Moving On

When are we going to start learning attraction?

You mean subtraction?

Yeah, subattraction.

Oooh, that. In a few weeks.

One of my kindergartners and I were talking last week, you know, that idle chat that can only come on a sunny, carefree Friday afternoon. Somehow the conversation turned towards having children. This student is very smart: school and otherwise. Talking with her is like talking to a high schooler and a young child at the same time, if that makes any sense, because she knows a lot about somethings and not so much about other things. Here's a small window into her mind:

My auntie is still deciding if she wants a baby. First she has to find a man (she half-chuckles). Then when she gets a man, she still has to think about having a baby because you have to push four times and that is a lot of work! My mom only had to push three times, so it was easy. But, boy oh boy, having a baby is a lot of hard work!

Where do they get these things from???

Yaay, another Mother's day to celebrate. I won't even begin to list all the ways my mother is so wonderful because I would be occupied for the next 10 years. Sufficed to say she is the best mom ever and I hope I am just a quarter as good as she is when I am a mom (Lord-willing). Thanks for being a wonderful mother and a true friend. I love you with all of my heart!

D's parents arrived tonight, and with them...the Wii. I snapped a few shots of David and Peter setting it up and of D starting to play the bowling game with his dad. Both of us created our Miis, too. Our night has been centered around this game console, so that's pretty much all I have to report. Tomorrow promises to be a very busy, but fun, day. Thanks again to Mom and Dad F for the great deal so we could get the Wii and thanks to Mom and Dad K for transporting it so we could get it earlier than expected!

The week has consisted of portfolio work and Spring cleaning. Both are coming along nicely, I am happy to say. Another reason for my happiness is that Kindergarten Graduation is now less than one month away on June 8th. YAAAAAAY!! I am so ready for this year to be over with and I am very much looking forward to Summer Camp and all the (free for me) adventures I get to go on all over the county. Until then, though, I still have some mighty funny kindergarten antics:

I needed to shred some of my personal papers while at work, so I figured I would let the kids in on how a shredder works. They always like learning about new, adult-type things, especially anything that is technology-related. So they were all watching me shred this one paper and saw how all the pieces fell in the attached bin through the little window. End of lesson. I was unplugging the shredder to put it back when one of the kids shrieked, "Ms. Jessica, one of the papers is still alive!!!!!!" I didn't know what to think, quite honestly, so I looked. There, in the bottom of the bin, was a fully intact piece of paper. Poor little guy couldn't get his mind around what a piece of paper was doing in a bin of shreds...until I showed him how the bin pulled out...

At random times, and for no rhyme or reason, I will give students candy for good behavior. Today was one of those days and, as one would assume, students usually respond very well to this little treat. Not so today, though. One of the kindergarteners raised his hand in the middle of a lesson, shortly after he had finished his Tootsie Roll, and proclaimed, "I have a problem with candy." I'm like, "Ummm that is unusual, but ok. What's your problem?" "Well," he says, "every time I eat it, my nose starts to hurt." To which I was speechless, but the little voice inside my head was not...Yep, that sounds about right for this class.

This week was fun. Besides the fact that we are incredibly short-staffed at work, raising everyone’s stress level by 100%, but we manage to channel our anxiety and make do. My answer to everything has been, “One more year.” This time next year my stint at KinderCare will be drawing to a close. So, in order to hold back from going into detail about everything that is wrong there, my simple answer has been those three words.

Anyway, I got a lot done on my portfolio, still plenty to go, but at least I feel like I have made a dent in it. We went over our friends’ house on Tuesday night for dinner and dessert. We’ve had such gorgeous weather all week, so we had a BBQ-type dinner. I brought brownies to make brownie sundaes for dessert. Our friends whose house we helped get ready to put on the market also came for dinner, unexpectedly. They’ve already had quite a few showings since Monday. I would like to attribute it to my fabulous painting job of the inside basement door, but I just don’t know for sure. At any rate, they are kicked out of the house for these showings, so with no place else to go, it was a nice surprise to have them for dinner, too.

Wednesday D had his last Psych call. Thursday he had choir practice. This is why I was able to get a lot done on my portfolio :) . Today we celebrated Cinco de Mayo in kindergarten and what fun! To begin the fiesta, many of us dressed in traditional Mexican-looking clothing. We’ve been speaking Spanish all week and they have gotten so good at it, so I took them to a local Mexican restaurant for lunch to taste the food and practice the language. We got to eat outside because the weather was great and because I think the wait staff was nervous about having 8 kids eating inside! However, the waiters LOVED them! The kids were speaking Spanish to them and they were answering back in these long sentences. I had to explain that they only knew a few words… Only three kids resorted to chicken fingers and fries, the rest tried the burritos, tacos, and enchiladas. D and I have a coupon to this restaurant and I can’t wait to go again. I ordered Mexican Fried Ice Cream to go, which D and I will be eating tonight. Along with some guacamole. I could eat Mexican for dinner four days out of the week. Anyway, the Ks even had a piñata filled with five pounds of candy to take their aggressions out on. All of us ended up pulling it apart in the end, but whacking it was quite fun. Cinco de Mayo just may become my newly-adopted favorite holiday.

