I'm grateful for school staff

Wow! This is my very first ever, mind blowingly original foray into the wonderful world that is the "blog hop."

I just recently read what they were and found several to try out, so here goes. Hope I follow all the rules. (I am a stickler for "the rules")

For my followers (I know I have secret ones, I'm sure of it!) a blog hop means I post this on a blog that I follow (in this case http://maxabellaloves.blogspot.com and then I read what all kinds of other bloggers have posted there about a certain topic (in this case, something you're grateful for)

It's my attempt at participating in the blog world instead of always reading from the sidelines.


I am sitting in my office stressing about life outside of work and trying to focus on Staff Appreciation which we will be celebrating next week at my sons school (where I also work). As I am emailing back and forth a zillion last minute items with the committee I am contemplating why we do this. My contemplation has led to my gratitude. So now I will share that with all of you.

I'm grateful for:

1. My sons teachers. This year the twins have very different teachers. I am beyond appreciative in a way words can never express with the younger twins teacher and the way she has gotten to know him and kindly guided him in his learning. She is truly one in a million and I constantly take mental notes when I am around her in the hopes it will make me a better person.
The older twins teacher is so relaxed that she has helped my son to relax a little. She lets the little stuff slide which is something he really needs sometimes and that I rarely do, I love that she helps balance out his life a little and undo some of the crazy that I am probably causing on a daily basis.

2. The educational assistants. Not all of them. I don't even know them all.
But there are a couple who have gone out of their way to know my sons, to look out for them, to help me, as a neurotic mom, calm down by sharing sweet stories about them and just in general for the tremendous amount of patience they exhibit on a daily basis with all the students they encounter.

3. The support staff. This is where my job falls under and I couldn't have done it this year if there weren't some outstanding staff members willing to give me advice, guide me when I steer wrong, encourage me to use my voice and answer my never ending questions. They are great and the work they do is long and often thankless, so I for one am going ot thank them more often.

4. Our custodians. I am grossed out by the amount of "stuff" that comes out of and off of elementary students. I should have taken out stock in hand sanitizer because I use a crazy amount just so that I can mentally handle the grossness. Yet our custodians clean it up (rather joyfully too!) everyday for what I am guessing is not a stellar paycheck.

Want to read what other bloggers are grateful for? Check out Maxabella, she is gratefully posting her gratefulness all the time and it's a joy to read. Plus she hosts this blog hop which gets all our grateful juices flowing so we can spread the good feelings around.

I painted something other than walls

It's like a christmas miracle* (I use this phrase way too often)

(*this just means I repaint my house a lot but don't think I've painted anything else since I was 14)

This afternoon I drug myself to another meeting at school/work. I was not thrilled to be going due to the usual excuses of tired, busy, lazy, hungry and probably the other 3 dwarfs as well.

BUT...

It was pretty cool!

 I'm glad I went.

3 reasons it was cool:

1. I learned some cool facts about Art in Public Places that made me proud to live on Maui and excited to tell others about their program.

2. I was the star pupil. As my dear friend delighted in pointing out.:) A professional artist taught our rag tag group how to paint with watercolors. During the phase where we created ocean he chose mine to show everyone as an example. Oh yeah, I was THAT good.

3. All the painting lit my creative fire and I am overwhelmed with exciting ideas to try with my family.

3 reasons I was right to be hesitant:

1. Right after being star pupil we switched to the wet on dry method to create turtle shells. I was proud of my work until the artist looked over my shoulder and explained how I was doing it terribly wrong and it would take all day and I needed to change everything. I was not good at this technique, as my dear friend delighted in pointing out :)

2. We were shanghai'd into creating a mural for the school, I am not a fan of surprises. Also, I am apparently  the slowest painter ever. It was an indicator for me as everyone had to stand around waiting for me to finish.

3. I was the only one who used blue on the turtle fins :( Either I'm color blind or everyone else is, but whatever the case, my piece of the mural stands out... but not in a good way.

