Maisie the other Reindeer

Oh my goodness I cannot even tell you how much I LOVE this little kitten! This evening she climbed inside this crinkle santa hat we bought for the cats and fell asleep.

I started to snap some pictures when I remembered the reindeer antlers I had bought to photograph the cats in. She was so tired she didn't even realize I put them on her so she was quite the good sport. How cute is she?!? I love her to death!

Foot Drama Day 2

I spent the entire day yesterday laid out on the couch keeping my foot elevated and icing it on and off. By the end of the day I was going crazy from literally doing nothing for so long! My foot was still hurting pretty badly when I tried to move it around, but the swelling was going down a little so my consensus that it was not broken was holding firm. By the end of the day I found that when absolutely necessary I was in fact able to hobble on it a little bit. I can only put pressure on the inside corner of my heel, and if any other part of the foot touches the ground it hurts like heck, but I can take a few steps when necessary (not that I am trying to, just that I can).

This morning it looks a little less bruised, is still swollen, but not as bad as Monday for sure; and while it still hurts to move it around, I am able to put some pressure on it.

I guess it is going to be okay given that I take good care of it and stay off it a few days. What a crappy way to spend my winter break though! I had so many things I needed to get done (license, car registration, hair highlight, organize closet, paint bathroom etc.)

Good thing T is only working a half day today though, I'm going stir crazy here!

New Paint Job

Might as well catch up on some blogging while I am laid up on the couch and home alone.

Most of you know that when I moved back to Houston I moved in to the extra bedroom at a friend's house. I didn't bring any of my stuff with me, other than my clothes, because I knew I would have no where to keep it. I was sleeping on the futon in the office, and while it was okay, I sure did miss my bed!

Well, a few weeks ago our third roommate moved out. This left an empty bedroom, so I jumped at the chance to move my stuff down here. My dad packed up the uhaul in Denver and drove everything down for me the next weekend (thanks Dad!)

In the meantime, this room had to be painted! I don't know who lived here before us, or what they were thinking, but bright yellow is no color for a bedroom! The color was so bright, that when the door was open it looked like light was shining out into the hallway. How B lived with this for the 9 months he did is beyond me.

After a few trips to Lowes, we had all the supplies needed to make my room beautiful!

Before:

After:

I really love the color I picked out. It's exactly what I pictured in my head. Not too dark, not too light, and a very neutral color that looks great against my dark wood furniture. T liked the color so much he contemplated painting his room, though we decided against that ... too much work!

He did, however, think it would look good in the bathroom, so he decided to try it out. After he had painted a big color swatch on the wall, we had no choice but to paint it all. Unfortunately, I got tired of painting and the bathroom is still not quite done. haha. That was on my list of things to do over the holiday break .... but now that my foot is a big fat mess it doesn't look like that will happen. :( Oh well, maybe someday ...

Foot injury

Today started out so good, and turned out sooooo bad!!

I woke up this morning to a sweet kitten that could not have been more excited to see me. She cuddled with me for awhile and then I got up to run a few errands. At noon I headed out to meet T and Roxanne for lunch, which was a lot of fun. On the way home I made one last stop to pick up my last stocking stuffer gift and as I was getting back in my car I stepped off the curb wrong and rolled my ankle on to my foot.

What came next was excruciating pain. I could no longer put any weight on it at all or move it certain directions. There were lots of tears. I called my mom and dad but neither answered. I called T and told him I thought my foot was broken so he left work with the intention of taking me to the er.

Side note here: last week I randomly noticed that the insurance card I'd been carrying was expired. So, I called united health care to get my information in preparation for this ER visit. And that's when shit hit the fan. Apparently my employer failed to submit the paperwork for my insurance and I have been uninsured since September!! Holy crap!! This caused the meltdown of the century! I need to call the district, but guess what? They are closed for 2 weeks. Insert more panic here.

