School days....

Last night was the meet your teacher night at Starla's mothers day out program. She had so much fun!

This is one of her teachers, Miss Laura











Showing where her backpack hook is.....









Starla's first day of school! I didn't get to go, but my mom took lots of pics for me!

















This is her other teacher, Miss Robin






Nanny said starla did very well when she dropped her off , and that she got a good report from the teachers when she picked her up! SO far, so good! :)

This is me in one of my Mrs. Little outfits, lol. I had a friend pass down some clothes to me, most of them never worn, when her friend's sister passed away. They are mostly power suits and business skirt sets. Nothing I would normally wear, but I needed professional clothes for Student teaching anyways, so now I got them! I come dressed much better than my mentor teacher, and most of the other teachers, lol. I come dressed more like the principal! Oh well. This is also the skirt I was wearing yesterday when I pulled it up with my backpack.....good times.



I had my post-op appointment today, he said all looked like it should. He did change my total healing time from 4-6 weeks to 6-8 weeks, but said it looked fine and all is well. I go back in 4 months for a check-up. Woo hoo. So now all of you guys can stop worrying!! I'll be ok! :)

I had a time

Did anyone watch My So-called life? I was such an avid fan when I was a teenager, sigh. One of the episodes, they said "we had a time..." my title made me think of it. If anyone ever wants a MSCL marathon, I own the DVD set and am just dying to sit down and watch them again! :)

So today was just one of those days, at least moments of it was. My student teaching was good, as always. I am getting the hang of the routines, and getting to know the kids. I am going to start taking over teaching Language Arts every day for her, which is nothing big, because she just follows out of a textbook and then has them do worksheets. Anyone who can read can teach it, but it still is experience teaching, so I won't complain. Then since last friday I went straight from my 4th grade class to UCO to meet my friend Lori for lunch, and discovered I could actually get a decent parking spot, I decided to start going straight there every day instead of coming home for lunch or whatever. Plus that gives me an hour in the computer lab to do homework and get caught up. So usually there is this parking etiquette I will call it, where cars sit there in a line, waiting for someone to come out to their car and then they get that spot, and then the next person in line waits for the next spot, etc. I was like 3 cars behind in this line when I got there, and after a few mintues of waiting, it was my turn and there was a car pulling out. I pulled up next to it, put on my blinker to show I was going there, and waited for it to move, when a car pulled in around the line, and went around behind the car I was waiting for (I was facing the opposite direction) and then whipped into the spot when they could clearly see I was waiting for it. I thought, "seriously?" If I wasn't such a nice person I would have flipped the girl off. :) So I pull back into the line, which I am now like the 2nd person waiting in this line, and wait my turn, only to have another car whip around me and take the next spot!! Doesn't anyone have common courtesy?! Seriously?! So I wait some more, and finally get a spot, right next to the one that stole my first spot. I parked REALLY close, so she wouldn't be able to get her door open........ ok, I couldn't resist. :) So I finally make it into the computer lab and I have an hour before class starts. I had done all my homework excett for one question one of of them, and had e-mailed it to my UCO e-mail account, and was just going to print it up at school, because I am out of black ink and didn't feel like running to the store to get some more. So I fiugred I would have an hour to work on tonights homework so that I didn't have so much to do tonight. So the silly UCO e-mail server won't open my stupid e-mail!! It kept timing out and giving me an error. I kept trying, and trying and trying. After 45 minutes, it finally let me in and I got all of my homework printed out and my last question done, just in time to head to class. So much for working ahead. So I get to class, and class is good. No big deal. I am actually feeling much more energized today than I have been since my surgery, so I am pretty happy about that. I don't have to yawn every 5 minutes, or feel like I am so drained I need to just lay down! AS most teacher ed. classes, we have like 30 females and 3 males in the class. So I am walking out with one of the guys, Charles, who runs a wildlife animal business with his wife, and he is telling me all about this Wildlife even in Guthrie in September as we walk out of the classroom and down our 3 flights of stairs, one of the other guys, John, is in front of us. But at the bottom of the stairs, John stops or turns, or something, I wasn't paying attention to him, but somehow he is now behind us. And we walk all the way across the building to the exit doors, when John calls my name. So I turn, and he has this weird look on his face, and he hurries over to us, and then says "Um, Tonya, your skirt is up." lol. I had slung my backpack over my shoulder in the classroom, catching the bottom of my skirt and pulling it up, and had walked all the way through the education building with it up. Lovely. And out of all the women in my class, it would be a guy that catches it! He looked very embarassed for a moment, lol. Funny enough, I just figured oh well, I'll live, and wasn't that embarrassed. I showed off my spanx tummy control shorts to the world. Lol. John was all "I'm so sorry." I said "No, THANK you, don't aplogize, I appreciate it." and then he's all "SO does this kind of think happen alot with skirts?" as if he is really interested, inquiring minds want to know, all seriously, casually, trying to make it ok or something, lol. Oh, it's been a day.

