Wordless Wednesday

Sniff, sniff...I can't believe how grown-up my baby is edition.

Randomness

Pros & Cons of this early cooler weather:

Pro:  We lit a fire last night and enjoyed its warmth while we watched TV.

Con:  Showering when the house is freezing at 6:00 a.m.

Pro:  Oh shoot...can't think of another one.

Con: I exchanged my summer clothes for my winter ones.

Con: My nose is running because I'm cold.

Con: It seems like there is way more laundry when we start wearing bulkier clothing.

Con:  My skin is already getting so dry...despite plenty of moisturizing.  A return of my eczema is just around the corner I'm sure. 

Clearly - I am not enjoying this weather!  Really, I truly like fall.  I'm just not ready for it to be this cold yet.  I'm not ready to haul out my coats.  I am enjoying the changing leaves and all that...but I would take a few more days in the 70's, please.

Lunch yesterday was embarrassing.  I looked at the tray of one of my co-workers and asked him what those green little heads of lettuce were.  Apparently, I've never seen a brussel sprout in my life.  I'm not going to lie...I got made fun of.  A lot.  I'm 36 years old and have never seen them...much less eaten them.  In my mind they looked a lot more like a bean sprout...or something sprout-like.  Or maybe like asparagus (which I am not sure I have ever eaten either, by the way, but I DO know what it looks like).

Luke brings home a self-report each Friday that gives us an idea of how his week went.  They rate their behavior, tell something they need to work on, and then tell about something they learned through the week.  He usually rates his behavior as "Excellent", but yesterday he marked it as "Good", and said he needed to work on talking less.  When your mom is a teacher...that's not okay.  Especially when you ask him about it and he tells you that he's the one who starts the talking.  You see...when you're a teacher, you know that teachers' kids are either the best kids you'll ever have...or the worst.  Seriously.  I am determined that my kid will not be in the latter category.  He knows that some of his favorite things are on the line if we hear that he doesn't get his under control.  Poor kid...

That about wraps up the random things I'm thinking about this morning!

Reason #236 Why I Love Teaching Middle School

When the lesson for the day has gone completely smoothly all day long until the last group of the last class does their part.  We've been talking about context clues, so yesterday, I read the kids a story paragraph by paragraph and they had to use context clues to figure out what a nonsense word in the story meant.  Today, they worked in groups to write their own very short "story" with a nonsense word, with the goal of providing enough context that the rest of the class could guess what they were talking about.  They did great all day long.  Even this group, I truly believe, had good intentions.  But when you read it out loud...in a room full of 7th graders...chaos rules.  See for yourself:

“Every day, people comment on my flooby.  Sometime, they even touch my flooby.  I don’t see how my flooby is so interesting.  My mom says my flooby is one-of-a-kind . Guys date me because of my flooby.  Then again, my flooby is really soft.”

Can you guess what flooby is?  Interestingly enough, in the midst of the laughter of 20 seventh graders who could hardly contain themselves, the first person to guess, got it right.