Survey Says...

According to recent reports {read: googling}, our dog is suffering from Canine Cognitive Dysfunction.  This would explain his recent behavior, like literally tearing our carpet:

When I got home today, I noticed he was tearing up the door frame in our kitchen to the garage.  Ugh!  I love my dog (duh!), but this behavior is crazy!  The hubby is a lot more patient than I am because if it were up to me, he'd be crated.  The hubby decided we'll put something heavy in front of the door when we leave. 

Super.

Anyways, on to the survey.  I'm linking up with 5th Grade Rocks, 5th Grade Rules.  I just found her blog from Jill over at Marvelous Multiagers!  I hope you head over and link up...I just love surveys and linkys.  Like Kristin, they give me something to post about.

1. Are you married, do you have a bf, or are you flying free as a single lady/man?
I am married to my high school sweetheart!  We've been together over 10 years!

2. Where did you grow up?

Pretty much the same place I live now:  Charleston, South Carolina!  I love it here and if you are ever wondering where to go on vacation, I strongly suggest Charleston!  It's beautiful here :)

3. Do you have any pets? If so, what kind and what is his/her name?

Gizmo, who is currently on a mission to destroy our home.  It's sad though, because I think he's getting near the end.  He is 13 years old after all!

4. What is a favorite tv show you are embarrassed to admit to watching?
Hmm...that's a toughy.  I love mindless T.V. like the Real Housewives of OC & NJ. 

5. Are you a saver or a spender?
A little bit of both.  I am definitely a bargain shopper though :)

6. What is your favorite children's book?
I love The Lorax!

7. Were you the class clown, teacher's pet, or neither?
I was definitely the teacher's pet.  Never wanted to get in trouble, but I also wasn't a suck up.  Just more of a goody two shoes

8. Who is your favorite athletic team?
USC GOOOOOOOO COCKS!  I cannot wait for football season (and to see if our baseball team will make it a three-peat this year).  AND on the 21 (of April), I'm off to the Ladies Clinic where you can meet staff AND football players...whoop whoop!  Okay, I may be slightly obsessed.
9. Where did you go on your last REALLY fun vacation?
We went on a cruise with my husband's family a little over a year ago.  So fun!

10. Who is your favorite actor? Actress?
Actor-Ryan Gosling.  DUH.  Actress...I don't really have one.

source

11. Tell about the last time you cried because you were happy.
When the hubby and I watched The Hangover 2.  Have you seen it?  Oh my word, this scene in particular cracked me up!  {warning: bad language in that scene!}

Note:  If you haven't seen it and watched that video, it probably makes no sense why it was so funny :)

12. What is your favorite season?
Summer, even though it is SO dang hot here.  Ugh! 

13. What is your biggest regret?

I really don't have any regrets. 

14. What food do you just NOT like at all?
Ha, this could go on FOREVER.  I'm an extremely picky eater.  I have the palette of a 5 year old kid.

I don't even like beer or coffee!

15. Who was your most memorable teacher, and why?
Hmm...that's a toughie.  I had some really good teachers.  I have to say I owe a lot to my 7th grade Math teacher, Mrs. Bunch.  It was announced that if you had good grades in her class (don't remember the cut off), that you would be able to take Algebra I in 8th grade.  All of my friends made it, but I didn't.  I had to actually get serious and do my work and try {crazy though, huh?!}, and I was able to get in the class as well.  That jump started me to take school seriously and I've never looked back.

My question:
What school years were your favorite and why?
I really liked elementary school and college and wish I could go back to either one of them.  They were really awesome times.

I hope you head on over and link up too!

Lunchbox Linky!

I am still trying to catch up for everything I've missed in blogland.  My nap yesterday afternoon on the couch didn't help.  Neither did my trip to Costco today.

First of all, have you hit up Target recently?  Check out what was on clearance a couple of weeks ago:

Sharpie pens for only $9.08 (normally $18.19).  I've heard nothing but great things about these pens, although I have shockingly not opened them yet.

Tara, over at 4th Grade Frolics is having a lunch box linky. 

