Another year has passed.....

The last day of school has come and gone. With every year of teaching that I get under my belt, the last week of school becomes more and more routine. We always manage to successfully hold the kids captive for those last few days, doing our best to fill the school time hours with as many fun activities as we can manage. This year was no different. Each year holds its own little surprises; on Thursday of this week, as we were arranging the cafeteria for the huge 6th grade karaoke party, there was a major power outage that shut down the entire neighborhood. We were pretty sure we would be without power for the entire day, due to the severity of the problem, so the office was abuzz with plan B options for how to feed the student body with no power. But, I was abuzz with what to do with over 300 students who were supposed to keep their morning busy with bad singing and booty shaking. Shortly after the figurative "storm" of panicked activity, the lights miraculously came back on, lunch was prepared as planned, the karaoke party succeeded as planned, and the entire day was saved. Everything always works out in the end, this is true. That is a mantra that I need to remind myself of daily.

The sadness that did come with the last day of school included the reminder of all of our departing teachers. We will miss everyone dearly - this is a year of great turnover at Drake. A lot of teachers are moving away or moving on for one reason or another. My team member, Brooke, is leaving for Birmingham as soon as possible, and her departure will be especially difficult. Also, a member of our teaching family is fighting a brain tumor, which has many of us working through a veil of sadness. So, although the end of the year is always a welcome time, this year is accompanied with some struggles.

As you can tell by the tone of this post, I am absolutely exhausted. I will end now before I am accused of being a big ole Debbie Downer!

Love to all - Happy Summer!! - K

Dennis the Menace

One more little Saturday Morning Post

Jacks spent a lot of time this morning decorating the front step of the house with sidewalk chalk. He even fell off the step once, but he was so engrossed in his activity that he didn't cry at all! He's quite the little artist. Of course, as you can tell, the big artist in this house helped with the general design.

Mother's Day

Getting our Mother's Day pictures loaded on to my computer took some doing. Joe's fancy camera runs a regular route between home and school, so its general whereabouts tend to be a constant mystery to me. Often when I can find it, the memory card with the pictures I want is nowhere to be found. There are five or six cards that regularly circulate the same route as the camera, but not always at the same time. And sometimes, the memory card in question comes up missing; Joe usually misplaces things, but another problem is high school students and their sticky fingers. If something is in the art room, I think they believe that the item is up for grabs. They will take markers, scissors, paper, mat board, memory cards, digital cameras, Joe's sunglasses and watches, last week someone even took a can of spray adhesive!! Part of the problem is Joe's trusting nature, of course, but the other part is that kids are not all that good at realizing someone will miss that thing that was swiped. Note to parents....steal from your children so they realize how much it blows to lose things mysteriously. Good lesson, right?

Anyway, this past week has been a major struggle getting all the items that I needed in one place at one time to get the pictures that I wanted. But it finally happened.

Mother's Day is a celebration holiday that for some reason has become extremely important to me. I don't care much about birthdays, valentine's, anniversaries, etc....these are events that come and go before you realize it. Maybe it's because I feel that I've finally been indoctrinated into the society of mothers, so I feel entitled to good treatment on my big day. Well, I hate to disappoint those of you anxiously awaiting your first Mother's Day somewhere in your future. It isn't all it's cracked up to be. I hope that improves with time for me, but the two that I've had so far have been big, fat stinkers. I will not elaborate as to why I have had bad Mother's Days, but I'll just say that I'm still waiting to be appreciated. After some consulting with my girlfriends and family members, they usually have the same experience on Mother's Day, last Sunday being no exception.

My little joy from this Mother's Day was the photo shoot of me and Jacks at the Arboretum, which was Joe's last ditch effort to improve my day. Bad voodoo, or whatever ruins my Mother's Days, caused most of the pictures to be overexposed, but we managed to get a few good ones in. I attempted to fix some of the bad pictures in I-photo with some enhancement and special effects (see above and below).

I just hope everyone else had a much better Mother's Day than me!!

Oh - one more good thing i can account for from this Mother's Day - my sister sent me a plastic canvas, hand-made cottage. Whoever made this thing put a HUGE amount of work into it. If I had made it and sold it, I would have taken nothing less than $100 for the masterpiece. Carrie paid all of $3 for it - what a steal! Thanks, sister. I love it so much!

I can see the light!

Well, I haven't posted in a while. I've been basically numb to everything lately as I am in survival mode until the end of the school year; my life is on auto-pilot. So many things around the house are neglected come May each year because we are waiting with bated breath for that oh-so-valuable free time that non-educators are so green with envy about. People actually think that teaching is a cush gig because of vacations. What they don't realize is that when you work with children for 8 hours each day, you need vacations!

With all of the end of the year festivities upon us, and every classroom board labeled with a countdown of how many days of school are left, this morning I had a child ask me, "Mrs. Dyer, how many days are left in school?" I could not help but be sarcastic back to him. "Today is Thursday, and the last day of school is next Friday. Why don't you tell me how many days we have left?" As you can tell, my patience has completely run out.

Come less than two weeks, I will begin posts about exciting things happening in the Dyer household. Things like purging the house of clutter, making more tissue boxes and other plastic canvas crafts, catching up on overdue sewing projects, signing up for swim lessons, teaching summer school, building a modular deck in the back yard and setting up a play set for Jacks. Wait, did I say exciting things? Sorry, I meant to say that I'll get back to posting the everyday minutia of our lives once school is out. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, folks. We're gonna make it.

Oh yeah - and Joe and I are going to Jamaica in 70 days. So, there's another countdown that's on like donkey kong.

Jamaica, mon!

Love it!!!

I finished my first tissue box! Is this thing adorable or what?

Crafty Sister

It has come to my attention that I have "short shrifted" my sister in my craft blog. She has the crafting sickness, too, and her creations are quite impressive. As soon as I get a picture of it, I am going to post the cross stitched tissue box cover she made that is in the shape of a house. You remove the roof and the tissues are hidden underneath. The craftsmanship in that little house is amazing!!! She has created many cross stitched items that boggle the mind at how complicated they are. She used an obscure cross stitch pattern of our parents' church that someone found in the catacombs, or something, and she had it framed. It is more beautiful than a painting.
Although she is a geeky crafter like me, she manages to be much, much cooler than me. Not fair!