Thankful Tuesday

1. For the first three weeks of August I had very little energy. I think it was a combination of being ill (stomach bug and then a respiratory bug plus pink eye), having 15 people live in our house for part of that time, doing a lot more driving than usual (to Virginia and back and then for Nadia's theater camp), etc. I actually was leaning toward not going to Dutch Wonderland on August 21, and part of the reason I was at one point not planning to go was because I was so utterly tired I had no interest in going. And usually taking the kids to an amusement park is one of the highlights of the year for me. It's something I love to do, but it wasn't an appealing idea a few days before hand. Thankfully last week my energy level returned, which was very encouraging. I was starting to wonder if I had mono or something like that. I've gotten back into exercising. I'm not doing very much compared to the days when I used to run for four hours a week, but something is better than nothing. Once I start teaching, my plan is to exercise at least 20 minutes a day, five days a week (skipping

Tuesdays and Thursdays).

2. I will be teaching FT at Bloomsburg this fall, and my classes are all on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and we have a wonderful babysitter lined up who will homeschool my kiddos those days along with her son. I haven't gotten the official job offer as far as switching from PT to FT, and I don't know my salary yet. Hopefully by the end of this week I'll have things like an email account, key to my office and the computers in the classrooms, parking permit, access to the website where the students post their assignments for my classes, etc.

3. I taught the Bible story for grades K-5 on Sunday morning for the last time this year. I was asked to continue doing so, which was appreciated (always nice to feel wanted!), but I'll wait until next summer to teach the children again.

4. All my clearances have come back. The child abuse one came through on Sunday, and the results of the second time I was fingerprinted for the FBI came in the mail on Monday.

Unfortunately the red tape process on campus moves very slowly. I had been told on Friday I would be able to teach starting on Tuesday, but then yesterday I was told I can't start teaching until Thursday because HR hasn't issued me a contract yet, even though on August 9 I said YES I wanted to teach the classes. The red tape is unbelievably slow, even knowing the semester was going to start on August 28. The upside to them cancelling my Tuesday classes this week was that I had some more time to get ready for the first day, and I get to teach my own kids four days this week. Hopefully my pay for the semester (whatever it ends up being) isn't docked due to them cancelling the first day of my classes.

5. The kids and I were able to see our very first Little League World Series game on August 23.

6. The kids were in GPS again (they performed it in May at our church) on August 26 and 27. Paul's parents came up to see it on Saturday, and my dad drove up from Maryland to see it on

Sunday. He had been planning to spend Sunday night at our house, but due to the hurricane in Texas, Maurice moved his flight back to Austin from Saturday to yesterday, and my dad needed to drive back on Sunday night so he could make two round trips to the airport yesterday. First to take Maurice so he could fly back to Texas, and second to take the Towfighis to the airport so they could return to Turkey. He spent 2.5 hours with us before the musical, and then left from the church after it was over. In other words he spent far more time driving here and back than he did with us. We greatly appreciated him coming. He hadn't been able to make it to see their GPS performance in May. Oliver actually participated in this one. Ian had a small solo. Nadia had a speaking part (played the part of Emma) and a small solo. The funniest part for me (again) was watching Ian trying to figure out which fingers to use when showing the numbers 1-10 in the song about the ten commandments. I took some pictures and videos that hopefully I can upload at some

point. The child who really knocked my socks off was Ian - particularly on Saturday night. He sang with enthusiasm and really SMILED. Reminded me a little bit of Nadia when she sang in her first musical in August 2012. Can you believe this was her sixth summer singing in a musical at this church? She has two years left before she'll be too old to participate. There were far fewer kids in the program this year. Last year I remember breaking down and sobbing outside the church because I was missing my mom so much. She had missed the first one (in 2012) because the Towfighis were in Maryland, but she had attended all of the ones from 2013-2016. Last year neither of my parents could make it because my mom was in Heaven and my dad was in Indiana. I certainly thought of my mom again during the musical, but this time it didn't cause me to have a melt down like it did last year.

7. The kids and I enjoyed a church potluck on Sunday afternoon. The weather was perfect, the food was delicious, and Nadia won a door prize (big

bag of fun size Snickers). Paul worked on Sunday. He got home around 5:30PM on Sunday, so he was able to come to their musical both nights.

8. Paul got home from work on Saturday afternoon at a time that enabled me to dash out and get a haircut and get back in time for the musical. It had been 3 months since I had a haircut, and I wanted to look nice for the start of the semester. I am also even more appreciative of my new dresses that I got at JCPenney this summer. If I had known I'd be going back to work, I would have bought more clothes when they were 80-90% off. I'm thankful for the ones I did buy. The past 5 years I've pretty much only gotten dressed up on Sundays, but now I'll be getting dressed up three days a week.

9. Paul's parents watched the kids from 8AM to 5PM on Friday, and then they were at their dress rehearsal. This meant I was able to work on my classes for 15 hours on Friday as I worked until 11pm. I won't continue at that pace, but it helped me make a lot of

progress on setting up two of the three courses. I planned to finish the third one yesterday, but then when I got the word that I wasn't teaching until Thursday I took a little reprieve to do things like write this post and upload some photos. I plan to finish the last syllabus today.

10. Last Thursday I met with a professor on campus. She shared a variety of things with me. Then on Friday she and another professor gave me their log in information which allowed me to access articles on the library's website, see their syllabi and other course documents (they had both taught at least one of the courses I'll be teaching this fall), etc. It would have been much harder to develop two new courses with such little notice without their willingness to share with me. Another friend who taught at Kutztown also sent me her syllabus for one of the courses also. I'm very appreciative!

11. We got the flag football game schedule, and it's wonderful! Many of the weeks the games are back to back (ex. one game at 9AM and the other at 10AM). This week that's not the case, but there's just one hour in between. The last week of the season both games are at the same time. That's the only time that is supposed to happen this season.

12. I declared yesterday to be our "first day" of this school year meaning it was our first FULL day of school. I am so thankful to be able to homeschool my three children, and I'm also thankful Tab is going to help me out with that over the next 15 weeks on T/Th. We did our annual first day of school pictures yesterday. This year Ian said he wants to be an inventor (had said work at the Lego company the past couple of years), Nadia wants to be a missionary (in particular she wants to get a nursing degree and then be a missionary who works with orphans in another country), and Oliver (out of the blue) said  he wants to be a police officer. Ian said the same thing a few years ago. Praying we have a great school year! In science this semester we're studying flying creatures (bats, birds, insects, and flying dinosaurs), and this year we're studying Rome to the Reformation in social studies. We're also going to read through the NT, which is a much less formidable task than reading the whole OT out loud last year. Yesterday we did Matthew chapters 1-2 using a video on YouTube that is a visualized account of the book of Matthew with the narration being every single verse from that book. It was a different way of listening to the book since it was also visual, which never happened when we read the OT.

13. My dad brought up a crockpot with him on Sunday. My mom had given it to me in January 2016 so naturally I'm rather sentimental about it, plus I will certainly put it to good use. I used it yesterday to make some beef stew.