I hate freeways

I'm avoiding doing my homework right now. I'm also avoiding parental duties. Richard has a tennis class every Wednesday night so I am in charge of the bedtime routine. Instead of rounding up the kids into the bathroom, I'm ignoring...I mean I'm letting them watch "Over the Hedge" in my bedroom right now. I wish that I could just throw then into bed with out a bath but Richard would give me a look like I'm the worst parent in the world. Never mind that he will buy them any thing that they want. Sorry, I'll stop complaining now.

I did have a somewhat exciting weekend, although not how I would have liked. See the following pictures.

Yes, that is a pipe sticking out of my bumper. A four foot long, three inch diameter, metal pipe; the kind that they use in portable scafolding. I was driving to a friend's house to spend a couple hours with him and his family enjoying their pool. His son and Nathan are the same age and we are trying to get them to be friends. About two miles from their house, a semi truck runs over this pipe in the middle of the freeway and it gets sent spinning towards us. I swerve to avoid it but don't get out of the way entirely. At least I was able to take it off the freeway with me so no one else got hit. When the AAA guy came to help me fix my tire (which I somehow busted during this whole experience), he and his trainee just stared at the pipe rather dumfounded. AAA guy did help me put it into perspective when he said that we were really lucky. He then changed our tire much more quickly and safely than I could have (we were still on the shoulder of the freeway), took the pipe out, and sent us on our way (I'm really glad that I have AAA, never mind that Richard works there). There seems to be minimal damage to the car. The bumber is being replaced and the body was dented a little but the repair shop will just pound it back out. In a week and a $500 deductible latter, everything will be back to normal. Otherwise we are all just fine. Joshua, who was asleep at the time of the accident, didn't even wake up. When he did wake up, he and Nathan thought it was a great adventure. They were a little disapointed that it was a van that came out to change our tire and not a big tow truck. We then went on to our friends' house and had a good time swimming and eating lunch.

Summertime, and the living is easy

Do you think that Josh has a future as a Jazz musician? Probably not, but you never know. By the way, did you know that my kids are growing up? I didn't, it surprised the heck out of me. They both seem entirely too tall. Nathan will be starting kindergarten in about two weeks. And Josh seems to be entirely potty trained. Jessica, Richard and I have been working on it for the past year and a half (mostly Jessica, thank you again for that sis) but it still feels like it was all too easy and happened very quickly. Nathan is even showing signs that he may be reading soon. All of it is great, but a little scary too.
On another topic, today I made one of my favorite childhood dinners for dinner tonight (corned beef casserole and cabbage for those that wanted to know). When I finished putting the cubed cheese on top I looked at it and realised what a 50's dinner it was. Half of the ingredients are canned, including the meat, and to quote celebrity chef, Gorden Ramsey, it "looked like a pile of s***t." But it sure was yummy.

Random Cuteness

This is a little bit of a misnomer because although this post will be random, cuteness is subjective. I was talking with a co-woker who is on maternity leave right now and she was saying how she can totally understand all of us nuts, uh, parents, who just can't get enough of their kids and want everyone else to know. Also, not all of the stuff that that my kids have been up to lately is all that cute.
For starters, Nathan is getting to be quite a helper. Of course, at five years old he is still not always a help. On Saturday I was needing to catch up on the sleep that I had missed all week. Joshua was down for a nap and I had set Nathan up with a movie. I locked the front door and laid down in the living room so that if Nathan tried to go out the front or if something else happened, I'd be able to wake up. I was doozing when I noticed that Nathan hadn't settled down. He kept walking through the living room to the kitchen and rumaging arround there for something. It's not unusual for the boys to grab a utensil out of the drawer to play with and all of the dangerous stuff it out of the way so I wasn't worried enough to fully wake up. A little while later he goes back to the kitchen and comes back with a large stack of napkins. At this point I'm worrying a little, I mean why should he need napkins in my bedroom, but I just tell myself that it's just some paper and I didn't see him bring any food in there. A little while later he comes back through muttering about how much cleaning there is to do in the house. Silly me I just stayed on the couch. I actually did fall asleep after that until he decided that he wanted to hang our U.S. flag out side and opened up the front door to do so (see, my plan worked). I watched Nathan hang the flag and then realised that I had been laying down too long. If nothing else I needed to wake up Josh so that he wouldn't sleep to long. First thing that I noticed when getting up was that the floor was wet. Not to big of a deal with our wood floors, but definetly unusual. I then start walking back to my bedroom when I notice that there is baby powder on the floor, a lot of baby powder. To make this long story shorter, Nathan had spread about half a large bottle of baby powder all over the master bedroom and had then tried to clean it up with baby wipes, wet napkins, and a duster that he grabbed from the back closet. I appreciated the effort, but it just about took all the energy that I had got from my nap right out of me. I called Richard up a let him know that we were having dinner at a local fast food resurant becuase there was no way that I would be able to make dinner, clean up the mess, and keep the children alive long enough for him to get home from work. Only two of the three would be possible. Also, I figured that the kids needed to get out of the house and expend some energy on the play-place at Carl's Jr.
Joshua is getting more and more talkative. I still only understand about half of what he says but he it getting better at expressing himself and we are getting better at understanding him. He, like most children, has some words and phrases all his own. For example, when he wants to watch the "Alvin and the Chipmunks" video he asks to watch "chicka-bow-wow." This is refering to a line in the movie when Alvin says "bow-chicka-wow-wow" when meeting a cute girl. In fact it is one of Joshua's favorite lines to say whenever. Proabaly because Richard and I get such a kick out of it. It reminds me of when Richard taught our nephew Tim the words to "Brick House."

