Camping & Swimming & Playdates

That pretty much sums up the last week of our lives. Declan has LOVED his swimming lessons. I have to say it's the first "sport" that he doesn't seem naturally inclined to do. I think it goes back to the fact that he never crawled. He didn't really get that "left, right, left, right" thing down? I don't know because all of his large and small motor skills seem excellent. Who knows. The important thing is he loves it. The worrisome thing is I still won't feel safe with him around water for quite a while (his other house is on a lake).


Below is a picture of his favorite shirt. This was received free when we purchased Lego Indy.
Camping this past weekend allowed plenty of opportunity for bike riding. Yes, he still has training wheels, it's been a difficult thing when his feet still barely touch the ground. He is the size of an average 4 & 1/2 year old boy. He is finally ready, but doesn't believe he is...I'm fine with the training wheels, but Grandpa really wants to see him riding without them.


Camping sure isn't what it use to be. All the kids had Nintendo DS' and so they were "racing" with Mario Kart at night in the tent.

Yes, another picture in the pool. I really like the look on his face. He had just finished floating and was VERY proud of himself.




I hope some of you checked out Dr. Horrible. The first few minutes, I really thought it wasn't for me, and then I made it to "Laundry Day" and I was hooked. So be sure to give it some time, Laundry Day is 3 minutes and 40 seconds in. Declan LOVES the songs (the ones I let him listen to). Maybe he'll be doing Theatre Camp next summer.

Remember, just click on the picture of Dr. Horrible and it will take you to Hulu.com for viewing.

If you haven't yet heard of Dr. Horrible, it's worth checking out. I loved it. Click on the above picture for a link.

Updates

iBook
I am proud to say that the hard drive replacement went fine and I'm 400.00 richer.

Swimming Lessons
As you can see Dec has been taking lessons. I opted for the every day classes, which has actually been a lot of fun. We'll be doing it again next week.

Geocaching
We have had two people find the geocache we hid. We're going to the beach this weekend and we'll be dropping our first travel bug. We called him Prehistoric Geo Dude.


Economy
Well it has been an amazing year watching the prices of gas, groceries and other products rise at a mind boggling pace. The good news? (well for me a single mom teacher with no big pay raises in my future). The price of the houses have fallen at the same crazy rate. I know that's a bummer for your home owners who purchased in the last couple of years. Those of you four or five years out...you'll be O.K. But holy fricken COW...I can afford to buy a house!!!!! I NEVER thought that would happen in the area I live. Now unfortunately, I spent the little nest egg I had from selling our house after the big split....I still have a reasonable amount in investments I can access easily. I also looked at my 401K and realized touching that money would be a big mistake. So...I've looked at some houses and I'm excited, nervous etc.. Ultimately, I think I'm going to wait a year, work intensely on saving and pursue this then. Afterall, I'm pretty confident that housing prices haven't bottomed out yet and the mortgage situation is squeezing out more and more buyers, especially others in my housing catagory (2 bedroom, 1 bath - tiny starter home).

So...I've worked out a budget and I need to stick to it. I actually am getting a pretty big pay raise this year due to several factors that will not likely happen again for quite a while..we'll see what I can pull off :)

Summer
In the meantime, I can't believe how fast Summer is flying by. I'm just enjoying hanging out with the boy and his friends and occasionally my friends.

Declan and his best buddy from school:
Declan having some fun in his pool with his buddy Solomon:

SCHOOL
I've looked at my tentative student roster for the fall. I have FOUR Alexanders in one class. I'm hoping to work out a trade with some of the other teachers "I'll give you two Alexanders for one Jason and one Jordan." O.K. they probably don't allow that....

Swimming Lessons

A week in the wilderness

We've been off at our favorite camping site. Much more fun now that we've discovered Geocashing. Discovered 4 "Travel Bugs". They are items you take from one cache and place in another. They have a code that you enter online. It's fun to see where the TB's have been. Ordered some for us.

We took my niece and nephew with us for the first few day. This is Declan and his cousin Nathan enjoying the hot tub.

Declan proudly displaying a cache.

Declan and his Grandma digging out a cache.  My parents went with us on a few cache hunts.  

This is one very steep canyon we went into to retrieve a cache.  This was definitely a challenge!  Those of you know know me IRL know I'm a little out of shape for rock climbing.  I suffered the next day.

