Losing the Battle

This morning Colby is feeling a lot better. He's causing mischief and starting to play with his toys again, so all it well in Colby's world.

It's quite amazing that in one week our house can go from extreme clean to crazy messy. I feel so lazy because I just don't WANT to clean the house. And I know exactly why: It's a losing battle. You can never really win the battle over a clean house because there will always be something or someone cluttering it up. I certainly don't want to live in a nasty house, but if all the laundry isn't put away or Colby leaves toys out occasionally, I'm not really worried about it.

Nice Spring Day

Colby has been sick for the last couple of days. He woke up yesterday with an extremely red eye. When we went to the doctor he was also running a fever. That mean he had to stay home for the rest of the week and he got some eye drops as well. I can tell he's still not feeling very well because all he's been doing today is laying around the house watching TV. But that's better than crying for nearly an hour, which he did yesterday. It's a helpless feeling when your child feels terrible and you can do nothing about it.

Today was super nice. While Colby was napping I cleaned up the back yard a bit. That meant cleaning up the abundance of dog poo (clearly that's a popular thing to do on one's day off). I didn't finish cleaning up the poo...I got hot! Anyway...there's still tulips and daffodils poking through in the front flower beds so I'm pretty excited about that :-)

I got a catalog from JCPenny today. I now have the itch to go shopping, but since we've started the Financial Peace University I feel like I can't. Maybe one or two things this month and one or two next month? Maybe that will be okay. Maybe I'll hit Ross and see if I can find some things I want for a much lower price. I did some looking around online to see what the trends are looking like for this spring and I'm now certain that I'm no fashionista. But what I did like: the jewel colored trench coat (short, not long), the t-shirt layered with a collared shirt, and of course the jewel colored cardigan.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Today I went to the Building Leadership Team meeting as part of my internship. I was suprised at how little they accomplished. I'm going to ask of that's a normal meeting because if it is...it explains a lot.

Over the weekend Brandon and I went out to dinner. We tried to go to Outback, but with a 65-80 minute wait we decided to go to Panera instead. After that we hit the used book sale in the mall and Ben and Jerry's. I got Brandon a card that plays a Taylor Swift song (he loves Taylor) and some Little Debbie cakes since I never buy those for him. I have yet to recieve anything, though I haven't seen Brandon since this morning when he was really sleepy and I won't see him until tomorrow afternoon. The only thing that sort of marred the weekend was my dear father-in-law's behavior. I hope that when my kids are grown that they still come over for Sunday dinner and that I never, ever loose sight of how blessed I am during those occasions. I hope I never keep a running tab of how much my kids owe me and that instead I always show them how much I love them.

Thoughts for the Day

Today I got to sit in on a meeting with my principals and their consultant (a principal at a larger high school in northern virginia). Two things became abundantly clear at this meeting.

1. I don't know that I would want my head principal's job. For every little decision there is too much to think about. The tiniest decisions require you to think about students, teachers, central office and community. The biggest decisions...well lets just say I don't know how my principal doesn't leave school every day with a migraine. I have so much more respect for him now that I've gotten a glimpse into the things he must think about on a daily basis.

2. My school leadership is out of touch with teachers and students. There was nothing specific that was said, but there were several times that I thought that they didn't know the faculty well if they thought that decision was going to go over well. Or that, that idea would create the nightmare classes I'd only want to see on a silver screen horror movie. Brandon and I talked about how loosing touch is a problem with almost all leadership including his leadership at the PD. I guess that's just one thing I'll have to remember when I become a principal - loosing touch isn't helpful in any way.

Wasted Day

Today was a waste. I have probably posted before that parent-teacher conferences are basically a waste of time in my high school. Today was an even more extraordinarily useless. First of all, it snowed last night. When I woke up this morning, the news said we were closed. It didn't say anything about conferences or anything. So being the good teacher I was, I checked my e-mail and discovered that parent-teacher conferences were still on and we were to report at noon. What the heck! Parents probably assumed we weren't even having conferences because the news said we were closed! I basically spent seven hours at school doing nothing but helping come up with ideas for prom, which I believe is going to be awesome. I met with one parent. Count 'em. One. And there were many teachers that didn't even get the message that they were supposed to be there!

Oh, funny story from today. I dropped Colby off at daycare just in time for lunch and had some time to kill before noon so I went to Walmart. I ran into one of my fellow teachers and we started talking. All the sudden out of the corner of our eyes we see this woman. We both had to do a double take because we weren't sure what this woman was wearing. Unfortunately for both of us, she was wearing daisy dukes. In the middle of winter. With snow on the ground. And she didn't have the figure Daisy had. We both lost our trains of thought while thinking abut how horrified we were and had a good laugh about it later at school.

Not Feeling Well

I have not been feeling well lately. I guess I have a bug - I've been tired, naseous (sp?), gassy and today I had a bit of a migraine and had to take something in the middle of fourth block. Thank goodness I had some ibuprofen in my purse. I don't know what's wrong with me, but three days later I sincerely want it to go away.

We got back the Social Studies SOL scores last week. They were not good. Apparently the state decided to revamp the test and make it so that the kids had to use some higher level thinking skills, which in theory is okay. It's not okay, though, to do something like that and not warn teachers. So our school freaked out and those kids that qualify for a retake (they got a 375-399 on the test - 400 is passing) now have to do this intensive remediation. They are asking the English teachers to help, but I have no idea what exactly we're supposed to do beside make sure the kids are taking the notes like they're supposed to. I had nightmares on Monday night about helping with the remediation so I didn't sleep well. I think the first day went well, though, so it will be alright. Pray that all these kids pass the second time around otherwise our pass percentage will stay in the 60s.

My Name is Julie and I am a Softy

Brandon frequently calls me a softy because I apparently care more about people in general than he does. That diagnosis was confirmed today in the front office. We had this girl who was SPED turned in for eight tardies. When we called her in, she wouldn't make eye contact with us or even tell us why she had been late. She seemed so scared. We put her out in the hallway and talked and I found out that she had only been in trouble for tardies and that for the last set of tardies, she'd been given 4 days of after school detention. I was like 'holy cow! 4 days for tardies!' and I felt really bad for her since I could tell she probably didn't fully understand everything. So my mentor was like 'do you want to call her mom?' and I shrugged and said 'sure.' Mom was pissed. She thought we shouldn't punish her daughter for being late since it was her fault because she overslept. I explained to her as best I could that we had to enforce the rules, but that we thought four days of detention was a bit excessive, so we knocked it down to two. After we sent the girl on her way, my mentor asked if I was nervous and I was like 'yeah, at the beginning'. I felt complimented when he said he couldn't tell in my voice.