Getting into the swing of things

I have been back at school for about a week and a half now and I'm starting to feel like I know what I'm doing. I've been teaching for 1 1/2 years now. I started mid year with my first group of students. They had had a series of substitutes for the first semester and then they had me; I tried my best to not let them know that I had no idea what I was doing. I guess that I am still technically a 2nd year teacher but becuase I am now on my third set of students, I feel like I'm starting my third year. It is actually kind of dishartening becuase I am still looked at as being a very new teacher (which I know that I still am) but I have also seen many teachers come and go so I also feel a little bit like I have some longevity.
My new batch of students seem like a very good group. It they stay like this through the rest of the semester I will need to send a note to the middle school teachers letting them know how good of a job they are doing. I also have quite a few former students this year and it is awfully fun. A few are repeating Biology because they failed the first (or second) time. But there are a few that I had for Biology two years ago and are now in my Marine Biology class. It is a lot of fun to see all of these students again and even a bit of an ego booster that they are willing to take another one of my classes.
I even had on of my seniors tell me that she has decided to go to college to become a doctor, a brain surgen probably, all because of disecting a fetal pig in my class. She was particullay talented at taking the brain out.

The End is Coming...

...of my vacation that is. School starts back up again next week and I'm starting to get back into teaching mode. It's always weird to start the school year again because for me that happens near the beginning of summer. It's even weirder this time because I attended graduation ceremonies for some of my former students yesterday. They officially ended their high school careers yesterday, while next Tuesday I'll be getting a whole new batch starting their time in high school.
Here are a quick bunch of unscientific statistics (because I didn't take notes yesterday during the ceremonies) for you about Fremont High in south LA. We have about 5,000 students in four grades spread over three tracks (we are a year around school). Entering Freshmen class is usually something a little over one thousand strong. We had a little over 400 students graduate last night. The rest of the students are either progressing normally, or they are "pluses," as in "he is a nine plus" instead of being a 10th grader. Not a technical term really, but when you have enough kids failing too many classes to progress normally, you tend to make up terms to describe it quickly. So doing rough percentages, less than 50% of the students that enter our high school graduate. On the encouraging side, more than 75% of those graduates are planning on attending and have been accepted into a college or university. And of these students, they received an impressive amount of scholarships, grants and awards. I think that the principal said that the total was something like $300,000. I don't know what is typical, but I was impressed. Of course that only works out to be $1,000 per student but since I got diddly squat, I think that they did well.

Our Weekend with Austin

It is a lot of fun to meet a new friend. It's even funner to meet a new family member and become friends. About a few months ago, we got a phone call from Richard's older brother's ex-wife. She was pregnant when they split up but we didn't know much more than that. The baby is now a 14 year old teenager named Austin. He, his mother Tracy, and his younger sister Alyssa came to visit us this weekend where we got to help celebrate his birthday with him and he got to get to know his father's family. We had a nice, lazy day at the beach on Saturday, we celebrated his birthday on Sunday, and we had several nice meals with various groupings of the family. All designed to give us good "get-to-know-each-other-time." Austin and Randy got along great and have continued to communicate over the internet. All together it was a very good visit.

Happy 5th Birthday Nathan!

My baby is getting so big. Nathan had a pretty good birthday I think. It started on the actual day by being woken up before daddy left to go to work so that we could open presents together. We did leave Joshua asleep so that there wouldn't be any fighting over presents. And yes, that is Christmas wrapping paper.

A little more than a week later we had his birthday party. He had been asking for a party where he could invite friends over since last year. We invited friends from school, church, and all the family over. We played with stickers, jumped on a bounce house,


hit a pinata (my niece Jillian broke it), and enjoyed cake and ice cream. It was a lot of work, but mostly because Richard and I finished off a few outstanding back yard projects in the weeks before the party. Nathan was very happy with it all. He thought that it was a great day and had a wonderful time throughout the entire party. He was even a fairly good host, for a 5 year old.




The funniest thing about all of it is that two weeks after the party, the rental company hasn't picked up the bounce house and we still have it in the back yard.