Dear Family, Friends, and anyone else who cares to read this,

I just washed a huge load of dishes.

Yesterday, I baked two recipes that were new to me and shared them with others at our fellowship. I made a blueberry cake and strawberry oatmeal squares. They were yummy--thus there are none left to snack on right now. I think that I will make the strawberry oatmeal squares much more often--they were so simple, few ingredients, and short bake time. These are important factors when trying to work up the motivation to bake in my easy-bake sized oven.

Trying to plan for this week. It's taking longer than usual because my motivation is very low right now. I'm starting to teach grammar (adding it to our schedule) this week, and since this is a brand new curriculum for me, it means a little extra work than usual in preparing for the lessons. It will be all right...once I get started. I also need to go through all my reading assessments that I finally finished and put together the kids' results. It will be good to have a concise report about who I am teaching. I already have a good idea about their reading levels, but this will be another way to think about their levels and something to track their progress by throughout the year.

The gradebook that we use is finally up and running--which means that I should finish my grading and actually put it into the system. I'm the worst about keeping up with grading. It's my bane. I wish that there was a magical fairy who graded while I slept, or that there was a robot version of me that could calculate all of my students' work, factoring in English levels, effort put forward, and such while I watch a movie.

A few words about how Adam is doing (from my perspective) as a second year teacher. He seems to always have time---even though he only has 1 planning period now. We've been waking up before 5am so that we can go to school on the earliest staff bus. This helps Adam to get more done before the students start to arrive. His 8th graders are painting a mural on one of his classroom walls. It's of the periodic table. Some of his other students made some cool models of the earth's layers--made out of all sorts of materials. He needs to take pictures of these things so that we can post them on here.

Today has been a good Sunday. I even got an unexpected afternoon nap! The air is starting to feel a little cooler outside, it's less humid too. I wonder how much longer we will be able to ride our bikes before it becomes miserably cold?

All right. Off to make a treat for my drama elective kids, finish planning, finish grading, and then it's bed time.

~julie