California

The fourth of July is one of my top two holidays (the other being Thanksgiving). Growing up we always went to the Lake Michigan and hung out at the beach all day. Then we would bundle up in blankets and sit back to watch the fireworks that were set off of the pier. Then there was always the excitement of waiting in line for an hour to get out of town and onto the highway to head back home. :) It was just always a very relaxed day spent with family, usually our cousins on my dad's side.

The five of us had a grand weekend in California. :)

This year I didn't make it back in time for the traditional Fourth of July festivities in Michigan/Indiana. I was still able to spend the Fourth with my cousins though! I'm still visiting my Mary and her husband Caleb in Arizona. :) Another cousin (Jon) is in California doing an internship this summer, so Mary, Caleb, and I drove over to California to spend the Fourth with Jon and his girlfriend. We had a great weekend. :) We started off the weekend by going to the beach on Friday, which was awesome! Those ocean waves definitely have something on the Lake Michigan waves, but I missed watching the fireworks go off over the water.

It is always so good to spend time with these two! I never know when or where I'll see them next!

Saturday morning we started the day off right... with a board game! Have you ever heard of "Pandemic"? I think it is a relatively new game, and it's a lot of fun. It's a group strategy game, so for those of you who aren't competitive, this one might be a good for you. :) Then we headed over to a friend of Jon and Cristilynn's for the afternoon and evening. We played some epic volleyball, played another round of Pandemic, ate some yummy food, and ended the evening with some fireworks and sparklers. Later that night Jon, Cristilynn, and I played a terrific game of Settlers of Catan. (I just LOVE board games. :)

Just a couple days left with Mary and Caleb!

Sunday we went to church and then had to head back to Arizona. Our weekend visit went far too fast. :( Enjoy some pictures of the Arizona and California scenery. I hear it is much greener in the winter time. :)

Arizona Sunset

Arizona sunset... hard to catch a good picture in a moving vehicle! 

It's dry and brown in California now...

So I keep trying to imagine these hills all in green. :)

Pictures don't do justice. These mountains seemed MUCH bigger in person.

I love the way these mountains and hills are so wrinkled and defined. 

The windmill farm in the forefront gives a little perspective to how big these mountains are.

I fly out of Arizona to Indiana on Wednesday. Looking forward to seeing all my Midwest peeps!

Sunday Thoughts

I really, really enjoyed being with my family for Christmas. First of alll, I got to spend time with some of my most favorite people! Secondly, I got to spend time with some of the most awesome people. And thirdly, I got to spend time with some of my awesomest and favoritest people! Parents and siblings and cousins and nephews! I was sad that I didn't get to see my oldest sister and her family though. :(

Little bro is so tall!!!

It started snowing as I drove to the airport to head back to Seattle. I ended up waiting for a good 7 hours in the South Bend airport before even boarding a place. 

This is my "YAY! I'm-finally-on-a-plane-and-I hope-we-get-to-take-off!" face. :)

After another 30-40 minutes of waiting on the runway we did get to take off and go to Chicago. Even though I had missed my original connection in Chicago (by 4 or 5 hours), God was so kind as to give me a seat on another plane that had been delayed in taking off. Once I got to Chicago I had another 4 hours of waiting in the airport before we boarded the plane. Snow does crazy things to airports! I ended up getting into Seattle at 4am on Monday morning. I didn't end up going to school that day. ;-)

Made it back to Seattle! Yay! And then got a haircut. :)

Autumn is gone... long gone really. Winter was already here. Now I'm fairly certain that winter is on it's way out giving way to spring rains. The picture of the dusting of snow in my previous post was all the snow that we saw this year. It's always possible that we'll get another dusting, but it doesn't seem likely to me. I'm sitting at the window as I write this, and looking out I see vibrant green grass that needs to be cut again. It only dulled in its bright hue for a few weeks, but never got to the dull brown that the midwest sees during the bleak mid-winter. I awake in the mornings to birds twittering outside my window. Such a cheerful waking-up sound! We've been getting lots and lots of rain lately. Not just the constant autumn/winter drizzle, but rather some good heavy downpours. The rain pounding on the ground is a very pleasant sound but I really feel that I need a good dose of bright, warm sunshine. So much so that I was actually checking weather reports down in Oregon and on the east side of the Cascades to see if it would be worth a Saturday drive. Alas, they were cloudy and rainy too.

One of our recent spring rains. It is coming down hard!