The final decision was to ice it all night and hope it's a bad sprain and feels better tomorrow. I'm holding off this ER visit until it becomes apparent it is 100% necessary due to my apparent lack of insurance. This is bad. Bad bad bad. Worst. Day. Ever. :(

My foot hurts like heck, can't really move, and is swollen and black. We'll see how it looks in the morning.

At least my sweet kitty has been cuddled up with me all night to make me feel better!

Sleeping with a Kitten

Maisie is the coolest kitten ever! Although, she literally NEVER sleeps! Trying to have her sleep in my room was pretty much a disaster. She will be sleeping in the office for awhile haha. She just kept wanting to play non stop. This might have been okay, but she has this obsession with pressing her head against your face (which is pretty sweet and adorable if you ask me) but when you are trying to sleep and she keeps randomly rubbing up on your face it makes life difficult.

She's so funny. She doesn't like to be alone at all. The funniest part though, is she will be sitting with you, then walk in the other room by herself, start meowing like crazy because you didn't follow her, then when you call her name she comes running back and climbs you to press her head against your cheek like she's so excited to see you all over again.

Who wouldn't smile seeing this sweet face upon waking up?!?

Christmas Kitten!

Look what T bought me for Christmas!!!

I have been talking about how much I want to get a kitten for months now; so today, T took me out to look for the perfect one as a Christmas present. When I found this sweet girl I fell in love with her! She's just beautiful :)

She's about 4 months old, and has already had all her shots and been fixed. She's such a cool kitten! She is incredibly sweet and cuddly, would rather curl up on your chest than be anywhere else, but is feisty and loves to play as well. She spent the afternoon crawling all over me while I edited pictures, and then finally curled up in the nook of my arm to nap. *sigh* I love her already!

I'm so excited I have 2 full weeks to stay home and play with her all the time. Best Christmas present ever! :)

Oh, I named her Maisie.

Thanks T!

Online Shopping

This was the year of online Christmas shopping and after this I will NEVER go back to shopping in stores again! I literally bought every single present online and had it shipped directly to my front door. I never had to get dressed, and I never had to leave the house. It was SO worth not having to deal with the crazy holiday shopping crowds. Plus, I got all my shopping done in just one day because I didn't have to go a million different places. Why have I never thought of doing this before?!? So stress free! I have never had all my shopping done before Thanksgiving ... it's just amazing really!

The only real problem I have found with getting my shopping done so painlessly and early this year is that now I keep wanting to buy people more things. I guess this isn't really a problem, but I'm spending quite a bit more money than I would have otherwise. Oh well haha

4 more days until Christmas break! YAY!!

Fishing Weekend

On Saturday, Tony and I drove out to his mom's house in Dayton to join them on the boat for some fishing. We stayed out practically all day and caught next to nothing. I caught one small fish all day, Gene didn't catch any, and Tony caught a few small ones. Pretty disappointing as far as fishing days go. When we finally got tired of casting out and catching nothing, we headed back to the house for dinner. Sam made pork chops, while the rest of us hung out by the fire outside. We made smores, which pretty much made my day!

After the A&M game (whoop!) we decided to just stay the night so we could go out on the boat again the next morning and try our luck again. We caught SO many fish that second day! Literally every time you would cast, you would catch a fish within minutes. The best part though, was most of those fish were keepers! We ended up staying out for only a few hours, and bringing home 34 fish for the fish fry. I love days like that. :) We spent the afternoon around the house then headed back home after dinner.

What a fun weekend!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

I'm pretty much obsessed with Christmas. Most years I have to try extremely hard to hold off busting out the Christmas music until at least November. Not after Thanksgiving mind you, but just November in general. Well, Tony being the good friend he is, gave in to my obsession and went shopping for Christmas decorations with me last night. We bought a small tree, lights, ornaments, and lights for the house. Then we spent the evening decorating the tree while listening to Christmas music. It's so pretty! I haven't had a tree at home since I moved to Houston so I'm pretty thrilled about this.

I think the cats are pretty thrilled too. Something about the glow of the lights must attract them because they have just been taking turns laying right next to the tree, and sticking their heads inside it.

