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: