My Daffodils Bloomed!

You may wonder why that's important, but it is. I've been impatiently waiting for spring to come to see what came up from my planting adventure last fall. The tulips are on their way as well, but I think it'll be a couple more weeks before those come up. I also decided I wasn't going to buy any more plants until the daffodils bloomed, so today when I saw their yellow, sunny blooms, I went to walmart and purchased to yellow pansies and a purple something or other that will go in a container for now and in the flowerbed later. I'm really looking forward to making my flowerbeds gorgeous. I'm starting with the one out front to see how it works. Should I plant things in a regular pattern, mix it up a bit, mix colors or go for a pop of one color? Truthfully I'm ridiculously envious of the pictures in those gardening magazines...but there is one thing I've learned from reading them and that is most of those gardens took years and years of hard work to look like that. I keep reminding myself of that so I won't get too down on the shape of my flowerbeds.

In other news I just lined up my internship for the fall. I'll be interning under Stacey Heller at Critzer Elementary School. I feel weird about interning at an elementary school because I haven't really been in an elementary school for any substatial time since...hmmm....since I was in elementary school eons ago. I just keep telling myself that teaching is teaching, parents are parents and students are students and it'll all be okay. I really DO want to do this internship to keep my options open as far as getting an elementary principalship. Who knows, maybe I'll even learn to like it. Maybe kids who actually fear the principal and getting in trouble will be a refreshing change. Maybe parents who care will actually restore my faith in parents in general.

Potty Training Failure

This weekend we tried potty training Colby. I'm woman enough to admit that no training happened, just lots of wet clothes and carpet. Saturday started with promise. Colby sat on his little potty and peed and even "dropped a duece" as some of my friends might say :-) After much praise and calling people to brag, he didn't use the potty anymore all weekend. He peed three times on the carpet, once in my bed (on my side much to my chagrin), twice at church, and once after I laid him down to take a nap - none of them in the toilet. I got a little frustrated and put him in a diaper to take a nap. I guess I'll try again when he wakes up. I know he's old enough to use the potty, it just seems like he can't connect the feeling that he needs to pee to the fact that he needs to go sit on the potty. I might need to make a chart and use stickers or something to get him to go. When all else fails, use bribery I suppose.

In other news I just made two pumpkin pies for pi day tomorrow. You know, pi - 3.14. Tomorrow is 3/14/11.

I Feel Stupid

I had to take Rolly to the vet and I got made to feel stupid. If I'm honest I'll admit that my feelings were hurt. I'm not used to taking care of puppies. I've only had full grown dogs up until this point who are fairly low maintenence. I don't claim to know how to house train, though he seems to be learning by example pretty well, and I was uncertain how much to feed Rolly and how often, but everything seemed to be going well since he was growing and acting playful and such. Today I let him inside around 5:30 and noticed he was shaking. I decided to take him to the vet where I was informed that they couldn't find anything wrong and that he should be eating at least twice a day, which he had been except for today. They thought he had low blood sugar and wanted to keep him overnight. I said okay even though I almost fainted when I looked at the charges for it. So at any rate I'm going to ask for the vets advice on when and how much he should be eating so that they won't think that I'm some sort of hateful dog owner who doesn't take care of her dogs and so we don't have this problem again. I was also told that he shouldn't be staying outside that long, though he was only onside from about 1:30 to 5:30. Yeah it was rainy, but he has dry places to hang out and it wasn't incredibly cold. I'm sure she didn't mean to sound hateful, but I guess I just felt stupid and ignorant, which I certainly don't enjoy.

The stuff with Rolly was the end of a hectic day. I got up early to drive to Abingdon for my internship where we talked about stuff fromm 9-12 and then I had to drive all the way back. And then this! It was a crazy day and might have been avoided if I had thought to put some dog food in Rolly's bowl this morning, but my brain was going in all sorts of directions and I got distracted. I won't get distracted again because my bank accouny can't take it.

Meet Rolly

One cute pup!



Definately not a lap dog cause he's scared in this pic.




:-)

Rolly

Several weeks ago while working Brandon got called out to go pick up a dog. When animal control isn't on duty it's up to normal patrol officers to go out and get them. Usually he picks up pits and other random dogs, but this time he picked up a puppy. He thought it was so cute that he sent me a picture and named him Rolly. He considered letting him ride around in his car with him because he was sweet and small and generally the kind of puppy that melts your heart, but he couldn't do that and took him over to the animal control building. Of course he told me all about him and mentioned him often over the next week or so. I encouraged him to ask about him and when he did he found out that we could foster him if we wanted so on Monday he went and got him and we are officially the foster parents of Rolly. Rolly is a Bernese mountain dog (with a dose of boxer) so he might grow to be pretty big, but for now he's a small, cute puppy that is much better behaved than Hershey. The one plus about Hershey is that he was house trained, which Rolly isn't. When he came to us Rolly had an upper respitory infection so we've been giving him antibiotics (that we don't have to pay for because we're fostering him). Colby is doing well with Rolly - he's his new buddy. And now I'm completely and utterly outnumbered when it comes to the male/female ratio around the house.

Not My Favorite School Day

So, we've been doing Social Studies remediation so that the kids that didn't pass the Social Studies SOL might pass on the retake. Out of our group of 10 only 2 passed. I felt really bad because those kids worked really hard and some of them REALLY knew their stuff. I can't help but think that the people who write those SOL tests are purposely wording things to make it difficult. Another English teacher went with me to tell them whether they passed or failed - it was one of the hardest things we've done in a while. Overall only 26% of the kids who retook the test passed.

Monday :-/

So...Colby is feeling better, somewhat. He is still doing a lot of cuddling and fussing and generally not being very pleasant to be around. I'm hoping that by the end of the week he'll be back to normal.

In other news we're starting a remediation schedule at school. I think its sort of...stupid. Sorry, I can't think of another word for it. We're supposed to take 30 minutes at the end of class on Wednesdays and either remediate or do enrichment. I find it stupid because if you're a decent teacher, you spend time remediating when your kids don't get a concept. I don't really need to have my principal tell me to remediate - If they don't get verbs we spend extra time on verbs (though why a 9th grader wouldn't get verbs is beyond me). I think I'll spend some time reading nonfiction articles and maybe do some activites with them. Other English teachers have thrown out the idea of doing silent reading, but I already do that on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'm sure I'll think of something productive to do like a good little teacher. I'll let you know what happens.