Updates

I think 5 months is a good amount of time to neglect the blog.  Don't you?

A lot has happened in the past 5 months.  The first 12 weeks of the year were pretty crazy.  I was student teaching.  This required me to be away from 7:15 AM until 4 PM every week day.  Ruth was super busy as well.  Between practicing for knowledge bowl and attending rehearsals for Annie Jr. (She was on the stage crew), she was at school every day until 5 or 6 pm.  My student teaching and Ruth's knowledge bowl and play practice all finished up at the end of March.  We were all happy to survive and learned a lot from our experiences.

April was full of finishing up my major capstone project and submitting for graduation.  Once this was complete, my time was filled with the stress of the job hunt.  I was so blessed to be offered a job after my second job interview.  In August, I will begin my teaching career at Alpine Elementary as a third grade teacher.  I do not have enough words to describe how excited I am and how perfect this opportunity is for me.

The kids have finished school and are now on their way to a fun-filled summer.  It's hard to believe that in just a couple of months we will have a 5th-grader, a 2nd-grader and a kindergartner on our hands.

My goals this summer include:

• Update this blog and neglect facebook more. (Facebook updates are all well and fine, but they are what keep me from updating the blog.  They are short versions of what I COULD be writing here on the blog and I KNOW that 15 years from now, I will be so sad that I didn't write it all down here).
• Prepare for school.  (There's only so much I can do, but becoming an expert on the third grade core and coming up with a classroom management plan will give me a great head start). 
• Help my kids avoid the "Summer Slide" --In case you don't know what this is... kids tend to lose a lot of what they've learned in school over the summer--especially in reading.  (I'm mostly concerned about Gareth.  His reading has come far this year.  He finished the year right on grade-level.  Our goal is to keep him there throughout the summer.)
• Go camping AT LEAST twice.  Last year we put a lot of effort into getting equipped for camping and we only went once.  
• Swim a lot.  Let me know if you want to join us.
• Use sunscreen.  If you follow me on facebook, you know why I have this goal.  Gareth's sunburned legs are finally healing up nicely.

So there you have it.  Keep watching.  I've got some fun stories to tell coming up!