How Much Do You Make?!?

This week has been one of the craziest weeks in a long time. I had parent teacher conferences, the new quarter started in school, our full language arts curriculum finally came in, Drew left for San Diego this morning, and today we had the real first snow.

Before I get into all of that, I had a very interesting experience while I was shopping. I was talking to a lady at a craft store. She told me that it was too bad I hadn't come in on Thursday because one of the things I was buying would have been on sale. I said that I wouldn't have made it because of parent teacher conferences. After talking for a little while she asked me how long the parent teacher conferences had taken. My answer? Three days, four to eight or nine. She then asked if I get paid more for the week of conferences. Nope. We spoke for a little bit longer and she finally asked what a starting teacher makes. I told her (if you are interested, it is public knowledge and you can look it up at my district's website). I felt so grateful for her answer. She said. "You make how much?! That is ridiculous. I can't believe you work so hard." Sometimes, especially after a long week, it is good to know that someone appreciates what you do.

As you read a little before, I had my first parent teacher conferences this week. After three, 12-14 hour days my throat is so raw I could barely hear my own voice on Friday. It was good to make contact with almost all my parents. The other fifth grade teacher and I co-teach. Which means we switch classes and only teach two or three subjects. We decided it would be good to do conferences together so the parents could ask any questions they wanted. It did turn out to be good, but it made it so that we had to do 50 conferences. Needless to say, I am exhausted!

The new quarter has started and it is going to be awesome! I have so many fun things planned for the next few weeks. We are going to start to learn about the explorers who came to the Americas. Then on to colonization. This is always a hard topic for kids because they often sense a kind of injustice in the colonization process. I never want to gloss over the details, but 5th graders are so young. It is hard to find a good balance, but there are so many resources online that help teach students about the past in a fairly balanced and age appropriate way.

The school I work at uses an alternate curriculum from the one the district uses. This is awesome because it means our curriculum is brand new and has some of the newest research behind it. The bad side is that the full curriculum didn't come in until this week. For our in-service day yesterday the other fifth grade teacher and I inventoried the books. Because the books were so late coming in, they actually sent us 3 sets to make up for it! I have 98 student textbooks. Good thing I don't have 98 students.

Today was the real first snow of the year. It has flurried and and snowed, but never stuck. Today it stuck! For Drew this is something he looks forward to all year. For me, well, I hate snow. Mostly it's not the snow, but the cold. Our thermostat has been broken for a while, but today was especially horrible because it was so cold. The problem is that our thermostat has somehow been reset to Celsius. That time in high school when my chemistry teacher said that I would never need to know Celsius, that I could always look it up, he was wrong. I wish that I had memorized the conversion!

If you have read this to the end, congratulations! It has been a long week and a long post. Hopefully all the interesting things that happen to me will space themselves out a little bit.

We're Back!

Well, as you can tell if you look back at the last time there was a post it has been a while since we posted anything. The last post was done by Drew, and although I am sad to report that we still shop at Walmart, he is still happy to talk to anyone who wants to hear about it.

Since our last post a few things have happened in our lives. Drew graduated from Boise State University.

We moved back to Idaho Falls. For a few months we lived in an apartment in Shelley. We learned we were not really country people, which I think we knew before but had to give it a try anyway. As soon as we could we bought a house near downtown Idaho Falls.

The house was built in 1927 and had a few major repairs. The first big project was the bathroom. Which looked like this:

Yep, this was it! There was a toilet and this tub handheld shower combination. We thought we could just take the tile off the wall, but they were kind enough to cement it to the lathe and plaster. This meant when Drew took the tile off, the whole wall came with it! For about 6 months our bathroom looked about like this:

But in the end, it has turned out awesome. We owe a lot to my father-in-law who has been an amazing help and we couldn't have done this adventure without him.

In May, I graduated from Idaho State University. No pictures here because that following Monday I had foot surgery. The recovery has been long and hard. You never really know how much you rely on your feet, until you can't use one of them.

Since his graduation, Drew has been working for the Idaho National Lab here in Idaho Falls. He is loving it there, and he gets to travel to cool places like San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

I am now working at an elementary school. I teach fifth grade and have loved it so far! I'm sure that there will be many exciting stories to tell soon.

Life has had its ups and downs, but overall it has been good. Hopefully we can be a lot more consistent about writing and let only a few days go by, not a few years!