"Can You Believe I'm Almost not a Second Grader Anymore?"

So says Luke to me tonight.  My answer is no, I can't believe it.  I feel like I've blinked and this school year has gone by.  Here he is at his awards ceremony and with his awards (minus one that didn't make it home) after school.

First he wouldn't look at me.

Then he would look at me, but didn't smile.

Then he did smile(?) and my camera stopped working so we couldn't try again.  I know both Luke and Brandon were terribly bummed about that...ha!

We are so proud of all his accomplishments.

Luke was thrilled to receive this Citizenship Award which only 2 people in his class received (one boy & one girl).  His classmates voted for him to receive it and we were just so proud of him.

Sniff, sniff...I don't think I'm ready for 3rd grade yet.

That's My Boy!

I got this e-mail from Luke's teacher today:

"Congratulations!!!

Luke has been nominated for our “Good Citizen Award”.  This is an award the kids vote on and he is very deserving.   SHHHHHH…This is going to be a surprise for him at our assembly on Thursday. "

Talk about making a mom's day. :)  A prayer I pray often for him is that he will grow up to be his own person and do the right thing regardless of what others around him are doing.  It's nice to see God's hand at work in him, and believe me, as he gets older, I'll be praying that prayer even harder.  

It was a nice way to end a long week.  Oh - and the 3 day weekend + summer break coming up don't hurt anything either!  

New Blog

Since I've been doing some really amazing work keeping up on this blog *insert sarcasm*, when I couldn't sleep last night, I came up with the wonderful idea of starting a new blog about books for my students.  Since I lost sleep over it last night, I worked on it today.  Keep in mind, I will be recommending Young Adult books appropriate for middle schoolers here, but if you like to read, there are many, many, many great YA books out there!

Check it out here!

Since it's been since February, let me catch you up with our lives.  School is out next week.  If I really wanted to feel bad about life, I would start thinking about how if we hadn't had all those snow days that tomorrow would be our last day of school.  But I don't want to feel bad about myself, so yay, we get out of school for the summer next week!

At the end of March, we had to say goodbye to Ginger.  I have not really been able to bring myself to write about it until now.  She had been suffering from congestive heart failure for the last few months, but seemed to be doing well until the middle of March when we had to hospitalize her because she was having trouble breathing.  We didn't realize how bad she was, but we vowed after her 3-night hospital stay that we would not let her get that bad again.  She came home for 2 weeks and was never really herself again.  However, I am so thankful for those 2 weeks, because even though she wasn't herself, we all tried to cherish every moment with her.  She started getting bad again, though, and we made the decision we never wanted to have to make.  We miss her terribly and had a few pretty rough weeks, but our hearts are starting to heal and her memories bring more smiles than tears these days.

Luke turned 8 about two days after we lost Ginger.  He handled it all like the champ he is.  We worked really hard to try to make his day special regardless of how sad we all were.  I'm so proud of this kid.  I can't believe he's mine sometimes.  He has a few days left of 2nd grade and it blows my mind that he'll be a 3rd grader this fall.

Those are the biggest things that have happened with us since February.  I have been reading a lot of books - shocker!  One day soon, I'll blog about some of my favorites I've read.  I'll try to stick with mainly adult books on this blog, though!