Back to School

Let's start first with my favorite person to write about: Nathan. I have only these 2 pictures since I last posted. Sometimes my camera is in the wrong part of the house when I want to snap a picture and the moment is over before I can run and get it. Nate is still jabbering away saying so many words I have lost count. He's stringing together words even more now into little baby-sized sentences. He still loves to say Daddy's car or Mommy's eyes. He's very good at telling us what belongs to certain people. He is now saying Nana for Grandma and he has names for our dogs (Nano and Bear). Nate runs, jumps and climbs all day long and he loves to be outside even when it is 110+ degrees outside. His Cars obsession continues and he still likes E-Pooh and Rarar (Eyeore). I will try to take more pictures of Nate this week so I have more to share.

Nate loves black olives like Mommy. Daddy taught him how to put them on his finger before he eats them.

As I said before I am teaching Kindergarten this year. At this point I do not have a contract as a teacher, but I am a long term sub. A few hour after my Principal put my name in for hiring they started another hiring freeze. There is still hope that I will get a contract sometime soon, but I wouldn't be too surprised if I didn't. It has been a chaotic, stressful and emotional couple of weeks getting ready and going back to work full time for the first time since August 2009. It's been hard on Nate being away from us for so many hours each day and hard on me too adjusting to not seeing him very much during the week. I have been so incredibly busy that I haven't had a single day or night for 2 weeks (Until last night) that I didn't come home and work too. I'll be spending more time in my classroom this afternoon to get caught up on some things that I just don't have time for during the workday. Hopefully I won't need to go in during the weekend very often.

Kindergarten was my last choice of grades to teach, but after a full week with the kids it's getting better. I still prefer 3rd grade and up for sure, but I think I will come to like Kinder more s the year goes on. I have 29 kids in my AM class and 31 in my PM class. I do not get an aide to help me until I have 34 in both classes. Luckily there have been people coming in to help here and there. It is a lot of work and my PM class is definitely much more challenging than my AM class. Hopefully I can get them on track soon.

This is what my classroom looked like in the beginning. It was actually much worse because there were tables from other parts of the school being stored in my room. My school has been under construction and my room was the last to be ready in the whole school. There are still construction workers at our school working every day. I didn't get to start arranging my room until Friday and luckily had help from Eddie, Nate, Mom and Dad on Saturday to help me finish setting up. Somehow I missed pulling the after pictures off my camera so I'll post those later.

Eddie's job at Zappos is going well. He graduated last week from the training portion and is not in incubation or probation. In two week he will be out of incubation. His schedule will change then so he will have Tuesday and Wednesday off and work from 5:30 - 2 pm. Unfortunately he'll beworking on Sundays for a little while, but he will be able to stay home with Nate 2 days of the week. Eddie had his first Nerf gun war last week. I know he'd been looking forward to that.

All for now. I'll try to post more often if I can.