We've had a great time.  We're heading home tomorrow, and doing a little Geocaching along the way.  We have 3 Travel Bugs with us so we'll be stopping to drop some off along the way.  Declan hasn't really been home in 3 weeks, so I'm sure he'll be glad to settle in and enjoy his pool.  This last photo is of Declan earlier today.  He didn't see a tree branch while out caching...it actually looks worse now than in this photo.  He's going to have a nice scab from his hairline to his chin...but it really is only a scratch and I'm sooo glad it missed his eye.  In the meantime, he's going to be getting a lot of comments when we're out in public.

Geocaching and Surgery

So, I've discovered a new hobby it's called geocaching. It's basically high tech treasure hunting and it's crazy how many caches there are. If you want to know more, check out geocaching.com. It seems like it will be a pretty fun activity to do with Declan this summer. It does require a GPS. I bought a Tomtom for a very reasonable 150.00. It's proving to be lots of fun in the car as well.

Here is a picture of some cache stuff I purchased today. Since I've found 3, I figure I'm ready to hide my own cache!



As for the surgery part of my post...my iBook died and so I took advantage of the great educators deal this summer and purchased a new MacBook...which came with a free iTouch! I was looking to upgrade the ram in my Apples (I can double the ram in both for less than 100 if I do it myself). After ordering my new memory...I figured perhaps I could get the iBook up and running. The tech person at the Apple store said it was a dead hard drive. I found one for 70 online and figured that I can do it myself and suddenly I have a laptop to sell worth about 400.00. The tech person said installing a hard drive on the iBook is VERY difficult, she said she wouldn't try it at home because it involves 50 screws...which was an odd thing for a tech person to say.



I'm pretty fearless and thought it would be fun, so tonight I disassembled my iBook. It took about 60 minutes and there were only 46 screws involved, not 50! So, it's now sitting in a box waiting for my new hard drive to arrive, let's hope it works. Below are the start and finish picture of phase one of the iBook surgery. I'm so proud of the little mess I made.


And as for my new Macbook, it's unbelievable how easy it is to install a new hard drive (if I ever need to). I'm sure I could do it in 5 minutes. TWO screws, it's right in the battery compartment - cool!

Friends

Over one Month ???

How can it possibly be that I've gone so long without blogging.

School was out on the 17th, and I spent the rest of the week on the interview committee (we were hiring to replace my partner teacher who "resigned"). I then quickly took off and went far away and hung out at a friends house for a little over a week. I love being at their house, I don't have to feel guilty about not cleaning or organizing my house. I've completely let it go during the past 3 months.

So...my first year of teaching is behind me. I already miss the kids. It would have been a wonderful year if it wasn't for my crazy teaching partner. Guess you can't have everything. Next year I'll be working with a very cool, interesting, and non-crazy person. I've spent the better part of this year hiding out in her room avoiding my teaching partner so I feel like I know her pretty well. I've called her my "unofficial mentor" teacher this year. I'm excited to be starting fresh next year.

Declan and I went on a short vacation during Memorial Day. This wonderful little town away from everything. Cute rustic lodge with a fantastic hot tub and community room (what in the heck do you call that?) Declan loved it, they had games out on every table and each evening we'd go down and play a game and eat popcorn. They also serve the most delicious Huckleberry waffles for breakfast. We're going back next week for 3 nights. My parents camp nearby, so this allows us to spend some time "camping" with my parents but not sleeping on the floor of their RV. We looked into buying an RV, but for now, this is just cheaper.





Declan is out of town for the week and I'm starting to miss him. I'm so use to our 3 day routine that when he is gone longer, it's obvious that something is missing :(

I have lots to do regarding school, so I'm busy with work (still avoiding cleaning my house). I'm putting together a curriculum outline of this VERY big unit we do at school. They've been doing it for 20 years...and no one has really ever organized things....well, at least not in a way that is helpful to new teachers. Many, many teachers have left 6th grade due to this particular program, but I'm not going to let it scare me off! I'm just going to organize it so that it feels less crazy to me.

I'm also taking a class, I am 3 credits away from my next pay bump. It would be silly not to get the credits this summer. I also just finished 4 classes to add an endorsement to my certificate- yeah me!

Well, that's all for tonight. I suspect with Summer, I should be posting more often.