It has been a really bad cold and flu season here. I'm still a young teacher, so I'm not surprised that I've been getting sick a lot, but it sure is exhausting and annoying! ;-) Someone at church commented on the fact that I've been sick a lot and went on to say they were concerned about my "fragile health". Well... that is certainly the first time I have ever had my health described that way. Typically I say that overall I'm really healthy. I'd rather think of it as a young teacher building up her immune system. ;-) Truth be told though, I have been perpetually fatigued the past couple of months. Just absolutely beat by the time three o-clock rolls around each day. It is probably in part just that I've been fighting bug after bug, and probably in part that my job has been emotionally demanding, but it finally dawned on me that probably the biggest slice of the puzzle is that I have been lacking Vitamin D! Last year I was consciously thinking about how I needed to be ready for the lack of sunshine and how I needed to be taking vitamin D to supplement for the lack of sunshine. I didn't get sick as much last year and definitely wasn't as tired. I began taking it again this week so hopefully I'll see an upswing in energy and general health. ;-) Perhaps a dose of sunshine is in order to jumpstart my energy again. I wonder what the forecast in Arizona is for this next weekend...

I am still loving where I'm living. The family that I live with is such a blessing to me on a daily basis. It continues to amuse me just how similar my growing up years were to the kids of the family. The books on the shelves could have come from my parents library. Movies that we watched when we were little... traditions through the holidays... even phrases our parents used! Anyways, all that to say that I am feeling very blessed and very at home with where I'm living this year. Please begin praying with me as I begin to look for my next living arrangement as this one is just temporary. I can stay until December, but know that the summer is typically the best time to move. 

On another note, I think the school year is getting easier. Over Christmas break I took a lot of time to reflect on why I was struggling and none of what I came up with was surprising. It was a lot of what I had already verbalized, but had not yet thought through completely how it was affecting my every day living and teaching. Upon returning to school in January I resolved to switch my focus from trying to get everything done, or even what I though was important done, and instead focusing on just living out each day in love. I decided to switch from trying to get through the lessons and loving as I went to loving as I went and letting the lessons be the vehicle of how I went through the day. I had to actually say to myself that for the month of January it didn't matter how much I got through. I needed to just focus on loving my 21 students. And you know what? It made a huge different in my stress levels. Living love, letting curriculum just be the means. The class size is still a huge challenge for me. I want to give every student the attention they need and have time to deal with heart issues that arise every day and have time for great communication with parents and still teach every lesson thoroughly and meet the curriculum goals that are set for 2nd grade. But the thing is, I can't. There's no way I can do all of that with 21 students. So I'm back to the basics: loving my students and shepherding their hearts. 

I'm still struggling with church... Please pray. I'm not growing and feel very stagnant in my walk. I'm praying for wisdom, a soft heart, and the Lord's leading. 

After many, many, many prayers, lots of patience, and a long time of looking, God granted me a car. It is an electric blue 2003 Mazda Protege5. I've been enjoying the good, firm brakes and the fact that it only has 62,000 miles on it. Woot woot! I didn't ever think that I would be able to afford a car with such low mileage. I need to take it to the mechanic for some squealing belts, but other than that it has been functioning wonderfully for me. Praise the Lord for his new mercies with me!

Introducing Zwingli!

I expect Zwingli and I will enjoy many Bunbury-ing adventures together. ;-)

I read a new book this weekend. It is called "The Lost Princess: A Double Story"by George MacDonald. It is an older book with a very interesting premise, several profound statements, and great insights into the ugliness of the human heart when it is centered upon self. The book is a book meant for children, and so many of the lessons that can be drawn from it are not proclaimed openly but rather woven into the story. It's a good one to pick up and read! I also read "The Giver" by Lois Lowry this weekend. I'm still thinking about that one and trying to decide what I think about it. Have any of you read that one and have thoughts on it?

I just noticed that all my past pictures have disappeared from the blog. Sorry about that. I've looked for a reason why and apparently there's no good reason... it has happened to other blogger.com bloggers. I was also hoping to find a way to get them back up and visible (some of those Yellowstone pictures were just breathtaking! and I'm sorry that they have gone!) but there seems to be no way to put them all back on except manually. That seems a bit tedious. I hope it doesn't happen again! Perhaps that just means it's time for another cross-country roadtrip so that I can take more pictures. ;-) 

Well, I think that's all for today. As always, I appreciate your prayers! I love hearing from you! :)

A few more pictures :)

Yesterday and today have gone much more smoothly. We actually made it all the way through every subject on the schedule both days!!! Granted, a few of the subjects were very abbreviated and not nearly as thorough as I would have liked, we got to them! :) Then today, after school, I got to hold a brand new baby for nearly 45 minutes! She was absolutely tiny... a preemie just newly released from the hospital. It was a good way to end the day.