Starla had her meet the teacher night tonight at her mother's day out. It was fun! Her teachers names are Miss Laura and Miss Robyn. The classroom looks like it is going to be lots of fun. She already made friends with a set of twins in her class, Gracie & Elizabeth. I have pics, but I will just combine them with the first day of school pics from tomorrow and post them then. I'm sad that I don't ever get to take her to or pick her up from school though. My mom and Alan get to do that. At least I can get them to take pictures of her with her cute little backpack and lunchbox. :)

And now I must go do mu homework that I didn't get to start this afternoon, and this time I am going to save it on my flashdrive instead of relying on the silly e-mail.....

Disney's Christmas Carol Train Tour

So I took the kids to the Disney Christmas Carol Train Tour yesterday, and we were in line for one hour and 20 mins!! And then we spent about an hour or more going through the train, and another half an hour watching the preview and such outside of the train. The 3D Preview was really cool, I think it's going to be a good movie. But not good for little kids, like Starla. It is much more for the older crowd. They had so much fun stuff though, snow coming down on us, carolers singing to us dressed in the victorian-era style, christmas decorations.... it was awesome! We had a good time.

A whole new world

So my blogs are pretty much going to go back to the way they were before summer, not many pictures, and more just writing! The summer was all about going and doing, so it was mostly pics. But now life is back to a more scheduled, regular routine. It's funny how easily we seem to transition into the different ways of life, how it just seems normal to go with the flow and not think about how different it was just a few weeks ago.

So far student teaching is going well. My mentor teacher has been a teacher at JGI for 24 years, so she is a very traditional teacher. Which is not a bad thing, but not what they teach us to be at UCO. However she's not a terrible teacher either, she seems very concerned with helping the students and wanting them to do their best. But they do alot of worksheet pages and not much else yet. But it is the first week of school and I have only been there for 3 hours in the morning each day, maybe it will get better. I was very excited that I was able to learn all of thier names within the first 3 hours of the first day! I have always been horrible at names, and just knew that when I got a class of my own I would have to make them wear nametags for weeks, lol. But I managed to learn them all and even remember them the next day, so I was proud. I've worked in lots of classes along the way, but I've never seen the first few days of school, which was very interesting and fun to me. We have 23 kids in the class. It's been fun getting to know them, learning their strengths and weaknesses, etc. And crazy enough, I already have my favorites and not-so-favorites, lol, which I'm not sure is good!! I can't wait until it's actually my classroom though, so I can make the decisions! :) My mentor teacher has some wonderful ideas and ways to manage the classroom to make things run smoothly, no doubt from her trials and errors over the last 24 years, so I am very thankful to learn them. She gives me a copy of every worksheet that she hands out in class to keep for my own files, and I already have a ton and it's only the 4th day of school! Lol. I am going to try not to use so many worksheets, but we shall see. I think learning should be active and engaging, not so much sitting at a desk and being quiet as you fill out a worksheet. That's not to say that she's not a great teacher though, just different than I want to be. After this week I have 2 more weeks of my afternoon class at UCO, and then I get to go to full days at JGI, so I am looking forward to that. Then for 2 weeks, I get to take over her class and be the teacher all day, so that will be exciting!