I won't lie...mine's not pretty.  Unlike that super cute button for the linky :)

Here's my lunchbox:

I got it at Costco a couple of years ago.  I like it because it is BIG.  My mother-in-law got me a cute 31 lunchbag to match my teacher bag, but I've found it's a little too small.  Here's what was in my lunch bag today:

• Ham & Cheese Lean pocket complete with a plate to heat it up on & a plastic fork & knife.  I like to be prepared & not have to ask the cafeteria staff for things to heat it up on.  The plate just makes things easier :) I have this lunch probably at least once a week, if not more.
• Yogurt.  I didn't even eat this today.  Maybe tomorrow...
• Diet Dr. Pepper...my new obsession.  I always have a diet drink at lunch to help fill me up.

At the last minute, I decided to add some real fruit: strawberries!

This is the embarassing part.  All of this is stuff that pretty much permanently lives in my lunchbox, until I decide to eat it {usually when I'm ravenous on the way home}

Except for the popcorn.  That's reserved for faculty meetings or my planning.

So here are the stats on my lunch:

• We go to lunch at 11:35 and have 20 minutes for lunch.  That means we're supposed to be leaving by 11:55.  By the time I sit my kids down and heat up my lunch, I have about 5-10 minutes to shovel food in my pie-hole.  I'm sure I'm doing massive internal damage eating so quickly, but what can ya do?
• I have to eat with my kiddos.  Last year, there was a big push for teachers to have at least one duty free lunch every week.  At my school we were able to have two.  However, whenever I went back to get them, they were always loud and crazy.  Even if I can't get a duty free lunch, I'd love to eat at an adults only table.  Right now, only special area teachers do that.  A little adult conversation would be nice.

I am SO jealous of those of you that can eat in your room or with other teachers and can just drop your kiddos off. 

Here's my lunchbox all packed up and ready to go {with the plate, you can see why I need a big lunchbox :) }  I also like that the straps are long enough that I can carry it like a purse on my shoulder.

So what's lunch like where you work?  I am always so amazed to see what it's like for other teachers in other places.  I hope you head over and link up!  There's also a chance to win a ca-ute 31 lunch box!

Cycles & The Hunger Games

I have been off the radar for over a week. 

I go through cycles.  Here's kiiiinda what it looks like for me.

If you're wondering, I'm currently somewhere between the right side and the top.  I feel totally caught up with stuff for my job, but have some lots work to do for grad school.  Luckily, the college is on Spring Break this week.  Holla!

So, let's move on.

The Hunger Games.

Did you see it?  I LOVED it!  I'm going back to see it on Sunday with my sister and my niece.  I can't wait!  I will say the book is better (isn't it always?!).  I just felt like some parts weren't quite as developed as I would have liked.  Like when Katniss found out Peeta was with the Careers and at the end after they announced there could only be one victor.  I won't spoil it for those of you who haven't seen it yet, it just didn't totally match up with the book. 

Overall though,  I loved it.  Minus the fact that I didn't get to finish my Coke Icee.  They always show a bajillion previews.  It was during the last preview I realized I kinda had to go to the bathroom.  Luckily, the movie was a great distraction.

I'm enjoying reading other books, but I really miss Peeta, Katniss, & Gale.  I'm having withdrawals. 

Oh yeah, remember how I talked about the craziness that my dog had become?  Well, it appears I spoke too soon about all being well.  I'll explain more later, but I'll leave you with this picture...

Rollin'

Have you seen this commercial?



It has refreshed my liking of that song.  Yes, I listen to rap.  Honestly, I listen to anything that is catchy. 

So when I left for work yesterday, I knew exactly the song I was going to jam out to for my inaugural ride into work. 

Can't you tell this is the perfect "Riding Dirty" car?!

Unfortunately, it was kiiiiind of a fail.

You see, the CD player has a place for you to plug in your iPod mp3 player.  So, I plugged it in, chose my song, and off I went.  Only, it didn't sound quite right.  Why can't I hear that guy?