So far, no ornaments have been knocked off and the tree is still standing. We'll see how long this lasts haha.

"prison riot"

So everyone knows our first graders are crazy. I'm talking CRAZY lol! It's not like every kid is crazy of course, but the group as a whole is just one big crazy mix of children. They are wild, and they do what they want for the most part. Well, this week it was decided that, because they are so crazy, all 5 teachers needed to be outside at recess as crowd control. So, our principal asked 3 office staff members to do our lunch duty so we could all have recess duty all the time. Today was the first day they were in the lunch room with our kids.

We were all sitting in the lounge enjoying lunch together when one of the ladies comes in and says "oh. my. gosh. I thought there was about to be a prison riot in there!" Apparently, out of nowhere, ALL the kids in the cafeteria started doing stomp stomp clap and then started the chant "we will we will rock you". The ladies in there didn't know what to do. One of them actually got up on the table and started yelling at them to get them to stop. INSANITY I tell you. Absolute insanity.

This is what we deal with on a daily basis. First graders are CRAZY! haha

Dewberry Farm

A couple weeks ago we took the kids to Dewberry Farm for our first grade field trip. Let me just tell you, that place is AWESOME! Michelle (one of my teammates) and I may have been more excited about this trip than even the kids hehe. I had never been to Dewberry Farm before, but had heard good things so I was pretty stoked about it.

They had so much fun stuff there, and Michelle and I literally spent the day playing on everything with the kids. They had mountains of hay to climb with rope swings off of them, zip lines, swings, racing bikes, big inflatable bounce pads, animals to feed, rubber duck races, a corn maze, and a hay ride out to a pumpkin patch. I took SO many cute pictures of the kids having fun that I wish I could share them here, however posting pictures of children that do not belong to me is sort of a no no.

The funniest part of the day had to be the hay ride. Michelle and I hopped on with a few kids from my class and as we were riding out the driver told us if you looked off to one side you could see the pumpkin patch. We looked, and saw nothing. Then we got a little closer and looked again and found this:

They literally had dumped a bunch of tiny pumpkins in a field and called it a pumpkin patch. Michelle and I were dying laughing! False advertisement I'd say hahaha

When I hear pumpkin patch I think of something much more like this:

Alas, this was set up just for photo ops, it was not the real thing. haha!

Because I have changed grade levels every year I've been on a lot of different field trips (this was my 6th) and this one was by far my favorite! The kids LOVED it, it was low stress, and fun for teachers. Can't wait to go back next year! :)

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween!

I'll be sitting here patiently awaiting trick or treaters :)

Do you think we have enough candy?!? hehe

Pumpkin Day!

Today was absolutely INSANE! Not only was it the last school day before Halloween, but it was pumpkin day in first grade AND the day of our book character parade.

The day started with kids dressed in costumes. First grade did fairy tales so we had dragon slayers, fairy godmothers, and princesses.

We sat in the hallway and watched grades 3-5 parade by us, then we stood up and got to parade by them. The kids LOVED it! There was music playing and they were dancing up a storm haha.

After the parade we went back to the classroom to begin pumpkin day. Pumpkin day included a variety of pumpkin activities. We started by making headbands, then made some guesses about our class pumpkin including how many seeds it had, how many lines, and how much it weighed. We cut strings to guess how big around we thought it would be then checked to see who was the closest (6 kids were dead on, impressive!!). We graphed our choices for what sort of face we wanted carved, then we opened up the pumpkin and carved it. The kids put the seeds in groups of ten for us to count, we listened to a story while sitting in the dark admiring our lit up pumpkin, we played Halloween bingo with candy corn, and we worked with partners to compare the small pumpkins we brought in from home.

All in all the day was a success. The kids were CRAZY excited ALL day! I had more than one tell me this was "the best day of my life" which I guess made the insanity all worthwhile.

