Resolution #1

Use your mind more for thinking and not watching TV.

We all suck at chess today, but I am confident that by this time next year we will be awesome!

Moving Day

We woke a couple of hours before dawn to drive to Auburn, rent a truck, and move Sadie to Atlanta. It was a long day! Here is a tour of her new place. It looked better once she started unpacking.

Coming in the front door. The first order of business was setting up her brand new TV. Thanks Aunt Joey!

Looking back toward the kitchen.

 

 

 

Going through to the bedroom. With a nice big window overlooking the courtyard.

The walk-in closet filled up pretty quickly.

You can get into the bathroom through the bedroom or from the front of the apartment.

Looking out of the bathroom you can see the laundry doors to the right and the kitchen straight ahead. When we toured the model apartment, we were told that she would have granite counters and stainless appliances. That did not turn out to be the case. Since she will only be here for 3 months, we didn't push the point.

This is the view from her balcony at night.

These are the King and Queen Buildings, where she begins work on Friday. They are usually lit up with white lights on top, but have a festive look for the holidays. If you drive on 285 between 75 and 85, you'll have this view of them.

Contentment

For as long as I can remember, Eric and I have spent a considerable amount of time dreaming of a better life. Whether it was house hunting, car shopping, remodeling,  searching out new jobs on the internet, or planning out a brand new landscape design, we have spent most of our married life trying to get ahead.

In the past couple of years I've developed a sense of contentment. I finally feel like we are where we're supposed to be; geographically, spiritually, and economically. Things aren't perfect, but they are right.

I hope for the same for all of you in 2015. 

Catching Up Over Christmas

Our Christmas in Pictures and Captions

Sadie and Mitch spent 6 days with us.

Caleb got festive socks and sweater.

Luckily there wasn't any spilled wine to cry over.

Madeleine was so excited to get a duck shower buddy. It photo-bombed quite a few pictures.

Sadie got Caleb a metal model plane that he quickly assembled.

"Protect me from the duck!"

The kids opened their presents in an orderly fashion. They also waited until 9am to get up. So much different than a few years ago.

Bow girl

I got Madeleine Humans of New York and she got me Little Humans. Great minds...

Ratatouille

                              

We've been so busy lately that many of our meals have been a burger and fries on the go. I have really been wanting some veggies and came upon a recipe for ratatouille in my latest Parents magazine. I've made ratatouille in the past and it's been an hours long complicated ordeal. This recipe took less than hour from start to finish, including all the chopping.

While I was chopping the eggplant, Caleb came in and said it looked good and he really hoped he'd be able to eat some. (He has some pretty severe mouth injuries, due to his attempt to create a mountain bike trail through our back woods earlier in the day. Let's just say the plywood ramp over the fallen tree was not a good idea.) I figure I'm a pretty awesome mom if I have kids who look forward to vegetables for dinner. (Disregard the previous account of the biking injury.)

                                

Dinner was delicious. Our house smells amazing. I have leftovers for lunch this week. Life is good.

Fall Color

                          

The fall leaves really stood out in the fog this morning. They will probably all be gone in another week. Caleb will be glad to be done with the leaf blowing and raking. I'm already looking forward to spring! 

No Hooch For You

For anyone who is wondering about the Hooch, everything on Saturday was canceled due to wind. That meant no races for Caleb or Madeleine. Sunday was beautiful and all those races went on schedule. It has been a long, cold weekend.

                        

This is the 10th year for the Hooch to be in Chattanooga after moving up from Roswell, Georgia. The hat I got for volunteering says "10 years in a row." Haha!

Fall Break

 We enjoyed a hike in Cloudland Canyon over in Georgia the first week of Fall Break.

 Caleb was styling on the trail.

 Lots of running water. Such a relaxing sound.

 In front of Cherokee Falls.

 When I saw these stairs, I knew they would look great in b&w.

 Caleb enjoying the view.

 Big rock in front of Hemlock Falls.

There are over 1,000 steps on the trail. It was quite a work out, at least for the parents.

The Vote

Will these flags still fly side by side after tomorrow?

The Machine

...that is life.

