Happy Christmas!!

Christmas - a time to rejoice in the birth of Jesus and spend time with family celebrating this awesome miracle! We are staying here for the holidays this year, so we had to get in the spirit:

Brad really wanted a Christmas tree. I didn't want to find space to store an artificial one the other 11 months of the year. But Brad really wanted a Christmas tree. So, like a good wife, I gave him one. By stapling garland to our wall in the shape of a tree and decorating it with all our ornaments.

Nice surprise for when he came home from work that day. And personally, I love the space saving aspect of it. It looks pretty sweet too and sure beats the 2 foot mini tree on our counter.

(ps. Thanks to Lacy for giving the garland to my mom who in turn decided to bring it out to me for some reason - it's been put to good use :D)

Us at the Roaring Twenties Enterprise Christmas Party

We will certainly miss our crazy huge families this weekend and all the delicious food, but it is nice to be able to start our own tradition and attend the Christmas services at our church here. And we're not missing the white stuff too much yet...the patio door is open and I am enjoying the sounds of the waterfall on our "lake."

Parental Overload Fun

Brad and I had visitors for the week surrounding Thanksgiving - 4 parents and 2 grandmothers to be exact. All at the same time. It was quite crowded in our apartment to say the least, especially considering the card table that is our kitchen table. But it was absolutely wonderful to see everyone!!

At first, it was only Brad's family. Lucky for all of us, we were invited to a distant relative of Brad's for Thanksgiving dinner so we didn't have to try to cook a huge meal for ourselves. See, Brad's grandma has a cousin who lives in Phoenix, who in turn has family out here. Their daughter invited us all for to her house. Strangely enough, Brad realized he works with her son at one of his branches. They decided they were 5th cousins. Did you follow all that? Just summarize it all to a crazy small world and we have family we'd never met before down here (but we're glad we did)!

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We tried out a few Christmas card poses while we were there.

My parents arrived the day after Thanksgiving, which also happened to be my dad's 60th birthday. Naturally we toasted this milestone with Templeton Rye. And of course, I made a giant '60' shaped cake with 60 candles, which he then had to blow out. Good times! As a birthday present, Brad took him golfing and they ate lunch at the Heart Attack Cafe - this disgusting burger joint that cooks fries in pure lard and makes milkshakes out of the stuff. The burgers are available in single, double, triple, or quadruple by-pass. They also make you wear a hospital gown and naughty nurses are your waitresses. Perfect place for a man-date.

We spent some time touring some nearby sites. We went to Goldfield, a ghost town, and took an interesting train ride around it, complete with a conductor full of facts and theories. In the background are the Superstition Mountains which are reportedly where either a lost gold mine is, where the government has a secret military base, or where aliens are hidden. You choose.

We drove on Apache Trail, which is a very narrow road that turns to gravel eventually. There were some sweet rock formations and plenty of cactus to be found.

I convinced everyone to come to visit my school and they helped clean my classroom! The dust is terrible in Arizona and we don't exactly have janitors who dust everywhere. They just do the basics - floors and trash. The moms also organized the boxes of books they had brought down for my students.

I had school all the next week so the family had to entertain themselves. I needed bookshelves for all the books I was now the proud owner of, so I set the men to work on a project. It turned into Mike's project mostly, but he did an excellent job building 2 very sturdy shelves for my classroom.

Most of the time our family was here, there was a cold spell with overcast skies and chilly temps. But in perfect Arizona send-off, we had a gorgeous sunny day when we dropped everyone off at the airport...just in time for them to get home to enjoy the big snow blizzard!

It's Snowing...Paper

It may not snow in these parts of Arizona but that doesn't mean my students shouldn't learn about it right? They went to town cutting snowflake decorations out of scrap paper. Sometimes you just have to let them play - and worry about the mess later.

Teacher Moment

Fridays are always chaotic at a school and behavior is usually leaning towards out-of-control...and today was no exception. But just small one minute out the entire 7 hours just made my day.

There is one student in my class who is incredibly low. So low that when he started the year, he could not even write his name without a model and when he did copy it down, the letters were barely recognizable. Counting 1-10 almost never happened without one or two numbers left out and nevermind reading words more than three letters long. On top of it all, he has the unfortunate setbacks of severe lack of motivation and behavior problems - especially defiant behavior. To me, it seemed as if he had slipped through the cracks and it was easier to ignore him when he was in the room rather than coax him into producing work.

I have done my best with him given my limited expertise on how to teach him. Slowly but erratically, he has made progress. And today took the cake.

My class does what we call the Mad Math Race - 12 addition problems in one minute. They start with adding zero and as they pass, move up numbers through 10, and then start subtraction problems. We track this on a big racetrack on the back wall and the kids love seeing their vehicle move. This particular low student never participates for obvious reasons. Well today, he was in the room when we did it. So I gave him the zeros sheet, a number he had finally figured out how to add just the other day. When I said "GO!," he faltered until I asked him, "What happens to the number when you add a zero?" It clicked and he was off...I watched him the entire minute as he sped down the sheet filling in answers. My fingers were crossed as I watched the seconds tick by. He finished a full 10 seconds before time was up. (jaws can drop here please)

All 12 problems complete. All 12 problems correct. Only teachers or parents of special needs kids could understand my feeling as I gave him his high 5 and his tablemates congratulated him ( I purposely sat him by some sweet, patient girls who are great at trying to help him). Of course, the class was soon back to its usual loud state but I am still grinning even now because he finally made it onto the racetrack - by doing it the same exact way as every other student.