A Request

Ok. I need to post more often as one of my little birds has requested from her new nest.

What's up here in Chattanooga? Last week was Wine Over Water. My favorite day of the year. You can see it was just as crowded as usual.  It's a great time to raise money for a great cause. (Cornerstones saves and restores historic buildings around town. Their first project was the Walnut Street Bridge.)

My life is totally consumed with school. I have the sweetest little class you could ask for. One of my boys has moved to an alternative school for a few weeks, which helps a lot. I get so frustrated with all the paperwork and administrative side of things, but then I get all the hugs and coloring pages you could ever want. So it's pretty good. My student teacher finishes her solo teaching Friday. It's been very hard for a control freak like me to let go of my class for two weeks. I actually didn't ever turn it all over. I didn't feel comfortable with someone else teaching my Intervention kids. I did reading benchmarks this week and all my kids made gains. Some of them went up 4 levels in two months! Now if we can just keep that momentum going.

No pictures of rowing, but Mr. C has been busy this fall. His time is now faster than M's. Since he's a boy he still needs to keep working on it. Chattanooga Head Race is October 12.

We have been making progress with the breakfast nook. My next post with be the big reveal!

Do any of you watch Midsomer Murders? That is my new go-to show for when I want a break from life. My reading choice is A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in A Song of Ice and Fire (aka Game of Thrones). The fifth book comes out in paperback this month. I started reading them the end of May and I don't know what I'll do when it's all over. The show still has at least two more seasons, but the books are better. 

Well,  keep up with your homework if you have any!

John Wesley Home and Chapel

Any Methodist can tell you who John Wesley is, but for those outside the denomination he started Methodism. While in London I got a chance to look inside Wesley Chapel and tour his home. I had planned on just taking a quick peek, but then T and I somehow ended up on a private tour with a very old and knowledgeable man. How do you skip out on that? Of course the entire time we were trying to speed things along, as we had left Sis and Aunt in the Underground station.

Here are the highlights with captions.

Inside the chapel hang flags from countries with Methodist congregations.There is the US flag on the right.

You can pull out these extra wooden seats when there's a crowd.

This is the home. It is just to the right of the church and it is only two windows wide, but 5 stories including the basement.

The most impressive thing, to me, in John Wesley's study was the electric shock machine in the corner. He invented it himself and used to administer shock treatments to people suffering from depression, or melancholy. It supposedly created a sense of euphoria. WooHoo!

This was my favorite room in the house. It is the prayer room, or closet, just off John Wesley's bedroom. He used to get up and pray at 4 am every morning. I asked if there was a view out the window when the house was built and our guide said the adjacent building was already there, so no distractions.

This is just a group of partyers on a peddle bike that we passed on our way back to the Underground.

That is the grand tour. If you're ever in the neighborhood, you should check it out. It's free!

Home and Work

Work consumes my life. I try to push it back on the weekends and concentrate on home. Two weeks ago I got up and told Hubby we were going to do some home improvement. I decided on beadboard for the breakfast room.

Before.

And during. I still haven't got to the after. Probably next week. You can see our new windows here. Aren't they nice? The day we had them installed it stormed afterward. We didn't even notice until we happened to see the trees swaying outside. With the old windows you could hear everything outside. These are very nice and I hope to start seeing an improvement in our energy bills. Yippee!

S came for a visit last weekend. Daddy fixed her car up with an oil change, air filter, etc. *Advertisement for Toyota here: 195,000 miles and going strong!!! I took her shopping for a business suit. In the dressing room she said, "I look so grown up." I said,"You look like you're playing dress-up." Where does the time go?

Mr. C is rowing and enjoying it. He is making friends in his own way, which means he keeps it to himself and doesn't share much with me. So much different than the girls. Chattanooga Head Race is October 12 if anyone wants to come see him race. I think the Hooch is the first weekend in November.
And how am I doing? This week one of my sweet girls had a seizure in class. There was no history and I didn't even know what was happening at the time, except that she fell and then acted strange. I knew something was wrong. I picked her up and ran her to the nurse (thank God we have a nurse at school). She became totally unresponsive and couldn't move before the ambulance arrived. I have never been so scared in my life. I wasn't allowed to go to the hospital with her, but went after school and spent about an hour with her and her mom. She was talking and coloring and reading a book. She found my name in the book. It was reassuring. But I kept thinking of all the "What ifs". What if I'd sent her out to recess with the other kids and no one had noticed her strange behavior. What if I hadn't worn my tennis shoes (which I never wear to school) that day and been unable to move as quickly as I did. What if she had hit her head when she fell in the classroom and been seriously injured. What if.... Hubby said to stop. None of those things happened and she's going to be fine. Just breathe.

And We Dance

Happy Friday! (That's my student teacher. I'm a great mentor, huh?)

Thanks! I needed that!

In Other News

If you're looking on here you probably want to know how life is going. So here are a few snapshots.
We went to Beaufort, South Carolina for Labor Day. (It is pronounced BU-fort in South Carolina, BO-fort in North Carolina) We found some promising properties but weren't sure if we'd fit in with the local demographics.
Back home, Mr. C is rowing this fall. He is much more blase about the whole experience than M was. A month from now we'll be starting the fall regattas and that will consume our lives for about a month. Sorry, no rowing pictures right now.

We studied the water cycle today!

My life revolves around school. Big surprise! I could bitch and moan for 1,000s of words about work. Let me just put in a few. Last year our school dropped from a score of 5 (the highest) to a 1 (the lowest) and now we are a "Watch School". This means TONS of paperwork, consultants in every week to observe, advise, and basically wreak havoc in our classrooms, very stringent rules about how to write up lesson plans (which I am totally thumbing my nose at and will probably get in HUGE trouble for at some point).

Post those public records and exemplar student work!

On top of that I am the grade level chair this year, I am co-leading the math and science cadre, I am the inclusion teacher for First Grade, I am required to attend all the district after-school literacy and math supplemental training sessions, and I have a child in my class who has been officially suspended twice already and sent home because of behavior issues countless times. And today was only Day 25 of 180. Lord, have mercy!

Would you look at that! I've been at school for almost 11 hours again today! I should send this to the smart ass teacher who made some comment to me last week about "some teachers put in more than 7 hours a day" when I was wondering when I was supposed to do some gargantuan task that had just been handed to me.

At least you'll know why I'm not updating very much this year.

You've Probably Already Seen This But...

Being a Fox I find this very humorous. The things we find amusing, huh?