I think most of you know that I'm an elementary math specialist and that I've been waiting for a position to open up in the math department for my school division for the last 3 years. Well... on Thursday, they finally posted the position I've been waiting for only now, I'm really nervous about it! Crazy right? Everything about this job sounds like it was made just for me... because I already do everything they expect this new person to do (except for the part where I work in more than one school and where my office would be downtown in the admin building). The person I'd be working with is a really good friend (in fact we went to high school together) and we get along great. The only downsides I can see with this new job is that I'll be moving from a 10 month position to a 12 month position... but as my husband keeps reminding me, I never have a summer off anyway. The upside to being 12 months is that I can plan my vacation time whenever I want... where now I don't get vacation time. I'm also hoping that there will be days that I can work from home.. especially during the summer when I won't have to make any school visits. Hmm... so am I crazy to be nervous about this?
i think you aren't crazy. anytime we have to experience any kind of change, we have a bit of trepidation in our hearts. we fear "what if this only seems like the perfect job, location, etc and i am wrong?"
just remember all the pros of this new job and the most important fact that God will be with you in any of your endeavors, guiding your steps along the way! :)
You are not crazy. I can understand you being nervous. There's usually anxiety that comes with change and then you are probably wondering if you can do the job. I'm sure you'll do fine and I hope you get the job.
No, no... You're not crazy. Anything new can be exciting, but nerve wrecking too. It's hard to anticipate moving into a new atmosphere with different faces (some familiar too). How great it is to know, that you are perfect for this position and would be an awesome attribute to the team! I'll be upset if you didn't try it.
I'd like to start by saying that we have always given our kids birthday parties. Nothing over the top or extravagant... but some sort of birthday party. I heard several opinions about birthday parties recently which makes me wonder if we're going over board by giving our kids a party every year. One family I talked to gives their kids a birthday party once every 3 years. Another family I talked to gives their kids parties once every other year. To be fair to my kids... I have to mention that they LOVE birthday parties. They love going to them and they love having them. In fact, I'm convinced that my oldest daughter should become an event planner when she grows up. She thinks about and plans her next birthday party as soon as the current one is over! I just wonder sometimes if we're being excessive by doing a party each year. What are your thoughts?
in my family, i only remember having one actual "invite your friends" birthday party. since both sets of grandparents lived in town, our birthdays were spent with family.
but my best friend gives her kids big birthday parties until they are 5 and then she either goes to a restaurant or tells them they can have one or two friends over.
Patrick just had his first "friends" party at 5. (He'll always have a family celebration.) For budgetary reasons, we've discussed offering him the choice of inviting a couple of friends for something special (movies, putt-putt...) or trading part of his gift budget in for a party with more friends. We have til March to decide for sure how we'll handle it. He sure was excited to get a real party this year!
I don't think it's excessive to have a birthday party every year. I do think that birthday parties can get excessive. I don't understand having parties at all of these gyms, museums, waterparks etc. What happened to the days when 5 or 6 kids came over to your house and mom made a cake and ordered a pizza? They can totally get out of hand but I still think it's fun to have a party every year. Just not a holiday for the whole town. :)
I'm in agreement with Elizabeth. People can spend way too much money and go way overboard at parties.
We've given our kids a party every year so far (boys are 6 and Casey is 4). I really don't see us stopping anytime soon, though that may change. They really have a lot of fun with their friends and enjoy it so much.
I'm of the opinion that we're celebrating their entrance into the world, our family, and our hearts. Why not throw a party for such an event? I imagine we'll start requesting no gifts be brought fairly soon, at least for the boys, but they can still have a great time with their friends.
We had birthday parties for our kids but not every year. We didn't go out to eat much then so we let the kids choose where they wanted to go. They always enjoyed that. I don't know how often we had birthday parties but they weren't usually that big. They would have a few friends over and we would have a cake and sometimes we let them have someone spend the night. Nothing extragravant.