I must admit, it was a fun day :)

Wings Over Houston

This past weekend Tony took me to the Houston air show ... by took me, I mean I begged him to take me until he agreed haha. He had free tickets from work and I really wanted to go so I basically just talked about it until he said okay :-P

It was hot as can be (it's October for goodness sake, when is it going to feel like fall?!?) but it was such a fun day! There was so much to photograph I was in Heaven! We wandered around for a bit checking out all the military planes and Tony taught me pretty much everything about them. They had a whole area set up like an army camp with actors playing the roles of soldiers. It was pretty neat

After awhile we settled into our seats to watch all the planes flying. There were so many that were sooo cool! Plus, it was fun to go with someone that actually knew about them because I learned a lot.

After a few hours it was hot and we had seen so much I would have been ready to go but Tony said we had to stay because the Thunderbirds were last and he claimed they were awesome. He was right, it was totally worth the wait. I was amazed by how fast they were going and how synchronized their movements were. Honestly, you just had to see it to know how cool it was!

I literally took hundreds of pictures all day ... so many that it is hard to choose just a few to post here haha. I do really love this next one though so I wanted to include it. It's a 48 star flag from WWII and after tinkering with the color I fell in love:

Intentions

This was posted on thenotebookdoodles.com today (love some of the things posted on that blog!) and I thought it was just perfect for me given how this year has gone.

It might be a ridiculous story, but I can laugh about it, and I'm so happy now so it doesn't even matter. :)

cute kids

First graders totally crack me up!

Today little girl A comes in and says to me "Ms. McCormack, I'm going home with M today because my mom has a doctor appointment. She's having an oh so sound ... you know, when they look at the baby in her tummy!" hehehe "oh so sound" too darn cute!

Later we were reading the book "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly". We had read through about half of it and then when I read "I know an old lady who swallowed a cow" little boy C pipes up loudly, "OMG that's disgusting!" he actually said the letters O.M.G. I laughed so hard I had to put the book down which of course made everyone else start to giggle too. Maybe you had to be there, but goodness was it funny! :)

Fishing!

In the past month I have become quite the fisherman (or woman rather)! Over the summer I went out on the boat with Tony a few times but while everyone else fished I just got tan. A week after I got back in town we went out again, and that day everyone was catching these HUGE fish! It was so exciting I decided I wanted to give it a try.

So, that week Tony took me to academy and helped me pick out a fishing pole (it's black and pink and super cute btw). We've pretty much gone fishing every weekend since, either out on the boat, or to the pier.

The first time we went to the pier I caught this MASSIVE fish! It was WAY too bit for my little rod and had it fought at all it would have totally snapped my line right away. As it stood I got it reeled all the way in and there was this huge crowd of people watching. All these men were trying to help get nets down there to bring it up (it was too big to get up otherwise) but unfortunately at the last second it broke the line and got away. I'm so sad we didn't even take a picture of it in the water :( Let me see if I can explain how big it was ... put your arms out strait in front of you then link your hands so it makes a circle. It was about that big!!

Catching a fish just never gets old for me. It doesn't matter what it is or what size I get excited every time as you can see from my pictures haha

This past weekend we went on the boat on Saturday and then to the pier on Sunday. On the pier there was a 4 year old boy fishing next to us who was just too darn cute. He wanted to help us throw all our fish back and got so excited when he saw us catch something. At one point he was helping me hold the fish while I got the hook out and in all seriousness he said to me "I'm going to sing twinkle twinkle to it and it will calm down" and then this sweet little boy sang to my fish. How precious! He totally loved Tony too! After Tony caught a good sized sand trout our fishing buddy Nick requested to be in the pictures too. He was too darn cute giggling up a storm as the fish flopped around and Tony helped him hold it.

I love my new hobby!! :) Can't wait to go again this weekend!

First Grade

I feel so lucky to have a job! I just cannot get over that! :)

So far everything is going really well. I really love how the school is brand new (only opened last year) so everything is SO nice! Nice furniture, technology, etc. I have a projector in my room that is hooked up to the computer which we can use to watch United Streaming, and I have an elmo instead of an overhead. I LOVE it! Oh, and the whiteboards ... SO much better than chalk. I hate the feeling of chalk on my hands haha. It's the little things. Plus, my classroom is HUGE. I mean it is at least twice the size of my rooms the past 3 years. AND one wall is painted green. It's so pretty (I have a thing for accent walls)!

