I can’t quite decide which words to start with, so I’ll use the last ones we spoke to my dad:
“Well done good and faithful servant…come and share your master’s happiness!”
My mom’s mom died of breast cancer at 60. My mom was my age at the time, with two little kids at home. I was only 3, so I remember very little of this traumatic time for my mom. She purchased this ugly little statue during this time. I never knew where he came from, but she shared with me…
Read More
Things I’ve learned over the last week: Many healthcare providers use euphemisms for death. The palliative rep kept talking about a “landing place” – where a patient might go after deciding to switch to “comfort care” from active treatment. Basically, where a person goes to die. As we discussed further treatment options we asked the doctor about the cost/benefit of…
Read More
Thursday – is it Thursday? Update: my dad has been on a ventilator since Wednesday of last week, and heavily sedated too. We’ve learned that sedation isn’t like a reverse dimmer light switch – we assumed that you turn it down then the patient brightens right up. Nope! We need my dad to rouse so we can do a breathing…
Read More
This past week may have been the worst of my life. My dad was hospitalized last Monday as the result of a months long fight that began when one lung infection turned into pneumonia which turned into Covid which ended up as a staph infection that went septic. Are you tired yet? I sure am. I’ve been back and forth…
Read More
I have three kids who many mornings go to three different locations. Getting out the door on time is a challenge. Remembering everything we are supposed to is also a challenge. There is always room to grow. and improve. What the morning SHOULD look like Here is what school mornings are SUPPOSED to look like, as per the pretty color-coded…
Read More
Our second child, Little Miss, is almost four. Although I am not particularly girlie in nature, this girl is the Fancy Nanciest princess unicorn lover ever. Her favorite colors are pink and purple. Hubster and I had never really discussed what it meant to parent a little girl versus Spartacus who is very much all boy, but we’re learning along…
Read More
I feel like I have been making a lot of decisions lately. I’ve also been putting off a lot of decisions. Some of them feel monumental, but they probably aren’t. This is 2020, and it seems like everything is serious, and I have to take everything seriously. Not even washing my hands can be done half-heartedly. Staying home I decided…
Read More
About 20% of the time, Spartacus (6) and Little Miss (3) get along really well. The other 80% of the time, they exhibit typical sibling rivalry: “Me Too!” “She started it!” “He hit me!” “That’s mine!” “She’s copying me!” Oy. We can’t send them to their room because they share one (and it is nine feet square). Little Miss takes…
Read More
At 2:03 AM this morning, I ran my final semester grade calculation, thus wrapping up the formal administrative part of my eighth year in education.
I wrote my students one last email, and I thought it fitting to share here.
Eight years ago, I began my teaching journey. This week, I push pause on this adventure.
My children’s preschool teachers are AMAZING. They created bags of activities, recorded themselves reading books for circle time and hosting Jesus time, and they joined the pastor to record a chapel message. I WISH I were half that put together as a remote-learning teacher! Hubster teaches three section of junior World Religions, and three sections of sophomore Epistles. I have…
Read More
I am sitting in my classroom of five years, in the process of cleaning it out for awhile. Each of the 29 desks has a pile on it: old graded essays, vocabulary books, newspaper articles I meant to share with my students, boxes of tea, so many coffee mugs, art supplies…a little snippet of my interactions with hundreds of students….
Read More
If your five-year-old wants some hot cocoa, you perfect your non-cooking quarantine hot cocoa recipe for kids.
Spring break this year wasn’t glamorous. One kid got the flu, the other got annual shots, I got a cold, and of course it was a drill weekend for Hubster (It’s ALWAYS a drill weekend, it seems). Also it snowed. At any rate, there wasn’t a lot of extra time for sleep, projects, or even a ton of relaxing. Still,…
Read More
As the coronavirus totals exponentially increase, it feels like dominoes falling that no one can stop…so we played with dominoes.
This week Spartacus’ preschool class had been scheduled for a field trip to a puppet show at the library. Obviously the libraries are all now closed, and he was super bummed to miss out. SO we made our own puppet theater! Puppet Theater We told the story of the Good Samaritan for Jesus time. The sad set-upon Jewish traveler was…
Read More
Today, while I put Scoober Doo down for a nap, the other two got out their current favorite board game and played all by themselves (success!). They call it “The Poop Game” but its official name is “Chickapiglets.”