The five games that come on the DVD with the Wii have two things on the lower right where the games are listed. One is to find your fitness age. The other has other games you can unlock. I have done the bowling and they are very challenging. Try them.
We usually have family birthdays. We've only done one church friends party and that was when we were in KY away from all our family. I'm glad we did it because we ended up moving away from there not long after, and now we're back close to families. We've never done anything big. I usually make their favorite food, have family over for some presents. It's wonderful when we've been able to get all our family together in the same room to celebrate the girls. Since Tripp's parents are divorced/remarried, they only get in the same room for birthdays. It's nice to see.
I don't think there is a thing wrong with having a birthday party every year. Like others have said, they do not need to be extravagant, but can be very simple. And you don't really need to have the guest bring gifts because most kids get plenty from mom & dad and the grandparents. There will come a day when the girls will be gone and you'll wish that you could give them a birthday party.
My wife doesn't see the need for a birthday party every year, but we have friends who do that for their kids. I think it just depends on what you like.
We haven't done a birthday party yet for any of the younger boys. I'll make a cake or something special, but the boys have not yet had a party with friends. I don't see anything wrong with it personally, but Sean and I talked about throwing them a friend party when they turn 5. I really like them to have a nice party when they hit certain milestones verses every year.
Kyle is the only son who has had a party, but he's only had one friend invited party, but the other times, he was allowed to invite one close friend and pick a really nice restaurant to eat at. It made the event special, because we don't go out to eat at nice restaurants often.
We will probably keep this tradition with the younger boys. :)
Go to the barbells or whatever it is to the left of the fitness training. I never tried it until Cheryl showed it to me. It's fun but very challenging.
Everyone has their own opinions on things, and shouldn't make you feel guilty for not having the same opionion as them. I personally don't think there's anything wrong with giving each child one special day a year. It doesn't have to be extravagant to be special. We've always done family parties for our boys, and when they get older we'll probably do the friends parties.
It's been a while since my last update... but things have been a little busy around here. :o)
For starters, last week was my conference trip to Salt Lake City, Utah. My friend Laura and I had a lot of fun going to workshops together. The first day we were there, we went to this one workshop where some lady briefly mentioned something about origami frogs.... which got me thinking. Origami could be a lot of fun for the kids and we could do some really cool things with them like having jumping contests and then graphing the results. So... I convinced Laura to make frogs with me. We spent about an hour Thurs day night making several different origami frog... none of which worked. :o( They jumped but not quite in the way they were supposed to. I haven't given up thought... I'm sure there HAS to be a way to make them work.
Apparently, when Laura and I get together, we must have a death wish because we ALWAYS seem to get ourselves into dangerous situations. Some of you may remember the blog I wrote about going to Atlanta... well, Salt Lake City wasn't much different. Friday night, we decided to walk to one of the local malls. Laura had been there before I arrived so she was pretty confident she could get us there. So... the two of us head off. We walked a few blocks from the hotel (until the street ended) and we turned off in the direction of the mall. As soon as we turned the corner, we see this man in this empty parking lot talking to an empty car seat. He was yelling at it "Are you talking to me?!?" "I know you're not talking to me!" (as he starts to walk off and then runs back) "What? Are you talking back to me?" Ok... pretty strange, but we just laughed about that. We go a few more blocks and we see this HUGE crowd of people lining both sides of the street. At first we thought, maybe they're in line waiting for something. But as we got closer, we realized that they weren't in line... that's where they LIVED. At this point, Laura and I abandon the sidewalk and start walking (much quicker I might add) down the middle of the street. Seriously, that had to be one of the top 5 scariest moments of my life. Lucky for us, the mall we were walking to was just across the street so we didn't have to go far. The mall was very upscale with people in limos driving through there. It seemed really odd that they'd allow homeless people to live right across the street.