All in all, time well spent. You should have come.

I'm supposed to be folding laundry right now.

You can't find my bedroom or my bed through the piles of clothes. But somehow I managed to dig my laptop out. When I finished holding it over my head and grinning from ear to ear like the true treasure hunter that I am, I sat down, ignored the laundry, and decided to post.

Today was a very random day, which will now lead to a very random post. It's called cause and effect for you academic people out there (as I tilt my nose in snobbery I also mention this disclaimer, *if I'm using this term wrong I don't want to know, sometimes I feel like being snobby).

First off, we all had sleeping disease. My twins almost fell asleep in class, my youngest nodded off during science time at preschool and I kept having to walk around my office to keep myself awake during the work day. At home my husband took a nap. We had a relaxed pleasant family day yesterday and went to bed at a decent hour so I am not sure if we all caught a bug or what, but we were wiped out!

Got home from school and planned to have the boys do homework, then chores and then off to Aikido practice. Apparently I was overzealous in my planning. My twins did their homework while their 4 yr old brother was allowed to play outside by himself for his first time ever!

This was a monumental moment.

 I sat next to the window and divided my attention between the homework helping process and the "Dear Lord please don't let my child die, get abducted or pick up dog poop with his bare hands" prayer process.

Turns out I was a rather unnecessary component in both processes. My twins miraculously completed their homework with no help required, and in record time, and my youngest was so loud while talking to his monster trucks in the driveway that
1. no one would want to steal him
2. I could hear him from 2 blocks away and know he was safe and
3. there was nothing that could break his concentration from those monster trucks and their cool flips and falls so dog poop lost it's usual magnetic draw.

By the time we finished up with these bits of fun it was 4 o'clock and we were all dragging. I voted for a screw the chores moment and suggested that we all lay down for awhile to which they all happily agreed (dead give away towards just how worn out they must have been). 2 hrs later we all groggily awoke to realize we missed playtime, Aikido practice and dinner. But we felt better so... oh well.

Bonus: Since I was no longer operating in half dead status I had enough energy to cook a healthy meal that everyone ate and enjoyed.

At 7:30 I realized that I had probably screwed up their sleep schedule forever and decided to just go with it and let them stay up. So I set the time for an hour, gave strict orders to have fun, clean up when it beeped and don't let the dog eat stuff and ran off in to my room to get chores done.

This is when I went treasure hunting for the laptop, blogged instead of being a good person, and I am now enjoying listen to my sons get so excited about the lego creations their building and so angry when they break or someone takes a piece they need.

Second bonus: Here are some other random highlights from today.

* Listening to a kindergartener read the word hippopotomus every time he saw the word mother in the book he was reading.
*My 4 yr old pouring a dead cockroach out of his water bottle then filling it up and reusing it and my 20 yr old cousin feeling that that was okay for him to do.
*One of my twins explaining that it was hard to wear his basketball jersey to school today. Everyone kept looking at his armpits and Juliette looked in the armholes and saw his nipples.
*Having to check one twins poop when the other one announced that it looked weird and never remembering to ask why they were in the bathroom together checking out each others poop.
*Looking for sets of playing cards around our house and discovering that all were missing cards or contained pictures of lego men or hawaiian women.
*Having my roommate explain that the dog needed to be taught to wipe her butt because he didn't appreciate that she chose to do so on the tile floor downstairs. Me thinking, "how do you teach a dog to wipe it's butt?" and never checking to see if the tile had been cleaned downstairs.
*Oldest child reading so well on his own. Tonight was a book called "The best children in the world" He announced that The Mallo Boys were the best children in the world. Then he counted the kids in the book and loudly announced, "Whoops theirs 5 kids in this book. That means we need to have 2 more mom okay?"

And that's it, that's what happened today when I was supposed to be folding laundry. Now I hear the timer beeping so...goodbye.

Bunnies and eggs for easter morning, cause adam is awesome!

Mmmmm, pancakes.