It took me until the 3rd song to realize that I didn't have the cord plugged in all the way.  DOH! 

For the record, the only part I like of that song is the chorus...it's so darn catchy!

Much thanks to Classy Confessions for rating my blog as a Top 10!

If you haven't visited her, head on over!  She's a new blogger AND just started an interim job so show her some love :) 

I promise I will do a later post with my nominees for a top 10 :)

Also, Lorraine from Fabulous 4th Grade Froggies is having a linky for 3rd, 4th, 5th grade bloggers.  If that applies to you, head on over and link up!  I know I'm going to be making sure I follow all of theirs :)

Here are some Pinterest finds I'm loving:

Source: technicolorkitcheninenglish.blogspot.com via Bonnie on Pinterest

I made this tonight for dinner.  Absolutely delicious.  We've had it several times and serve it over brown rice.  Yum-Oh!

Source: eisforexplore.blogspot.com via Bonnie on Pinterest

We did this on Monday and my kiddos really enjoyed it!  Then we went outside on a pollen hunt (killer on my allergies, but they really seemed to get it).

Speaking of which, we have officially hit spring and pollen here.  How about where you live?  I'm excited it's warm because that means dresses!  Today I wore my new dress from JCP.  It's supposed to be warm tomorrow as well so I'm off to decide on what to wear!

Lovely Blog Award

You all were so sweet after my last post!  I actually considered not even posting it, considering the hubby and I haven't really told anyone in our family about all of that stuff, but I knew how great and supportive the blogging community is.  Thanks for all of your congratulations! 
Elizabeth from Fun in Room 4B awarded me with the One Lovely Blog Award. 

If you are not a follower of hers, you need to run hop on over and follow her.  She is high-larious.  Seriously, this post had me laughing out loud.

Here are the rules:

1. Link back to the blog that gave you this cute award.

2. Pass this award to 15 other lovely bloggers...Might not be quite 15...

3. Follow the person who sent it to you! (duh...I have a following addiction).

Now to find 15 people who have not yet received this may be tough!  Here goes...

I know I should go and let all of these people know I have nominated them, but I am pooped!  I'm off to bed early.  Cannot wait to drive my new car to work tomorrow!  If only I didn't have to go to class afterwards.  Whomp-whomp.

Best News Ever!!!!!

So, I have had some really good past couple of days and here's why:

1.  I passed my evals!  YES!  Here's some background...

Evals go like this in our district: 

Your first year is your induction year. Mine was from 08-09.  In an extremely challenging school.  I'm talking the second day of my first year teacher (ever) I had a kid swinging to yard sticks at me during dismissal because I wouldn't give him his MP3 player back (which he of course was not supposed to have at school).

Your second year you undergo formal evaluation.  During formal evaluation, you are evaluated by at least 2 people in your building.  You get no feedback about how you're doing.  During my formal evals. from 09-10, you did not have to fill out a reflection form (where you could address all of those things like the kid who was on the verge of having a breakdown in your room or WOW that lesson was terrible).  We also got a new principal halfway through the year.  I had been told I was doing a great job and I was still teaching 5th grade at the same extremely challenging school.  Come my final conference with the new principal, I was shocked to find out I had failed.  She said my room wasn't organized (which yeah, it wasn't, but I hadn't been told about that before...) and that I joked around/was too sarcastic with my kids.  I pride myself on having a great rapport with my kids, so that kind of came as a shock. 

I couldn't believe it.  I came home and cried and the only person I told was my hubby (and one of my team members who was just as shocked as I was).  Eventually a couple more people I worked with found out, and none of them could believe it either.  Not that I'm saying I should have passed, but a little heads up/warning would've been nice.  I'm not the type of person that if you tell me I'm doing something wrong I won't correct it.

Last year I switched schools because the school I was at had to be restructured.  Basically, if you wanted to go back and teach there you had to reapply for your job and be reinterviewed.  No thank you.  So last year was kind of like another induction year.  The principal said I was doing great.  Whew.