A few more pictures of classroom things...

The following pictures are from the first day of school. I gave every student a piece of paper with the same lines drawn on each... (the dark black lines). Next, I invited the students to look at the lines and to finish drawing the picture that they saw living in the lines. I received all the papers back with quite a variety in pictures! Enjoy!

Weren't those great??? I've got quite the creative class, eh?

Then the clipboards I recovered this summer... :)

My customizable schedule cards that I found on TeachersPayTeachers.com. They are perfect for the room! :)

Finally, during spelling and grammar I allow students to ask me questions for sentence practice... I like to think that this will help them to develop writing complete and creative sentences, including capital letters and punctuation. So, how would you answer this question without breaking your student's heart?

A New Home and a New Classroom

I arrived safely in Seattle on Wednesday and discovered that Seattle has been having some extremely warm temperatures this summer! (Warm for Seattle anyway ;-) It was in the low 80s on Wednesday and has continued to be warm the past couple of days.

Well, I landed at about 10:30am on Wednesday and then my pastor picked me up and we went and got my car from a friend's house. Then we loaded up all of my earthly goods into two small cars and the bed of a small pick-up truck. We arrived at my new home at around 1:30pm. (For those of you who don't know or don't remember, I have moved into a bedroom in the Pre-K teacher's home for this year. God has blessed.) Upon our arrival two of the third grade teacher's sons were on hand to help unload and carry boxes up the stairs. By the time we had finished, I sure was glad that I had asked them to help! The rest of that day I spent unpacking. It felt so good to sleep in my own bed that night! Some pictures of my new home... (please note, they DO own furniture. ;-) There was some water damage on their hardwood floors downstairs this summer, so they had to move all the furniture out so that they could refinish the floors this week).

The view from the front door.

To the right and a little behind the front door.

Looking upstairs... the door at the bottom of the stairs is a bathroom.

Walking past the downstairs bathroom you see this to the right. This is the family room area.

To the left you have a dining area and kitchen.

It's a beautiful kitchen!

From the top of the stairs looking down...

From the top of the stairs looking left. The hallway leads to a little bedroom and bathroom. The open door you see there is the laundry room.

From the top of the stairs looking straight ahead. The closed door is the linen closet. The open door leads to a little sitting area and then two more bedrooms. (My room lies through this door)

To the right of the stairs is the master bedroom.

Here is the little sitting area I was talking about. Straight ahead is R's bedroom (the Pre-K teacher's daughter).

I love this little window seat. :) It's where I do my morning reading and praying.

The bathroom I share with R.

Then finally, my bedroom.
I'm still working on finding a bedskirt long enough to hide the storage underneath my bed. :) 

The left side of my room. Still need to repack that container into two smaller ones that will fit under the bed. Mrs. S. gave me a little desk to put my sewing machine on. :)

The closet...

It's acting as my storage space below for now. I may need to rework this. It's a little too messy for me.

And then using the shelving above as a dresser of sorts. 

So Wednesday was an eventful day! I was planning on spending all of Thursday at school, but I woke up with a headache... well, more like a migraine. I guess all the activity and excitement and adrenaline from the day before caught up with me. I ended up lying in bed for most of the day instead of working at school. By Thursday evening I was feeling much better, just tense back and shoulder muscles.

This morning (Friday) I went and got a haircut, did some shopping for my classroom, then picked up a couple of kids from school to go through a carwash (they were SO excited to go through a carwash! I love how simple things can make kids so excited!). Finally, this afternoon I got to my classroom to get to work. I have 21 students this coming year, so even though my room is bigger than the one I had last year, I am feeling really quite cramped. I spent the entire afternoon moving things around trying to figure out how to make things work best. Things will probably shift around a little more before I'm done, but I'm pretty happy with how far I got today. Take a peek to see my new room. :)

At the start of the day here we are. This was the view from the door looking left.

View from the door looking right.

Front of the room...

And another front of the room view. 

Back of the room view.

I made progress! This is how things stand as of right now. To be resumed on Monday!

View from the door looking left.

Back of the room.

Front of the room looking left-ish.

Front of the room looking right-ish.

Doesn't it just look like a classical school?