With the exception of finding the homeless population, we had a great time in Salt Lake. We meet several authors (Greg Tang and Stuart Murphy) and got lots of new idea for teaching math. My camera didn't work so I don't have any pictures. Laura has some pictures of us with Greg and Stuart so when I get them from her, I'll see about posing them. :o)
While I was gone, both girls came down with some sort of stomach virus. :o( I was lucky that I missed having to clean up after them but unfortunately, that meant that Brian had to do it. Poor guy.
Hannah had her first soccer game Monday night. She did a pretty good job especially since she missed the last 4 practices (1- camping, 2- rained out, 3- church and 4- church). She had a couple of good blocks so we were proud of her. Here's a picture of her in her uniform:
Ok.. I'd better go. I've got class at William and Mary tomorrow (8-4). This will be our last Saturday class. Yay!! I love all the things I'm learning in the class, but I will be so glad when I won't have to worry about homework anymore. :o)
So far, there's 8 videos. Five of them are from a live concert I did at MO's Coffee House in Memphis, TN. The other three were filmed at my house this week. I'll be getting those uploaded very soon.
Salt Lake is a beautiful city, though it sounds like you found the not so nice parts! The origami reminded me - when I was in middle school we had this one sub who used to always have us make origami when she was there. We thought she was rather weird. :)
Sounds like an interesting trip to Salt Lake City. Glad you made it back safely. Hope the girls are feeling ok now. I'm sure Brian was glad you got back home!
Sounds like an exciting trip! The frog idea sounds neat. I love how you are always thinking of ideas to make math fun! Hope the girls are better now. Hannah is so pretty, and more grown up looking all the time!
It was on both the cottage and kitchen/bedroom area. The plumbing on both places needed to be resconstructed and redone. Dad still has a long way to go, but hopefully this gave him a head start on some of the major areas.
SWEET!! Glad you had such a great trip! ;) Just FYI, most homeless folks are actually really nice, they come up wanting to wash our windows all the time in the truck but won't take any money without doing work for it first. :)
I just noticed that picture of your daughter up there. The one where she's holding her soccer ball. She looks just like you. She really does. (You can tell her that that's a compliment.) ;-)
the box is nice and safe on the pew. i should have given it to brian :) Heather is teaching that class along with Gloria, who mostly just sits in there (she teaches when heather isnt able to make it).
Question: do you know if they have bible classes for kids at Williamsburg and/or Newport News? Mom didn't think there were many children at Williamsburg and wasn't sure about NN. I'm still trying to decide where to worship on Sunday.
So was Jane Ayre your favorite? That one was a hard one for me I could have picked a few of those books as being your favorite. Also the ?? about what you like most about your job was hard to choose from.
I only have a few minutes... but I wanted to post some pictures from our weekend. :o)
I have some time this morning, so I thought I'd update this entry. We had a good time camping this weekend. I'm not big on the whole "camping" experience but like Rob mentioned on his blog... he was the only one who actually stayed in a tent. The camp grounds were nice. I got my first experience learning to play racquetball while we were there and we were able to go bowling. (Definitely not your normal camping trip). It was very cold, so many of us didn't stay too far from the camp fire. All in all, it was nice time. :o)
In other news... I'll be heading out to Salt Lake City next week. I'll be attending a math conference which should be a lot of fun. I've never been to Utah before, so this should be an interesting experience. Hannah will have her first official soccer game when I get back... which we are all excited about. She seems to be catching on quickly and has really been enjoying herself. I'll have to get a picture of her in her soccer uniform to post on here. Well... that's all my news. I guess I'd better get back to work now. :o)
Yep, we'll be up there this weekend. Salt Lake is a really cool city and I love that area of the country. We'll be in Idaho later this year for a trip to see my wife's grandmother.
I have never been camping so I don't think I would have enjoyed camping when it was cold. Bowling and racquetball sounded like fun. Hope you enjoy Salt Lake City. We went out there to Salt Lake City in the early 1990's. We toured the Mormon Tabernacle. Very interesting!Will you have any time to do any sightseeing?