This year, I've had to undergo formal evals. again.  Not only did I have to have 2 people from my building observe me, but I also had to have someone from the district evaluate me.  That was even more nerve wracking because I'm still in a rough school and you never know what people on the outside will think.  I actually failed my preliminary evals all because I used the wrong template for two things I had to do. 

Friday morning at 7 was my final conference.  I kept checking with the people who evaluated me to make sure everything was okay because as it turns out, if I failed, I would lose my teaching certificate.  That's a big deal.  I kept reassuring myself that I was doing fine, I'm a good teacher.  But there's always doubt sneaking up in your head.  However, I figured they wouldn't make me meet at 7 (right before my kids come in) if it was bad news.  I passed!  And one of the people who observed me said she felt bad about what they did at my old school because I could've been done with this a long time ago.

This has been such a relief.  I've been pretty stressed over this the past year and I'm so glad I can kind of relax now!

2.  I found out we won't have extra days added to our school year next year!  Whoop whoop!  Although, we found out about it in the paper, not from anyone official in the district.  But it's in the paper, so it's gotta be true, right?!

3.  I am selling my Honda tomorrow and will be driving my new car starting Tuesday! I bought my mother in law's Mazda Tribute and I'm stoked to finally drive it!

4.  I've actually consistently ran this past week!  Go me :)  I ran a mile last Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday, and yesterday.  Baby steps people, baby steps.

I'm off to get everything ready for another week of work.  Seriously, where did the weekend go?!

Field Trip Funnies

We have two field trips this week.  Yup...2.  Today we went on a trip to Ft. Sumter.  If you don't know, Ft. Sumter is where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.  It's on an island, so you have to take a boat to get there.

Here are some things you should know about my kiddos:
1.  I teach in a Title 1 school.
2.  Most of my kids haven't left the area they live in
3.  Most of my kiddos do not like water.

So I'm telling them yesterday that it's going to be cold and windy, especially on the boat ride over.

There was definitely some excitement then.  Questions & comments were flying...

"We're going on a real boat?" {"Yes"}

"I've never been on a real boat before!"
"Yes you have, we went on one at Charles Town Landing."

I'm going to interject here.  This is the boat we went on.  It does not move and stays at the dock:

"That's not a boat.  It doesn't move."

"Mrs. Walton, is the boat gonna move?" {Yes, how do you think we're going to get there if the boat doesn't move?}

"Boy, I'm scared of boats!  I'mma need a life thingy"

So that was pretty entertaining. 

Today, as we're walking up, one of my kids asks...

Wait for it...

"Are we getting on The Titanic?"

Huh?!  Keep in mind, they know what the Titanic is because I've seen them reading the book!

I'm happy to say we all survived the boat ride over, even though it was freezing.  However, I can't say the tourists enjoyed their ride over as much as we did...

So as we're listening to our little tour guide telling us about The Civil War and how it was between the North and the South, one of my little friends comes up to me and asks...

"When are we going to learn about the Indians?"

"What Indians?"

"I ain't had know."

Thanks for the clarification buddy...

I should also mention that this same student managed to have his pants on backwards A-L-L D-A-Y L-O-N-G.  Someone else mentioned this to me, but I couldn't tell.  It wasn't until we got back to school & were cleaning up litter when he yelled

"Aww man, my pants are on backwards!"

So that has been my day.  Quite funny, but definitely exhausting to say the least.  How was your Tuesday?  I'm celebrating no class tonight with working on work going to bed early.

I'll leave you with a picture of a little friend of mine (not backwards pants boy) hiding from me behind a tree because I asked him to sit down before he could play (since, oh I don't know, he pushed other kids on our field trip)...

That coat?  Yeah, that's where I asked him to sit...

March Currently

Okay, so I'm going to try a delayed post so I don't break the blogging twice in one day.  I'm of course hooking up with Farley over at Oh Boy 4th Grade for her March Currently.  Make sure you read the rules, especially for the 3 words!

