you too

Hello world! It has been a long time since I’ve written. Life has started to pick up the pace for me, which means when choosing between sleeping and blogging, sleep has been winning. Here are the small things since Thursday!

ST1: 1st day of middle school. I substituted for a middle school English teacher at my parish school on Thursday. It was like reliving the first day of middle school all over. It had been since May since I’d seen a middle school and so it was great to be back in that atmosphere, but hard because it was with students and teachers I didn’t know. The best part about it all was they knew about Kansas! I told the students I was from Kansas and one asked if I liked the Jayhawks (of course I said no) and then when I said I was went to Kansas State one kid said, “Jacob Pullen is awesome” and that made me smile. (He is a senior guard on our basketball team). And I had to tell them that I did not have a small dog named Toto, my name is not Dorothy, and Kansas is NOT one huge tornado. It was a fun day.

ST2: Spending the day with a nun. Friday I was a 4th grade teacher in a classroom with a student teacher who happened to be a nun. We had such a great day sharing the teaching responsibilities and talking about life. She is from Vietnam and came to the US in order to get her degree in education, and she’ll be working on her master’s in Chicago in the fall. How cool is that? She was so sweet and it made me wonder what it would have been like to have nuns as teachers, especially calm and loving ones like Sister Theresa. I hope to get to spend more time with her before her student teaching ends. Oh, and at the end of the day a few students broke out into a random chorus of “Glory to God in the Highest”. Amazing.

ST3: The “you too” phrase. So I had a moment this morning that reminded me of the comedian Brian Regan’s sketch about this very situation. I was getting my coffee and the lady said “Thank you” to which I responded, “Thank you” and for some odd reason added “you too”. Hmm. I walked away hoping no one heard my obvious conversational mess up. I had to smile though, because it was pretty funny. Check out what Brian Regan has to say about this in the first minute of this video. The rest is hilarious too.

 

ST4: family wine bottling. My husband’s raspberry wine was ready to bottle this weekend so we made it a family affair. His parents, grandma, and uncle were in town to help, which was perfect. We set everything up in the kitchen and ended up with about 23 bottles of wine which will sit for another 3 months until we drink it. We had a taste and it was yummy, but it will be even better once it has aged a little. Next endeavor, bottling the blueberry wine in another few months! Anyone want to come visit to help with that? 😉

Husband with his wine

Raspberry wine ready to be corked

ST5: Shanghi Rummy. My husband’s family loves to play games, so after spending some time on campus talking with Utah fans and listening to the bagpipe and marching bands, all we did was play! The game of choice was Shanghi Rummy, which is like Phase 10, almost. We had a blast with building anxiety and both good and bad luck. I truly enjoy playing games with family and that is one thing about his family that made me fall in love with them. They sure know how to spend quality time with each other. And we went to get ice cream to console all of us who lost 🙂

Jonathan with his mom and grandma

ST6: proactive Christmas decorators. My rule is that I can’t do anything Christmas related until after Thanksgiving. Anything before that is too early for me and really Christmas doesn’t start until Christmas…but anyway…I do appreciate people who take advantage of the nice weather to get a head start in sharing their Christmas spirit. I drove by the house that had lots of inflatable Halloween decorations last month, and guess what? The snow globe and enormous Santa were there to greet me. It made me smile because I really didn’t expect anything less. My prediction is that as Christmas gets closer I will be seeing more decorations pop up at that house.

ST7: funny slogans. I was driving behind a home inspections truck and their slogan read, “If we can’t kill it…we’ll eat it!!!” Yes, there were that many exclamation points.

I know that I have many more small things from this weekend, but these give you a concise glimpse of the fun we had. Thank you for the comments from last post because not only is it great to hear from readers, I learned a lot about Mrs. Camden from 7th Heaven!

What is a small thing from last week that made you smile? Have a stupendous Monday.

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