Horrifying Experience

So today I had an experience that is still bothering me long afterwards. I have to preface this by saying that I am in no way a perfect parent. I fail daily, but what I heard today from one parent left me heartsick and quite frankly horrified. I won't tell you under what circumstances I met this parent, but during the course of the conversation the parent admitted that they let their child smoke at home and in the car even though the child is underage. As a matter of fact, there were smoking rules for this child. The parent said that since everyone in the childs life smoked, there wasn't any point in trying to prevent the child from following their example. Here's an idea - quit smoking and be a positive example for your child. The parent also spoke about how she was being evicted from her apartment and was having trouble renting a trailer at the local trailer park. I felt terrible for that child. To have to grow up like that is an awful childhood. And whatsmore, I think the child will live the same sort of life as the parent, which makes me nauseous. There's a school in D.C. where low income boarding school where they are only at home for the weekends. This experince makes me think how wonderful something like that would be in our area so that students can be exposed to positive role models so that we can break this cycle of poverty. If I ever win the lottery or if Dave Ramsey ever makes me a billionaire, I know what I'm going to do with all the money.

Gorgeous Weather

So, prom was really good. The decorations were fabulous, most of the dresses were appropriate and there wan't a lot of bad behavior aside from the boy who put a hole in the drywall of the bathroom when he slammed the door back. I had fun slow dancing with Brandon and making jokes about the students. There were some bad things that happened too, mostly afterwards, but I can't post about those - Brandon fussed at me not too long ago about future employers checking my blog (not that I'm looking for a new job!) and not being pleased about badmouthing, so I'll only be pleasant when speaking about my job :-)

The weather would be super fabulous if it wasn't so dang windy! The temperature is nice I just can't take the breeze pushing me every which way and drying out my planters like the Sahara. Maybe I need to get a clothes line going on...with the wind everything would be dry in like 30 minutes! Not really. The weather has acutally been so nice that I'm considering hardening off my tomatoes and planting them...anybody think this is a good idea?

I'm super pumped to be going to visit my family over spring break. Of course it's supposed to rain on Friday for the drive, but it's supposed to be excellent weather for an easter egg hunt on Saturday and Sunday. I'm also really excited about eating ribs at my grandparents'. I secretly think they decided to do this to bribe us into coming...it worked!

Busy Week!

It has been one crazy busy week...

Several teachers and I took 150+ ninth graders to Radford University to see a production of Romeo and Juliet. We had all finished reading the play in class so it was pretty cool to go see it for real. The kids were pretty good - I only had to remove one student because he got an attitude with me after I seperated him from his buddies. He was taken care of the next day at school with some in school suspension. The play itself was pretty good. The kids were impressed by the fight scenes and got a good laugh over some inappropriate gestures during one scene. I thought it was true to Shakespeare, but I realized that I've probably read this play a few too many times because I could tell when they screwed up the dialogue. The Friar was particularly bad and screwed his lines up regularly. And Romeo - I deny you stars? Dude the line is: I defy you stars! Sorry...38 readings of Romeo and Juliet will do that to you!

I've been helping decorate for prom this week. I couldn't stay for very long because I had to go get Colby from daycare, but I got in a good hour and fifteen or twenty minutes for three days. And a teacher counds as like three kids, so that's like nine hours of kid time :-) The theme this year is cruise to paradise so we have a cruise ship on one side and paradise on the other. And this year I have a date! It's a lot of fun with Brandon :-)

And four years later, I still think about what happened at VT. I can still clearly remember where I was when I found out about the tragedy. I still think about Stack and how vibrant he used to be and in my head I picture him laughing always.

Happy Birthday Colby!

Today was Colby's third birthday. His birthday was kicked off several weeks ago when my mom and dad decided to buy him a new "ramblin' chuck" truck along with a special foods delivery. They were visiting and decided to do that while they were here to see him in person. Today was a beautiful day. It was 80 degrees with the sun shining. He got some really cool toys including a basketbakll hoop, a little people noah's ark and several new DVD's including a new Bear in the Big Blue House DVD (I was getting tired of the old one). He even got to eat something new - a tortilla pizza. We bought corn tortillas and topped with pizza sauce, cheese and spices. He ate the entire thing :-) It was a really good day, except there was no sitting on the potty.

Over the weekend there were tornados in Pulaski. An F2 touched down in a poor part of the town of Pulaski and another F1 touched down in Draper on the other side of the mountain from Pulaski. I know that there was a lot of damage to houses of residents who can't really afford it. I sincerely hope they had house insurance or renters insurance. The students are on a two hour late schedule tomorrow while us teachers go to work on time to see how we're supposed to handle this with our students. I feel really bad about everything and hope that things turn out okay.

Principal Gill

So yesterday I was at school from 8am to 9pm. Of course I worked my normal day slogging through Romeo and Juliet and grading like my life depends on it because grades are due. Then I morphed into Principal Gill and patrolled the sports events that day. Those sporting events were tennis, varsity softball, jv baseball, jv boys soccer and varsity boys soccer. It was a really nice day so I was pretty excited about being outside and getting in some intern hours and grading some papers and watching some of my students play sports - I have four boys who play baseball and two boys that play soccer. The first thing I noticed when I stepped out the door was that it was super windy. It was still warm, but I was concerned about my papers blowing away. I found a seat in the bleachers by the baseball field and graded during warmups. Brandon brought me dinner and we meandered over to softball to eat and watch a few innings. Between baseball and softball the sky got dark, but it was still decently warm. I walked Brandon out and walked over to the stadium for soccer. I watched the second half of JV and I got to watch my two students play. And by watch I mean I graded and looked up when the cheering piped up. It was all good...I could handly a 30 minute half. Then Varsity took the field and much to my dismay their halves are 40 minutes. I settled in, in a non-windy location and continued grading. Then it started to sprinkle. I was thinking great :-( I packed my papers and went to go stand near the concession stand. The way the wind was blowing I was able to stay pretty dry. At the end of regulation the score was tied and I was thinking "damn!" So I decided to go get my car, which was parked at the other end of the school grounds. I got a bit wet walking over there, but I pulled back over and watched the scoreboard until the end of the game from the comfort of my car. We lost the game just in time for it to start pouring, which made me glad I was in my car. I stayed long enough to make sure everyone scattered and went home. I was in my house at 9:15p.m. Now I know why high school principals get paid more money than other levels of principals. A 12+ hour day really takes it out of you.

Adventure in Rearranging!

We rearranged our living room this week. I don't know if it's the fact that spring has sprung that makes us want to do such things, but I really like it. I think that after two and a half years of not having cable we decided arranging our furniture around the TV is overrated. Now we have a sitting area and a reading area. Plus the bookshelf got decluttered. I don't know what it is about us and shelves, but if there's an open shelf, we need to put something on it besides a book. The really excellent thing is that the love seat is no longer in front of the closed side of our door. If you've never been to my house, let me just say that we have a door that is supposed to be a back door for our front door. It opens on one side and is a window on the other. With the house being so small we had the loveseat in front of the part that doesn't open. Now more sunlight can enter our small house and make it feel even more open. I can see the flowers I planted too!

Today the wind has been blowing like a hurricane outside. At times it seems like it's really nice outside and I get this idea that I might take Colby somewhere, but then a gust of wind blows everything sideways and I reconsider.