Here's mine:

The 3 Words have to start with the first letter of your last name.  Lemme tell you...it is hard!  They have to be words that describe you in the following order:  Students, Friends, & Family.  I'm pretty sure my kiddos would call me wonderful (although it all depends on the day with some of them!).  They've said before "I like being in Mrs. Walton's class!"

The friends was kind of hard because I don't have a set group of people that I hang out with.  I kind of felt like Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed with the delloser stamp on my forehead!

My family thinks I am a nut (which I really am).  I'm most comfortable with them and I act all kinds of crazy!

I hope you head over and link up!  Can't wait to see what everyone is currently up to!

Issues...

I'm still here.  If you follow The Best Endings, you know I'm still alive and kickin'. 

I have some good excuses.  Really, I do.

Like I said in my last post, I've been busy finishing up things for my evals.

And I'd been procrastinating a little a lot with my grad school work so I have been super busy trying to finish up some assignments I had done nothing with.

About two weeks ago our dog started acting all funny.  Like would NOT leave us alone at night when we were sleeping, crawling on top of us, etc.  This is definitely out of character for him because night-night time is his favoritist time of day! 
On Thursday the 16th the hubby couldn't sleep because of him (like only got a couple of hours of sleep).  He went to bed super early Friday night and when I came to bed, I could just tell it wasn't going to be a good night.  I tried to fall asleep, but Giz was just so anxious.  Heavy breathing/panting, constant moving & laying/crawling on me.  So, I went to our "guest room," pulled out the hide-a-bed, and the Giz and I "slept" in there.  I got about 2-3 hours of sleep.  He acted the same and it was T-O-R-T-U-R-E!  There was one point where I was literally hiding under the covers from my pup.  Unfortunately, he always knew where I was.... 
So, we took him to our vet first thing Saturday morning (thank goodness for them being open on Saturday!) and spent about 3 hours there.  Over $300, x-rays, and blood work later all they could really find was a slight back issue (which we knew about) and a bladder infection. 
We had a BBQ to go to that afternoon and when we came back we tried to take a nap to no avail.  I HAD to get some sleep so we decided if he started acting up, we'd put him in the guest room all by himself.  We had to do that E-V-E-R-Y single night until the 28th.  He is finally seeming to be back to normal and sleeping through the night thank goodness! Although I guess I should point out he started a little last night around 4:30 a.m., but I'm thinking that was just a fluke :)

Last weekend we went shopping Friday night because the hubby is starting a new job!
Saturday we had my nieces birthday party.  Saturday night was a coworkers birthday party.  BUT, I had to skip it to work on grad school papers.
Sunday morning we had our tax appointment, went to Costco, and went to my in-laws house where I officially bought their car!  Whoop whoop!  Pictures to come soon, I promise.

Oh and then this weekend, I've been working on another paper for grad school and I noticed my search engines were messing up.  I would click on the link and it would take me to some funky web page that also had search results.  So I spent over 3 hours scanning the whole computer with Norton.  Problem not fixed.  So I downloaded some eraser thing (from Norton) and luckily that seemed to find the virus and get rid of it.  Hackers are so annoying!  I've also had to stop allowing Anonymous users to comment on the blog because I was so sick of spam!

So there are my excuses.  I love that I'm making excuses when I tell my kiddos all the time to not make them :)

In other news, I ran yesterday morning!  I can barely move today, but hey, I ran a mile so go me!  Seriously though, every fiber of my body hurts today.  I am cursing myself every time I have to go upstairs to tend to the laundry that we have a 2-story house.  My dad was right...2 story houses suck! 

Oh, and in other exciting news, I got 3 iPads to use with my class!  I currently only have 8 kiddos, so it works out nicely to have them use them if we have extra time at the end of small group instruction.  Yes, you read that correctly, 8 kids.  And half the time I have an associate teacher in my room!  I also use it as a reward.  I have one friend who doesn't listen or pay attention when I'm teaching so he is slowly learning that he has to do those things in order to play on the iPad.

I don't really have anything to share with you, unless you really wanna read my 21 page paper on Supporting and Mentoring Other Educators.  What, why not?! 

Thanks for hanging in there with me!