My team is awesome! My team leader is so on top of things and such a good teacher, and there are two girls just about my age on the team which is so nice as well. I enjoy being around all of them and they seem to have similar teaching styles to me. We plan everything together every week (no more winging it because I don't have a clue what I'm doing) and as an added plus I have found they do a lot of the same things I did at Highlands in first grade, so I'm really comfortable with it.

I have 22 kids in my class, 13 girls and 9 boys. I have some REALLY sweet ones! I do love first graders! I had forgotten how little they know though, so the first few days were really a shock. I'm getting back into the swing of things though and the days are going much smoother.

I couldn't be happier with how things have turned out :)

rewind button

You know that rewind button for life people are always wishing for? I think I may have found it!

From my point of view, I messed up my life pretty badly this summer. I quit my awesome job, I spent a ridiculous amount of money moving across the country, and yet I ended up right back where I started in the first place (sans job, money, and apartment). Oddly enough, I wasn't too panicked coming back without having a job. I just kept telling myself that it was going to be a good year for me, no matter what happened and that there was a reason for everything. I'm learning to go with the flow here. haha

Before I came back, I emailed my principal, my assistant principal, and the original principal who hired me into Fort Bend (who I never got to work for since I was moved schools). I assumed they wouldn't have any openings, but wanted to see if they would just keep their ears open for me in case they heard of something at another school. All three immediately responded that they would be on the lookout for me, and that if something came up I would be their number one choice. This was encouraging, but I still wasn't counting on anything opening up. I know how little hiring is happening this year in general.

As I was driving back on Tuesday I got an email from the principal that hired me 3 years ago. She had just been given permission to hire for first and third grade and wanted to know when I was moving back. I responded quickly with "TODAY! I'm driving through Dallas right now!" She asked me to come in and interview the next morning. Basically, she had already decided to hire me, but was going to let each of the two teams meet/interview me (along with one other girl she was hiring) and then let them duke it out to see which team got which girl. Both teams were great, but I felt like I really clicked with the first grade team. The team leader is awesome, AND there are 2 girls about my age on the team (um, that's amazing! haha). I was really keeping my fingers crossed that I was placed there. First grade would always be my first choice if given the option!

When I left the school, the principal gave me a huge hug and told me "it's just such a God thing that you showed up right now, I'm so excited about this". I just keep thinking how right she is ... it IS such a God thing! Had I not interviewed with her 3 years ago, and had I not made it a point to stay in contact with her every once in awhile after moving schools, this never would have happened. At the time I had no idea how much that connection would help me years later. It's just amazing the way it worked out!

Later that same afternoon I got a call saying they were putting in the paperwork with HR to recommend me for the first grade position!! I somehow managed to move back and find a perfect job for me in less than 24 hours! How amazing is that?!? Seriously, NO ONE is hiring, and yet somehow I managed this. I'm still a little bit in shock, but I'm SO excited! Everyone knows how much I LOVE first grade, and the team just seems fantastic. I think I am really going to love working with them.

So, I did something crazy, realized it was a mistake, and managed to get my entire life back in a 2 week time span. Things are better than ever now. I get to teach first grade again, I get to work with a new great team, and I get to live with some of my favorite people (I realized recently that having roommates (one's you like at least) is SO much better than living alone). Life is so good! :) And, on top of all that, I now realize how much more I need to appreciate my life. I appreciate every single part of how blessed I am today (and that may not have been the case before).

What have I learned from all this? I've learned that life is not quite as cookie cutter perfect as I had made it out to be. Sometimes it's messy and confusing, and that's okay. I don't have to color in the lines all the time. I can make mistakes. My life does not have to be perfect all the time. I don't have to make all the right decisions the first chance I get. And guess what? Life will still be okay.

I'm SO happy! :)