Tomorrow D is going to see Spiderman 3 with some friends, while I get the better end of the deal: babysitting. And when I say babysitting, I mean babysitting. The little guy is but six weeks old and is cute as cute gets! I told his mommy I’d watch him so she could go on a date with his daddy…who promptly invited all these people, including my husband. Guys are such….guys!

Not much else to report. This week went by incredibly fast! We will be using next week to get the apartment in order for D’s parents and his brother Peter who are coming to visit next weekend. We will need all of that time. For now, though, Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Students do journal entries each morning on a given topic. They draw a picture and write a sentence or two that correspond with the picture. We work on capitals at the beginning, finger spaces in between words, sounding out each word, knowing how to spell sight words correctly, and using periods at the end. It's actually really fun to see a student's first few entries compared to the last few entries...there is a HUGE difference! One word in one such sentence looked like this: bnananan. I asked, "How did you know how to spell banana??" (Because it was pretty close in kindergarten terms). "I just keep learning and that's how," was the reply.

Part of an overheard conversation: "I love Dougie. He is the classic guinea pig."

I was asking a student to pick up a napkin he had left on the ground outside. Another student heard me say this and told him, "Hey, don't do that. That's called glittering. Isn't that right, Ms. Jessica?" Uh huh...

I can’t remember when I last looked forward to a weekend so badly. I was basically over my cold, but my voice was still coming back the entire week. And I was playing catch-up both with kindergarten work and housework. And the little chickies were hatching and visiting, which takes extra time and care. And David had a busy week between friends coming here or him going over there. So I was ready to just veg.

Friday night we used one of our many gift cards from Christmas and dined at T.G.I. Friday’s. The closest one is in Delaware, so we had a tax-free dinner :). I always like to walk around after a big dinner and Kohl’s just happened to be in the general vicinity. D spotted this shirt (below) as we were walking past the kids’ section. I’ve never seen anything like it before and would have gotten it if I thought I would wear it. We settled on taking a picture and remembering it that way…

Saturday D was gone all day at our church’s Pioneer Club camp. His job was to help oversee the hiking part of the day, so he took five 45-minute hikes. He got to hang out with some people from our Sunday School class and eat a campfire lunch (smores and all), too, which he enjoyed. However, he did mention that he was glad that the diarrhea song did not die out with his generation. Boys… In other David news, he is now the proud owner of a Wii. Yes, you read correctly, a Wii. It was only a matter of time. My mother happened upon one in a store she was at recently and picked it up to sell on eBay. Instead of doing that, she offered it to my husband at a discount price which he readily wanted to accept. I couldn’t really justify such an expensive game/want when we’re on a med school budget, but D put on his “pretty please” face and, well, who could resist that?? To justify such spending, the deal is D will plan and execute all dinners for a week, as well as take care of clean up. Now that’s a deal I can live with. Of course he’s on call one day this week, has choir practice another, and we are invited over to some friends on yet another. One way or another, I am going to get my 7 days of dinners!

Today, Sunday, brought with it perfect 70-degree weather. After church, we offered our help to friends who will be moving to D.C. in a few months (he accepted a job with the Department of Justice as one of their lawyers, which has to be a pretty cool job!). We went over for lunch and an afternoon of working on their house. The “many hands make light work” adage still holds true and I would like to add that it makes not only light work, but fun work. Driving by, you would never have guessed we were all there to work…we were having too much fun! On our way home, we stopped by a local park to get some more outdoor exercise. It had hills and everything, so it was quite the workout. We even saw a deer running by.

Maybe now I will get the opportunity to veg…

Be glad kindergarteners do not have the responsibility of naming anything important. Meet our dozen chicks...by name...

This weekend’s weather was unbelievable. A friend from church was throwing a Birthday BBQ for her husband on Saturday and asked everyone to pray for good weather. We prayed, but she asked on Monday…when that Nor’easter was in town. I told her on Saturday that I wanted everyone who was praying for good weather to be available for prayer when I have any requests because the Lord sure delivered a wonderfully beautiful day.

I wasn’t sure I was up to going since I was still in recovery from my cold. My voice was still on the mend and I was still coughing intermittently. David convinced me that both the good weather and the good company would be good for my health. He was right. We had the best time we’ve had with friends in a long time. Everyone was thoroughly enjoying the much-anticipated weather so it was hard not to have a good time. Just about everyone was there from our Sunday School class…14 in all, plus 4 kids! We ate, chatted, ate, played ball, ate, chatted, made smores, ate, watched the kids play, and…well…ate. None of us realized it was 7:30pm by the time we were done with all the festivities. I can’t wait for the summer months!

