Checking it twice

Well as of today I am declaring myself done with Christmas shopping. Considering Christmas is in four days, it's about time to wrap it up! I have wrapped everything that has arrived. There are two items still en route. Amazon says the one for Nadia will arrive at our house tomorrow. The other gift (for Ian) from eBay was supposed to arrive by today at the latest, but it didn't. We shall see if it makes it here tomorrow or Saturday. If not, he'll just have to wait a bit longer for his last gift from us. Yesterday I placed an order with Shutterfly; I had to stay up much later than I've been staying up lately to finish it. I know the items will not come in time for Christmas. Making things on Shutterfly is either cheap or free for me, which is wonderful, BUT it's very time consuming. I've force myself to take less time, but even if I am as efficient as possible there is still a significant time investment. Time has been very precious to me the past four months, and so I have been behind on using my Shutterfly coupon codes, but I am determined to use them before the end of the month as I

still have one more free shipping code, and I'm not going to waste it because in a typical year those are only issued in November.

Yesterday I baked more cookies so we could have enough to make cookie trays to give to the kids AWANA leaders last night and to their kids' choir directors tomorrow night. In addition to homeschooling and housework, I didn't get anything done for the spring semester yesterday. Earlier in the week I had worked on one syllabus. So today I was determined to work on the other syllabus because I have a feeling this month I have off is going to just fly by. I am bound and determined to be prepared before the semester starts. I figure if I work on my lesson plans for the math class a little every day, I should be able to complete that task plus the conference proposals by January 21. I won't be doing any homeschooling next week aside from a field trip to Mount Vernon so that should give me a little more time to work on the spring semester. Right now there is *nothing* on our calendar for December 23 or 26. I've decided to take the kids to

see a movie on Saturday because I have 2 free tickets, 2 free large popcorns, 2 free large drinks, plus $10 off the remaining two tickets. Paul won't be joining us in Maryland, but he's taking off work December 25 and 26 so I should be able to get a lot of work done on December 26 while he plays with the kids.

At the Turkey Hill Experience we learned that although French Vanilla had been the most popular flavor for many years (in terms of sales), Butter Pecan has been the top seller the last few years, which happens to be Paul's favorite flavor. They had different Christmas trees decorated in a theme related to a particular flavor of ice cream such as a birthday themed tree with Party Cake ice cream. I took Ian's picture beside the tree that featured his favorite type of ice cream - Touchdown Sundae! In one area of the museum you could eat a small sample of a variety of types of ice cream. My least favorite was Pumpkin Pie. Most of that was tossed. My most favorite of the ones they had that day was Strawberry Cheesecake. Yum!

I haven't received an official job offer or a contract yet, but I did receive my list of student teachers for the spring semester. I had a few of them as students this semester. They are in 5 different school districts. Five are in the district where we go to church (15 minutes from our house). Six are close to where we lived in 2004-08 (about 45 minutes away). Two are in a district 30 minutes from our house, and I have one each in two other districts. One is about 40 minutes from our house and the other is closer to one hour away. Two of my student teachers teach in the same building where our neighbor teaches, and I actually know one of the cooperating teachers I will be working with in that school because she was the director of the summer musical in past years (not this year) at the Alliance Church. Seven of my student teachers are Early Childhood majors (PK-4), two are middle level (4-8), one is Spanish (K-12), and five are secondary Ed (7-12). Three of them are graduate students, and the other twelve are undergrads. I haven't supervised a student teacher since 2005. I'm looking forward to it!