So school is back into full swing, which means that my life now revolves around 11 six year olds. You heard right, I only have 11 students this year. Our school was rezoned and we lost a lot of students. Most of the kids who are now zoned for our school go to private schools. We lost two teachers this year and will lose another two next year. Enough about that. If you want to check out my school website, including pictures of my classroom click here.

Well, Madeleine has complained that I am not keeping her up-to-date on home happenings with this blog. So I took a walk around the house and took some random pictures to show just how uneventful things are here. Here's the tour:

Caleb has been hit hard by the ragweed this week and has a regime of prescription and OTC meds to take, on top of his allergy shots. He missed two days of rowing and one of school this week.

 

The basil is about done for this year. Chicken has her eye on the last few leaves.

Caleb still thinks everything should be dropped in the kitchen, including deodorant. Some things never change.

Lizzie spends all her time pretending to be a fur rug.

Mr. Socks hangs out with Eric and me, watching our Spanish show. It's impossible to watch and work at the same time, since you have to keep up with the subtitles. On the plus side, I'm picking up phrases like "los ciento" and "por favor". I'm sure I've completely screwed up the spelling but you get the idea. I've also started being able to tell when the subtitles don't exactly match what the characters are saying. But by no means would I be able to follow along without the subtitles.

You can decide if this update was worth it or not. In all honesty, most of the time we are on our computers doing work of some kind or another. Not a swash-buckling life of adventure.

Growing Up

Last month Sadie turned 21! Wow! We celebrated early because we knew we wouldn't see her on her actual birthday.

She is now a senior in college and taking her final semester of classes to complete her bachelor's degree in accounting. After Christmas she will complete an internship with an accounting firm before graduating. She has already interviewed with two firms in Atlanta for her internship. They are not allowed to offer her a position until September (Auburn sets this requirement so students can look at all offers at one time and make a decision) but both told her that they were going to. Furthermore, they both also told her that the offer of an internship would also lead to an offer of employment after she completes her graduate work. So as of right now she is looking at two job offers! Good news!!!

But there's more. After completing her bachelor's degree, Sadie is going to begin graduate school (for 3 semesters) in order to complete the requirement to take the CPA exam. She has taken the GMAT for admissions and her advisor told her that she should be admitted and that she should also be able to have all of her graduate tuition paid while working her current campus job (which would also pay her a healthy stipend on top of covering tuition). Great news!!!

We have always promised the kids that if they finish college we will buy them a car. Although it's a little early, we went out and got Sadie hers this weekend. The combination of the wonderful model year-end clearance prices and the fact that she'll need something reliable to drive around Atlanta in a few months helped us make the leap a bit early. She loves her current 2001 Toyota Corolla, with 200,000 miles, but I'm sure she'll like the 2014 just as much.

Words cannot express the feelings of pride and excitement I have for Sadie as she starts this next phase of her life! Almost all grown up.

First Day Photobombed

Caleb started his high school career last week. Madeleine photobombed his first day photo. Yes, she hid in the pantry and waited to pop out just in time to be in the picture. That girl! We'll miss her next week when she returns to school.

Caleb seemed to like his classes. I can't remember all of them. They changed the scheduling this year, so he has eight classes all year instead of four each semester. I think he has German, geometry, physics, personal finance, English, principles of engineering, and a couple of other things.

2014-15, here we go!

Summer Flowers

                                 

In an effort to fill the dirt bed next to our front walk, I planted three hydrangea bushes. I am very pleased with how they are doing. They start out creamy with blue tinges and then darken into a violet color. I have a drip hose around them for watering purposes because I read that they can get a fungus on their leaves if they are watered from above.

Dinner is Served

                                 

 About a year ago I started getting Ladies Home Journal. I still haven't figured out who signed me up for the subscription. In the meantime, LHJ has gone out of business and the remainder of my subscription is being filled with other magazines. This month I got an issue of Parents. I wasn't too thrilled since I've moved beyond the stages of parenthood that are covered in the magazine. But then I found the food section. There is a section that has a grocery list for a week's worth of meals, along with the recipes. I was a little hesitant, since the main ingredient for the week is quinoa (pronounced keen-wah) and I had never even heard of it.

