I am THAT mom

First of all, the play that line from my last post came from was "Macbeth." The true line was "Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under 't." Kudos to you guys for trying to figure it out!
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When I was in high school, I worked in an educational toy store. One of the amazing things our store offered was free gift wrapping. The store was in the same shopping center as the Chuck E. Cheese. You probably see where this is going. Every Saturday, you would get the mom with the kids in tow popping in to grab a gift, pay quickly and have it wrapped before the party started at good ol' Chuck's. I always wondered why they waited until the last minute to buy a gift. I am the kind of person that likes to think out a gift that I am going to give...spending lots of time making sure it is just the right thing for that person. I usually get a gift several days or even a week ahead of time - that way I have time to wrap it (my favorite part!) and have it ready before the big event.

Today, V had a birthday party for a little boy in her class. I ran into Target about 15 minutes before the party, grabbed two Bakugan toys, a 99 cent card, and a gift bag (I brought my own tissue paper in the car!) and rushed back out to the car. V signed the card while I wrapped the gifts and I realized - I am THAT mom now. When did that happen? I only wish that Target offered free gift wrapping because - I would have SO taken them up on that.

Look like the flower, but be the smoker underneath

Last week, one of my students gave me this beautiful origami rose. It was folded and fashioned with this sparkly, shiny silver paper. I oohed and aaahed over it and put it on my bookshelf, promising my sweet student to keep it forever. Today while my kids were playing on the playground, that same sweet little girl came over and was chatting with me. Here's a recap of our conversation...

Student: "Mrs. P, you know the flower I gave you for your birthday?"

Me: "Yes, of course! I love it! I still can't believe that you made it. You are very talented!"

Student: "Well, actually, my Nanny made it for you but I helped."

Me: "Well, that was very sweet of you both."

Student: "Want to know how we made it?"

Me: "Sure!"

Student: "Well, you know the shiny paper inside a cigarette box?"

Me: (hesitating, not sure where this is going): "Uh huh..."

Student: "Well, my Nanny saved all of those from my Papa's cigarettes and taped them together to make that flower for you!" (said with this big beaming smile)

Me: (biting lip HARD): Thank you again...that was just so sweet of you.

**Bonus points given to whoever can correctly identify the Shakespeare play that I grossly misquoted my title from (Tim, you are out since you helped me!)**

And I'd like to thank the academy...

Or really my awesome friend Crys for...


this great blogging award!

Crys is a super adoptive mom who went from 0 to 3 kids in a few months, so her blog is always filled with humor and great kid stories! :)

So...I am passing this award on to:
Tim
Ali
Melissa
Crystal
Ainsley

Hope this brightens your day like it did mine! Here's what you need to do...

1. Copy the above logo and put it on blog or post.
2. Nominate blogs that show attitude and/or gratitude (Those who add sweetness to life and/or inspire you by making lemonade.)
3. Be sure to link to your nominees within your post.
4. Let them know they have received this award by commenting on a post.

Detox

Today was an interesting day. We are in the middle of a serious issue with V. After worry and tears, Tim and I have decided that she needs professional help...in fact, we staged an intervention. Because of this, she is currently enrolled in a detox program. What in the world could an 8 year old be addicted to, you may ask? Well... she is afflicted with severe "spoileditis." It was made much much worse by the weekend at Grandma's where she got to stay up late and choose where to eat for dinner and watch TV in her bedroom and just generally get to call the shots, so we are working her through her "Grandma detox." Please pray for the poor girl...it must be horrible to be back home and actually be asked to do *gasp* chores! or *gasp!* speak with a polite tone to your parents. Poor poor kid...

The Big 2-8

On Wednesday, I celebrated my 28th birthday. It was kind of a hard one since I feel like I am close to 30, which was my official "old" age when I was younger. However, my sweet husband and cute daughter worked hard to make it the best birthday ever!

I was woken up at 5:45 am by Silly String being sprayed on me and two people screaming "Happy Birthday!" at the top of their lungs. V had never used Silly String before and successfully got it all over my hair and even into my mouth when I was screaming. Needless to say, we had to wash the sheets afterwards but it was so funny! :) Tim gave me a beautiful Lisa Leonard necklace and V gave me the Pinocchio DVD and some premium mint M&M's. Yum!

During the day at school, one of my student's moms had made cupcakes and bought drinks so we could have a party at school. She is so sweet - I have never had a parent do this and it just made my day! She also gave me an ADORABLE bag with my initials and last name monogrammed on it - it is soooo cute!

After school, we went to my favorite pizza restaurant, the Mellow Mushroom, to enjoy some pretzels and "mighty meaty" pizza for my birthday dinner. To top off the night, we enjoyed some cake and Ben and Jerry's.

What a wonderful way to celebrate the day - I am so blessed to have such an awesome family and sweet friends!

Daylight savings time...

Anyone else think this is a terrible idea? I mean, why do we even do it? Is there an evil plot against mothers and teachers everywhere? Does everyone want little children and adults alike to be grumpy and nasty because their circadian rhythms are all screwed up? I just don't understand it.

Today my child slept in until almost 8 AM. If that isn't proof that she is tired from daylight savings time, I don't know what is.

In class this week, I was literally JUMPING up and down to demonstrate changing verb tense from hop to hops to hopped to hopping. My kids didn't even crack a smile because they were all trying to stay awake.

Let's hope everyone gets some more rest this weekend. :)

Girl's night

Tim had to work late, so V and I officially declared a girl's night! Here's the equation for successful girl's night:

McDonalds+rented kiddie movie=lots of mommy daughter snuggles and together time.