My name is B and I'm an addict

It's true. I have finally reached a safe place where I feel I can say this out loud...and apparently, share it with the world. Not sure where this places me in the 12 step program but I'm not looking for recovery so maybe that's not a big issue.

I was in denial for a long time. I swore to myself, my husband and anyone else who confessed concern or even feigned interest that I could quit cold turkey anytime.

In the past year I have quit at least twice. I managed to quit during both of my pregnancies. But I always end up back on the bandwagon.

It's just that, well, it makes me feel soooooooooooooo good! Seriously, after a stressful day nothing could be better. When I just want to chill out and relax, nothing could be better. Bonus points in that it replaces my cravings for unhealthy foods and sweets. I think I am so fine without it but every time I go back to it it gets even better than I remember.

I lay there, smack my lips and think, "aaaaaaahhhhhhhhh, that's the stuff!"

So yes, my name is B and I'm addicted to soda. I love the way it bubbles, I love the sweet taste, I love that it comes in a can, I love that they serve it everywhere and I hate how bad it is for me.

I tried to switch to diet, which tastes awful, and I sort of made it work but then I discovered those newer sodas like coke zero and pepsi max. Now I'm officially in heaven and ready to admit that yes, I'm addicted and no, I don't want to change.

Judge me as you deem fit or better yet support me, I'm always available for a little soda drinking action. So ends confessions of a soda addict.

ROCL (I am not good at this texting language)

I am rolling in my chair laughing right now! I was just checking the "stats" section of my blog to see if anyone actually reads this dribble and came across the search words that have been used to find and read my blog.

"my childs butt itches"

"things are really bad"

These 2 phrases sum up my past 90 blog posts :)

Also, I discovered that 90% of the people that read my blog do so via facebook, which means I know them, and they know me.

Still wondering if I should have kept this blog anonymous. You people have way too much information on me at this point.

Oh well.

On another note, I am almost to 100 blogs. To celebrate I am going to write a blog list all about myself and the things that I have decided that you love and hate about me.

So tune in because soon I will be taking TMI to a whole nother level y'all. A whole nother level.

Confessions of an oversharer

You know that person who knows everything and can't help but tell you? The one that you are a little scared to strike up a conversation with because it may go on for an hour and will definitely get preachy as they pretend they can solve the worlds problems?

I think I may be that person!

Except I don't know everything, or even 1/100th of everything. Okay, to be fair, I'm smart, let's say I know 10% of everything.

Or, maybe I'm not so smart. Because most of my information comes from television, internet or eavesdropping (errrr, I mean overhearing).

I just can't seem to keep my mouth shut when I read a news article, watch a movie etc... and I rarely do the research to find out if things are true or not. But I often spew the information at others like its fact.I have overwhelming urges to shout things from the rooftop for the world to hear (not literally, roofs are scary, but you get the idea)

For instance, this weekend, there were snoring pillows for sale at my garage sale which naturally brought up a discussion on snoring. I loudly announced that an enlarged uvula can do that as well as dairy products before bed. I have never dealt with snoring in my life, not from friends, family etc... So where did I learn these facts? Surely from a fascinating medical journal or when I was doing research through the Mayo Clinic right?

Or from an episode of Royal Pains, a medical show on USA network.

Yep, I'm that kind of person.

It got me thinking and I realized that I do it all the time. I have a need to chime in and to share. Well, probably it's oversharing. I've decided I better start praying for patience in those around me and graciousness so that they realize that all my many many bits of advice and knowledge are of the take it or leave it sort.

Also, to be used at your own risk because I probably learned it from an episode of The Office.

p.s. I have a sick friend and the snoring episode of Royal Pains also had a patient with all her symptoms. If this knowledge solves my friends medical mystery I may start sharing my opinions and advice even louder. Stay tuned for a possible blog on how my incessant tv watching saved a life! Yep, I am not so good at learning from my character flaws, sometimes I just embrace them :)