The Surprise

Everyone loves a good surprise.... I wanted to really surprise my family with "the news" on Christmas. Last year, Lesley, did an excellent job of surprising my mom with a picture of Anna's ultrasound on Christmas morning. In my head I thought everyone suspecting something was up, but really they didn't. Mikey and I had ordered Christmas crackers to fill with our own surprise for Christmas dinner. I had stuffed each cracker with plastic babies and a note that said Baby Brown was coming. When we got to my parents house, I discovered that the ones my mom had already got were quite different then ours. Secretly one morning I opened each of the crackers, emptied them out, and put our surprises in them. I was so nervous the whole day because I thought that someone might say something about the crackers, but no one did. Right before we prayed for dinner, we popped our crackers! I was so nervous, I was looking around and everyone was saying, "Why do we all have plastic babies in ours?" Matthew finally read the note and showed it to my mom, then they all understood! My family was shocked and excited. I didn't have to hold on to that secret any longer!

Sweet Summer Baby

Here is our newest family picture :) Baby is now 13 weeks old and looking good!

Don't you dare do that!! (A post about teaching)

Earlier in the year I would often browse through all the cute teacher blogs out there. I have a list on my blog that I like to look through but the past couple months I haven't wanted to even read them. The cute classrooms, cute lesson plans, and cute ideas are another world to me. I was discouraged because I knew my classroom could never be like that, not the class I have now. There is not time to find the perfect "font" for lessons or incorporate fun art projects. I had 10 sets of markers in the beginning of the year, we have pulled them out to use every so often, now I am missing most. I had a paper tray for blank lined paper but started to notice that the paper ran out quite fast....I have to hold on to my white board markers or those to go "missing." When I have a sub I usually lock up everything. My personal class library will most likely be destroyed by the end of the year (what ever happened to treating your books with love and care?). I try every day to make my teaching engaging and fun. My kids have suddenly decided that fighting is cool, so I am now breaking up fights at least once a week. Rather than focus on adjectives and pronouns, we are reviewing how to stand in line, how to talk with kindness, modeling examples of helping one another. I am often giving students pep talks to encourage them to not give, try their hardest, and act like a scholar. My students need instant gratification...week long or month long class points is too far of a concept. I give daily Scholar of the Day awards to students that set a good example for ANYTHING. They really love it, but of course before I started giving out the awards I had to teach them what they do when they don't receive them. No negative comments, we only say positive things to our classmates. We had to practice this several times because I knew, that if some students were not chosen they would throw their books across the room. So maybe in some fairy tale classroom their are students who work well together in groups and have color coded bulletin boards....but in my class its.... making it through the day with no tears, no punches, no stealing, and of course the clincher that EVERY student should be above grade level for state testing. No pressure on me :)

Christmas in California and Colorado

The first part of Christmas vacation was spend in Redlands and then we drove over to Murrieta to be with my family. We spend a lot of time playing with sweet Anna. She loves to read and actually read that book to us! Amazing.

We also spend some time at the beach in La Jolla. Here we all are, all the kids!
Mikey and I loved having this time off, where we could be together everyday, all day!
On Wednesday after Christmas we flew to Colorado. Here we are with Mikey's family. We had such a good time.
We even made it to a Broncos game. Notice Mikey's shirt. They lost that day but it was still fun to be there.
On to 2012!!! Big things are in store..... I can just feel it!