So far this week we have had Quinoa Salmon Salad, Peachy Pork Chops, and Quinoa Patties. We still have Chicken & Potato Salad and Fresh Tomato Pasta to look forward to. Everything has been delicious! Surprisingly so. The key to making the meals quickly was the weekend prep ahead of time. I cooked the quinoa, cut corn off the cob, prepared fresh green beans, and stored it all in pre-measured containers in the fridge. I could use a year's worth of these meals in a cookbook. Let me know if you see one!

Traditions

             

Some traditions are started deliberately and others by accident. Granny kept pictures of her kids from their senior year in high school on her dining room wall. Grandma M. had a large photo of her kids on her dining room wall. I am turning it into a tradition with these photos of the kids in my dining room. Maybe they'll continue the tradition in the next generation. 

This room is much brighter during the day, but I was so excited to get the pictures back today and wanted to share as soon as I got them up!

Doctors

Since I don't like to take sick days during the year, summer is the best time for me to go to a doctor. I always end up putting off making appointments and haven't been for any kind of check-up since 2006. [We do go to the dentist twice a year. :) ] This summer I decided to stop procrastinating and make an appointment. Partly because my insurance sent me a notice in the mail telling me that I'm getting old and should get things checked out, but in nicer words. I also have a small scaly spot on my shoulder that is probably nothing, but I thought it would be better to know for sure.

I have called two different doctors. The first didn't answer the phone and the second said they are accepting patients for next year. I take that as a sign from God that everything is A-OK. Plus, next time some idiot is going on about the evils of socialized medicine and how you'll have to wait eons to get an appointment, I can throw in my experience with un-social medicine where you can't even make an appointment.

Summer Job

There are, admittedly, several mindless hours of pointless Netflix watching during my summers. But quite a bit of my time is spent doing school work. This summer I have cataloged countless books for my classroom library, written close to 100 guided reading lesson plans, spent many hours trolling the internet for storage baskets, bins, and boxes, read/ studied books on classroom management in the hopes of improving instruction in my classroom next year, attended the Math Best Practices workshop, and already started worrying about test scores for next year and how to improve them. I think I'm just feeling a bit defensive because of the general attitude and remarks that people make about teachers getting the summer "off".

A Trip to the Beach

Apologies to anyone who has already seen these pictures from Hilton Head on Facebook. I really don't like Facebook and usually put stuff here instead of there. For some reason it was just easier to post a whole album to that site instead of writing about our trip here. A moment of laziness I guess.

The majority of our time was spent at the beach. Eric and Caleb were in the water and I watched from a very relaxing beach chair. The first couple of days, Caleb used his skim board, until he had an accident that landed us at the nearest Urgent Care. Three x-rays proved that he hadn't broken anything and could continue with a couple of prescription painkillers. However, after that he stuck to his bodyboard.

Besides the beach, we walked around Pinkney Wildlife Reserve, which is an island between Hilton Head and the mainland. It is a very unique place with tons of wildlife and miles of hiking trails. That is where we came across a baby alligator, but luckily not the mama!

Besides regular golf courses, there are several mini-golf courses. We played a round and I came in last place. If we had counted an extra shot each time Caleb's ball ended up in the water, he would have come in last. We had a lot of laughs.

One of the most fun things we did was to go on a 2-hour nature kayaking trip around the Sound. I have never been kayaking, so that was a new experience for me. Eric and I took a double, since I was worried about flipping a single. Remember my paddle boarding experience a couple of weeks ago? We saw lots of wildlife and learned about the nature in the area. One of the coolest things is that the tidal change in the Hilton Head area is 10 feet. It is the largest along the American eastern seaboard. You can really see the dramatic difference along the beach as well as the tidal creeks throughout the day.

Looking through the pictures I thought this one made Eric look really skinny, until I realized that it was Caleb! I find myself constantly taking a second look nowadays, just to see who I'm talking to.

There was a crescent moon during our visit, so I naturally had to try to replicate the South Carolina flag. Not too good. Here's the real thing:

We walked along this path to the beach everyday and this shot epitomizes everything I love about the Low Country: tidal creeks, the birds, marsh grass blowing in a breeze, and especially the Carolina blue sky. I wish this was my backyard!