)

Making it up on the fly

Isn't it funny that we have to go to college to be "certified" to do certain jobs - like teaching? It's funny for a few reasons. The first is that "certified" and "qualified" are two different things. I have known many paraprofessionals who are more qualified to teach so students can learn than the teachers in whose rooms they work! Secondly, most of the learning for a job like this happens - on the fly!

Nailing jello.

We are one week in to the new semester and I am ready to poke my eyes out with a dull crayon. I have diligently pin-pointed students who struggled last semester - those who had a lot of absences and/or tardies - those who had a difficult time behaving... I have whittled my list of 500 charges down to 50 who need at least weekly attention (some need DAILY attention.) And now begins the task of keeping all 50 of them where they belong each hour of the day. Picture me, trying to get 50 kittens to stay in a box... kittens who would rather be exploring (except I work with bad-ass kittens who want to go smoke by Sam's Club or make out with other hot little kitties in the stairwells.) I really DO have to just be amused by the things that happen each day, don't I?

Everything's temporary given enough time.

These are tense times in high school. Seniors who are failing are freaked out - their parents are more freaked out... Juniors who are failing are mad - their parents are more mad... Sophomores who are failing are apathetic - their parents are too... and finally, Freshmen who are failing are still in denial that they have to take a class over again (or several classes over again) - and oddly enough, their parents are too! I have been yelled at, cried at, and cussed at today. I got into my car, cranked the tunes, and took the long way home - pulling over to enjoy the view of the river along the way!

Every corn-ner...corner.

I love it when the girls and I hang out and just giggle ourselves silly. So often, with their ages what they are now, someone is moody so two of us are yucking it up and someone is sulking off in the corner (and sometimes that "someone" is me!) There is just a LOT of estrogen in the picture these days, so the rare moments when all cylinders are firing simultaneously are PRECIOUS! This weekend was one of those times.

Global Warming is a Myth -or- NEWS FLASH! Summer School starts in the Snow

I remember so clearly the early morning hours after McKenna was born on May 7, 1996. I was in the hospital when a nurse brought her to me to nurse around 2 AM. As she got her fill, I looked out the window into the dark and watched snow, back-lit by streetlights, falling gently to the ground. All the while I thought, "Snow in May... how crazy is that?"

"What the hell." That is what I was thinking a little over 12 years later when I woke up this morning around 5:00 and came out into the living room. I had to rub my eyes a few times when I looked outside and saw snow. Not snow "falling gently to the ground," but snow, blizzarding through the air, eventually creating enough weight to cause a huge maple tree branch to crack under its weight and fall to the ground. There are at least two inches on the ground and it doesn't look like it is ready to stop!

The big, mature, deciduous tree across the street must have broken sometime last night... What a mess this weather is leaving things! When it got down to 8 below in mid-April, after many plants, shrubs, and trees had started coming out of dormancy, huge numbers of pine trees died (everywhere you go in town, people are having companies remove huge, old pine trees from their yards), buds froze beyond repair (almost no lilacs this year!), and flowers that had begun to bloom died (not many tulips or daffodils!)

I think it might be time we just admit it... we need to be concerned about the warming of the surface of the earth's crust... we should be very concerned about, deeply... deeply in a deep kind of concerned way... it's not just liberal scientists and godless tax-raisers who are using "facts" and "scientific data" to make the current administration look bad... we just need to get nature to cooperate with us and we can beat this thing...



This is what we were greeted with this morning!