How do you like to spend one on one time with your kids? :)

Girl drama

Today V brought home a less than desirable grade from school. For some reason, third grade has been challenging for her and her attitude about school has been far from enthusiastic, which is a surprise considering that she adored school until this year. She wasn't happy when I discovered the quiz grade in her papers - she told me she hoped I would "forget" to look at them and just sign. Yeah, that's NEVER.GOING.TO.HAPPEN. Sorry, kid.

So, anyway, I told her that I was very disappointed about her grades and proceeded to look at the errors she made. All of them were careless, sloppy errors which just showed that she was in a hurry and didn't take her time. This isn't the first time this has happened this year, so she knew what was coming next. I told her she was grounded from all things electronic until her grades came back up. Well...you would have thought I told her that she would never see the light of day again. She turned around, stomped out of the kitchen, stomped up the stairs, stomped into her bedroom, and proceeded to throw herself onto her bed and wail pitifully like a hurt animal. I almost started laughing - did she really think that would make me change my mind? She usually tries to talk her way out of it but I guess she thought she had a new trick up her sleeve. I walked upstairs and told her I would be happy to talk to her once she calmed down but I didn't want to hear her screech so I was shutting her door. She yelled down the hall, "Well, I really don't think it's fair that I am grounded for just ONE grade!" I told her again I would be happy to talk to her once she came down.

Once she calmed down and realized her huge overreaction, she of course apologized and morphed back into her normal, sweet self. Of course, she did say that she was glad the dog loved her because she didn't ground her because of grades. Heaven help us in a few years...teenage V looks like she is just going to be LOVELY. Please start praying for us now.

Tim seems to think teen years are going to be (his words exactly) FUN. Say an extra prayer for the dear boy, please. :)

Further proof of weather weirdness

V and I got sunburned yesterday. Not badly - but sunburned none the less. How weird is that???

Also, why do we have to go on and off daylight savings time? I HATE springing forward. I wish we would go on and never go off. My students are going to be so tired tomorrow morning...I better wear tennis shoes because I am going to have jump around and do handstands to make phonics interesting tomorrow. :)

Global warming or fluky weather?

Remember all that snow I blogged about earlier this week? The snow that we had enough of to cancel school for TWO days and have a delay on the third? Yeah, well, here's how we spent today.



It is 78 degrees here today. Who wants to explain THAT for me?

This blog is brought to you today by the number 2 and the letter V

Great Sesame Street reference there, huh? Yeah, that's how I learned to read. I still adore Sesame Street and would watch it right now if it was on.

Recently I learned a sad, sad fact. My child will never follow in my footsteps and continue the female teaching tradition of our family. I know you are dying to know why. Here's the story...

V LOVES her name. Mostly, she LOVES her first letter. Any time we see anything with a V, she gets so excited and points it out to us. Recently, we started yelling out "V!" whenever we watch "Wheel of Fortune" because it cracks her up so badly.

The other day I was watching my niece M. She is almost 8 months old and is very vocal, so we were driving in the car and she was singing in her little baby talk. I told V she should sing back to her. She wasn't sure what to sing, so I suggested the ABC song. Here's how she sang it,

"A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P"
I was pretty proud at this point because she distinctly pronounced the L-P part which I am a real stickler about. It stinks to have a teacher for a mom. Then she started the next part:

"Q, R, S, T, U, VEEEEEEEEEEEE"
The V was sang in this high pitched squealy, "Oh, I just love myself!" kind of voice. Here is where I had to bite my lip (see yesterday's post if you don't know what I am talking about.)

"W, X, Y, and Z. Now I know my ABC's, next time won't you sing with me."

I just cannot in good conscience let that girl go out into the world and teach kindergarteners their alphabet like that. She doesn't want to be a teacher anyway...she wants to work with her daddy on computers at "his college." I guess she will follow in one of our footsteps.

Biting my lip...

I recently read a great book about teaching that said teachers have to bite their lips a lot. Basically, we hear all kinds of funny things (because as you know, kids say ANYTHING!) and of course we don't want to laugh AT them, so we bite our lips and share later with fellow teachers after school. :) Parents, if you are reading this, you probably know the 1/2 rule about teachers and kids. I tell my parents, "I'll believe about 1/2 of what they tell me about you if you believe about 1/2 of what they tell you about me." Haha! My daughter is one of those who tells EVERYTHING about her day at school and her teachers. I know all of their kids names, what they did on the weekend, what their favorite things are, etc etc etc.

Anyway, today V did something that made me bite my lip because of how completely blond she can be sometimes. She is doing a writing assignment because they are starting standardized testing and they are practicing for the test. The assignment is to write a letter to the principal stating why you think they should or should not have to wear uniforms. V's reasons against uniforms were that they cost a lot of money to buy at the costume shop and if you wore your police or nurse outfit to school, your uniform could get dirty. YA'LL - she thought it meant PROFESSIONAL uniforms.

I am going to pause and let you crack up laughing.

I had to explain to her that the assignment meant SCHOOL uniforms and what school uniforms were like and then she had to re-do it because her reasons didn't make sense (of course!) She is still anti-uniform. Her major reason why: because God made us all different and He wouldn't want us to all dress the same.

My sweet, sweet blond girl.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

That's right - SC got snow... in March!!! That is just crazy for this area. We NEVER have snow past January so we were excited to see all the white stuff coming down. We finally ended up with almost SIX inches! :) V had never seen so much snow in her life. She was enthralled with it and didn't want to come in for anything! We had such a fun time playing outside in it...V used a trash can lid for a sled, we tried to make a snowman but decided we needed lessons because it was a disaster, and the dogs just had fun trying to eat it all. Check out Tim's flickr page...I know he will be adding more pictures as he has time. It was a fun long weekend! :)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/timpattersonphotography