Sunday went by quickly, which I didn’t mind so much because our chicks were due to hatch on Monday and Tuesday!! And I got a call bright and early at 6:30am on Monday morning from a co-worker telling me one, loud chick was out of its shell. They didn’t stop there. We got to see three more hatch during the day. Three more hatched in the two hours I left and when the center closed. I ended up bringing the first four home with me and returned to work before it closed to retrieve the other three that had hatched. Saying that they are quite entertaining is an understatement. D had a med school buddy over to work on some presentation and they were chirping in the background the entire time. I made dinner for the three of us and it included some chicken. There was something entirely not right with that…

Eventually all twelve eggs hatched and they are here again visiting tonight. They are fun to watch. They have such a group mentality: when one sleeps they all sleep, when one wakes they all wake, when one eats they are all swarming the food dish, and when one starts drinking, well you can guess what happens. Right now they are all staring through their bin at D who is cutting his nails. I have yet to introduce them to Douglas. I think I’ll give it another night, for Dougie’s sake.

Here are some pics from last night for your viewing pleasure:

I came home the other week to find this nice plant sitting on our coffee table with a very sweet note attached. It was from David (of course). I liked the thought that went into it and it looked really neat, too. But it hasn't stopped at looking cool...

This is how it looks during the day:



And this is how it looks at nighttime:


The first time I saw it closed, I thought, Great, I can't even make it through an entire week without killing vegetation. I was both relieved and surprised to see it back to normal the following morning. I'm not exactly sure how it knows it's getting to be nighttime because we have the lights on to make it as bright, if not brighter, as the daytime. But it's a smart little bugger. Even now as I'm typing the petals are half-way closed. D said he took out the tab with the description on it, so I have no idea what it's called or where it comes from. Maybe I'll just make up my own name for it...like really-smart-plant-that-knows-how-to-open-and-close-on-its-own.

I should have been doing this all along. By this I mean writing down in some sort of notebook all the funny/cute/puzzling things my kindergarteners say. And by all along, I mean I should have started the first day I started teaching kindergarten. Oh well. Here are some of the few I remember from the past week or two:

One of my students decided to do some explaining to some parents she saw: "She [meaning me] lost her voice because she was yelling too much yesterday." (Real answer: I'm sick!)

"I know how to spell TV. [Looks up, take a deep breath, looks directly at me...] T........[very drawn out] V." Looks at me proudly. First question that popped into my head: Where did I go wrong??

"Shhhhh guys! Don't say we're having chicken for lunch! The chicks might hear you and be sad and then they won't hatch! You know they're going to get eaten when they're bigger, right?" The quickly-adopted codename for chicken: turkey.

All of the sudden out of nowhere one of my kids shouts, "Ms. Jessica, you look like the REAL Ms. Jessica!!" I must have missed part of that conversation...

Oh, I just remembered one from last year. It was a note I got from a student who hadn't been listening to me and I asked her to write a note as to why this kept on occurring. Well, I got a response:

"Dear Ms. Jessica. Sorry I didn't listen to you. I am going to the ear doctor very soon. I love you." (I edited the spelling for those of you who don't read "kindergarten.") I still have that note.

Hopefully I'll be able to think of more. And if I don't, it's okay because this class, especially, supplies me with lots of material!

Well it’s here again: my annual cold. It has come mid-April every year since moving to PA. I can even predict its arrival and the course it will take. Last week I commented – only in my head, not because I’m superstitious or anything – that I just may avoid my knock-out cold this year. I was even cautiously optimistic. Silly me.

Then it hit – late Friday night into Saturday. It always starts with a sore throat and a nice dose of the chills with a slight fever. I was still functional on Saturday. We visited the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philly because it has this unique restaurant called Copa Banana smack-dab in the middle of it. Lunch was especially yummy, and another observation: the 80’s style is coming back – ugh. I was telling D that if you want to see the most up-to-date fashion, check out college campuses. He wasn’t too interested in that conversation and totally didn’t get what I meant by the 80’s style, but that’s okay. I think I would have been worried if he did. All that to say, “The 80’s called and wants its clothes back.”

We went back home and I rested up a bit and did some homework. Last week was the final week of official classes – ever. Yay! D wanted to see Shooter (A+), with Mark Wahlberg, at the theater so we caught the 7:20pm showing. It was a really good spur-of-the-moment movie to see. Saturday night, however, was not a good night. D said my having a cold is like having a sick child.

He’s right. And my mom is there to back him up. I get a cold once a year and that is the extent of my sicknesses. So I don’t handle it with the ease and grace that others might. Poor David. He was up with me both Saturday and Sunday nights being such a caring and understanding husband. I told him I was just getting him ready for children…

Sunday I didn’t feel any worse, which was good. Monday I went to work because our eggs were coming. I was so excited, in spite of my sickness, all day Sunday...which definitely put me on the level of my kindergarteners. (All 12 eggs arrived safe and sound, through that wacky Nor’easter and all!) This morning I woke up with the next phase of my cold: a stuffy nose and no voice. You can only imagine how fun my day in kindergarten was today :).