Day 44: Sorry About Last Night

First off, I've heard from a few people that they didn't get Sunday's blog post. Let me explain. I didn't post anything. Instead, I fell asleep at 8:30. I'm sorry, but I literally had to wake myself up shortly after 8 p.m. and make myself go to bed. Sad.


Last night we had an amazingly loud and strong thunderstorm. I wear earplugs every night so the roosters won't wake me at 4 or 4:30 each morning, but the house shook. And I mean SHOOK!!! Plus that, I could clearly hear the thunder through the earplugs. We had a cooler out on the deck and this morning it was completely filled with the water that came with the storm, so it was a doozy! And about fifteen minutes ago, the thunder and rain began again, so I'm thinking we're in for another noisy night...


Today (Monday) is one of my music class days, so it was great! The day starts with the little guys doing English language, and they're at the point where they're picking it up well and becoming somewhat independent. They are comfortable with the routine, so today's class with first, third, and fourth graders combined ran more smoothly than any so far. Yay!!! The youngest group is on cloud nine with their music and they're raring to go when it's time to sing. The oldest group loves the meaning behind the songs they have and attach quickly to meaningful songs (like "Seasons of Love" from Rent). The middle group...middle-schoolers...are the ones that sometimes I want to throttle....but only the boys. So music was good; in fact, it was all good! 


I still have a balancing challenge in English language arts with what my kids can do at grade level according to Michigan, and what they can do according to the reality of them having English as their second language. All of my students have at least one parent who is primarily Spanish speaking and a few of them have parents who speak very little English. One thing is for sure: they're picking up English much more quickly than I'm picking up Spanish!


After school I did tutoring. Normally I tutor on Wednesday, but Abbie offered to switch with me this week because a very dear friend is coming to visit on Wednesday!! I'm beyond excited!!!! So if there's no post on Wednesday, you'll understand, right???


On another note, Abbie's School is having a fund-raiser lunch on Saturday, and each of the students is required to sell five tickets at eight bucks a piece. This has been on Hannah's mind big time! She had sold two tickets but still had three left. So today after tutoring we went to the post office (of course!) and stopped at several places so she could be a salesperson for Abbie's School. After about the fourth place we stopped (she had been turned down every time), she came out with a big smile on her face: she had sold two tickets and was as pleased as punch about it! I so admire her tenacity.


Now on to the post office saga: when she went into the post office this past Saturday, she was quite disgusted because there was a yellow card in our box. The yellow card means there's a box for us. However, there isn't anyone behind the desk on Saturday, so you can't actually get it! She was chomping at the bit today to get there, so that was actually our first stop after tutoring. Unfortunately for her, both boxes were for me. Stan has been an angel about sending me things I need for my classroom and one of the boxes was from him. However, the other box was from R, who knows me well and loves me so much!!! She sent me a digital frame with pictures already loaded onto it. Some of the pictures were contributed by some of our other great friends from a trip we took just before Hannah and I shipped out. As Hannah and I watched the slide show, Hannah would just give me a little pat on the arm when I teared up over seeing my wonderful friends I miss so very much. She pulled up two chairs and we watched the entire slide show as though it was the best movie of all time.


Thank you, R. I cannot tell you how very special that is for me!!! When H gets here I'll have her help me figure it out so I can get some other pics on there, too! 


So tonight I just need to write in my students' homework notebooks for tomorrow and get ready for school. Then I'm going to crash and hopefully the earplugs will help me sleep soundly.


Thank you, God, for the wonderful packages today. I am so very blessed with the family and friend You have given me!!