Thursday, May 24, 2012

Alejandro the caterpillar, flowers, food, and pink gorillas.


How is that for a title? Makes you really want to read my post, doesn't it? Especially considering that I've been absent from the blogging world almost the entire month of May!

I do apologize, but let's be honest. 

It's May.

End of school.

Teacher=busy.

At any rate, life has taken over and pretty much everything except for family & work has fallen by the wayside. This will be a "catch up" post also known as dump out all my random phone pictures. You ready?

I've been very, very, very torn about this school year ending because I have the sweetest little class. They are adorable. And I am spoiled rotten by my kids' parents. I mean, spoiled rotten!

See? My whole class got me these wonderful flowers, a picture frame they decorated with their class picture, and a nice gift card for an end of the year present. Yes, I'm spoiled.


So what did I do with the end of the year gift cards?

Glad you asked! I went out to buy a jogging stroller for my new goal of running a 5K at the end of June. I keep borrowing jogging strollers, trying out people's strollers, searching Craigslist for used jogging strollers, etc., etc. In the end, I just saved up my gift cards from my class parents to buy a stroller. 

Technically, we never even bought Micah a stroller because I'm cheap, and we have just borrowed a lot of stuff from family and friends. I guess we still didn't really buy this stroller either since I had gift cards, but either way...

If a parent from my classroom stumbles upon my blog---thanks for the jogging stroller!

I'm very happy. The front wheel rotates and locks as well as it folds up to fit in my car trunk. 


We've had a little battle of wills with our neighbors next door. Well, I started having a battle with them, but I finally gave up and decided it wasn't the most Godly thing to do.

They like to park all their cars (three of them with only two adults--but who's counting?) in front of our house!! They don't use their driveway. They don't use their two car garage. Nope, they park in front of our house. So for a while, I was parking purposely in front of our house to reclaim my property. That just made them worse, so I gave up.


I started to do a vlog one day and accidentally took this lovely gem of a picture of myself at my desk. Whoops!


I discovered Flat Out bread by Hungry Girl for my lunches! Oh so healthy, and oh so good!


Micah likes to let us know how manly pink can really be. I had an obsession over Strawberry Shortcake when I was a child, and I have this amazing blanket (not from childhood) that I love. Well, Micah loves to snuggle with this blanket and a pink gorilla one of my students gave me for Valentine's Day. He totes that pink gorilla everywhere. It it hi.la.ri.ous.


I took this pic at school one day before I released the kids to go play at recess. The weather is now getting hotter, but I have to say...I've had a pretty good view for the end of the year.


Micah discovered salsa, and we let him have at it. He's very independent these days! He had to make sure that he dipped his own chip in the entire bowl by himself. He also squealed (or squawked) at you if you tried to just give him a taste. OH NO. He has to be elbow deep in salsa on his own.

Then he just slurps it off and double dips. It's gross, so we let him just play in it after we were finished.


Did I mention how pretty is has been outside (although rapidly getting too hot) lately?

Many afternoons my view has been of this (with various children running everywhere).


Here's Micah going to town with the salsa again.


Speaking of end of the year, I assigned my last student project to be due about two weeks ago. We were studying sound, and I thought it would be fun for kids to make their own instruments.

Imagine my surprise when somebody made this! Then he played it using flip flops at the top to make sound come out of the bottom. It was the most unique project I've ever seen in ten years. Also notice it is as tall as my director's chair!


Speaking of my sweet kiddos, I have this one awesome artist in my class. He's painting me things all year on canvas, and my classroom is full of his creations. His mom told me that she couldn't wait for me to see his end of the year present for me.

Now, we all know that I love woodland creatures. My sons's room is decorated in woodland creatures, his first birthday party was woodland themed, and I even found woodland creatures bulletin board stuff this past summer! So I named my kids Mrs. C's Critters this year, and went with the woodland theme at school, too.

Look what he painted for me!!!! How precious is this? I took a bad iPhone pic of it. 

I am in love with this.

Wow. I sure am talking a lot about school. Can you tell where I've been this month? Haha!

On to another funny school story.
One of my kids found this crazy caterpillar that was extremely wild looking. I've lived here my whole life and never seen a caterpillar like this one. She brought it to school in a cereal box and begged me to keep it as a class pet. The girls named him "Alejandro Spike", and I gave them a container to put "Alejandro" in for this last week of school.

Don't you just love kids? I mean, can you say that about your job?


So we've played with Alejandro most of the week, but on Tuesday night I started thinking, Why does this caterpillar look so strange? I wondered if he was poisonous, and I was just letting my kids wander around with a strange bug in a jar that could hurt them.


So I google searched him as any good educator would do. I mean the kids were so curious anyway as to what kind of a butterfly or moth he would become. 

I mean, what did educators do with all these crazy questions before Google?

Anyway, I found this site that stated it was best not to handle them!! They can't really hurt you other than cause some itching, but still. I told my little friend she had to take Alejandro home.


Of course, we also took our Sunday morning picture. However, my camera has been without batteries, so we took a pic of the boys with my iPhone.


So there's where I've been this month. I've been knee deep is grading papers, finalizing averages, researching caterpillars, enjoying flowers from my sweet class, pretending to run, indulging in Mexican food, and watching my sweet child play with a pink gorilla.

Also, for my own record, a few things Micah is saying now at (almost) 18 months:

Go!Go!Go!
Kitty-kitty (for our neighbors' cat)
Oh, WOW!
Whoa!
KayKay (my mom's grandmother name)
Ebin (his cousin's name)
Mama (and will point to me in pictures)
Dada (and will point to Mr. C in pictures)
Bean bean (green bean)
BAAAAAWWWLL (in like three syllables)
PupPup (puppy)
Boc! Boc! (Tells the puppy to get in his box.)
Hi!
Bye-Bye!
Uh-oh!
Yummy, yummy.
Mmmmm (when he thinks something is good).
Milk.
Bowl.
Nononono! (Yes, that has started, too. Sigh.)

Many, many more. I just wanted to get some down on paper. I'll brainstorm more with Mr. C when I'm off this weekend.

So excited that tomorrow is my official start to summer at about noon, and I'm glad to be reentering the blogging world. I've missed you!

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