*Disclaimer* This next section may have TMI, especially if you are a male, you have been warned* :)

So I had my surgery on my cervix a week ago today. It went ok, Jamie came and stayed with me thursday & friday and took care of me, and some wonderful friends brought me meals for several days, which helped immensely. I think they busted my vein when they gave me the IV, I still have this giant purple bruise on the inside of my forearm that makes me look like a junkie that doesn't have the sense to keep their track marks hidden, lol. Something I found amusing too was the nurse who helped me at the surgery center, when I woke up, she said "Your going to be sore probably, that's just from all the different positions they had to put you in back there." Hmmmm, that never sounds good when you are waking up from surgery. What kinds of positions would they need to put me in?! lol. I've been cramping since they did it though, which is never fun. And it took me FOREVER to get my energy level back up, I was just sooo tired, and seemed like I just got drained when I did anything. But it felt like I was just getting back to "normal" (although the healing time frame for it is like 4-6 weeks)when I started bleeding on tuesday. I hadn't bled at all, and they said I probably wouldn't. So I called and talked to the nurse tuesday evening, and she said it was probably ok, but to call if I felt like it was getting excessive. Well this morning when I woke up, it was excessive, at least to me. I won't share the gory details, but I have never bled so much like that in my entire life. I didn't want to miss any of my student teaching (all missed time has to be made up after the end of the semester, it is a big no-no to miss time!) and I figured I shouldn't answer my cell phone during my time either, so there was no point in calling the Dr's until after I left at 11am (I get there at 8am). The 3 hours flew by as it always does, and I left the school and called the Dr's and left a message to have the nurse call me back. I was getting more and more tired, light headed even, as the day progressed. My head started hurting, and I was cramping, and just bleeding like crazy. I was convinced I was going to just pass out during my class at UCO, lol. I told my friend Krystina who sits next to me what was going on just in case I actually did pass out, someone would know what was going on!! But they hadn't called back by the time my class started at 1pm. Missing class time is also a big no-no, there are strict rules to not make any appointments or any other engagements for these 3 weeks. So between not wanting to miss any time, and not having insurance (paying for the surgery and for my tuition this semester has wiped us out financially, but that's a whole different story!) kept me from wanting to just run to the ER to find out it was nothing and then end up with a huge bill and missed class time. Because maybe it was just excessive bleeding to me, what does "excessive" mean really? But I told my Proffesor that I was waiting on a call from my Dr. and that if they called I would be stepping out to answer it, and quite possibly just leaving after they called. She just nodded and said ok, so I left it at that. They called at 2pm, I explained, and the nurse said I needed to come in right then if at all possible. We were just about to do class presentations of our assigned teaching philosophy, which was our homework last night to research, so the professor asked if I could stay at least to do our presentation, but I was already freaked out, and started to get a bit upset about it all, my eyes started welling up, freaked out that I probably should have gone in hours ago, and she noticed and said to just go. I didn't even really explain anything, I just left, teary eyed and trying not to get upset because there was no point in it! But of course, all my wonderful co-students (kinda like co-workers, hee hee) most of whom I have known for several semesters and have made great relationships with, noticed and I started getting texts and e-mails as soon as I was out the door, hoping that everything was ok. Ah, how sweet. :) Anyways, I drove to my Dr's, who wasn't even there, another Dr. took a look at me. They said the bloodclot that covers the wound as it heals had been dislodged which was causing it to bleed. They said this usually happens when the patient is doing "too much" and need to take it easy. They had to pack my cervix with this awful smelling (I know, TMI, lol) goopy, thick medicine to stop the bleeding and allow it to heal properly. This HURT like a **&*%^%&^%&^%. I was in so much pain by the time I left, I thought I was dying!! I was crying like a baby by the time I made it home! They told me to keep my feet up tonight and to take it easy for the next several weeks. The intense pain subsided within an hour, and the cramping is now back to a dull ache, except when I stand up. I don't know how in the heck I am supposed to take it easy with 3 kids, a house to keep clean and running, student teaching, and a class that has homework ever night for 3 weeks, not to mention the parking at UCO is ridiculous and I have to park way across campus and walk a mile to and from my car. It's just frustrating. I tried to get this surgery done during the summer so I would't have to worry about this, but of course that didn't work out with the Dr & the surgery center schedules.

I could write forever, it is my thing. But I figure I've written enough of a novel and I can write another day. Especially if I have any hope of anyone actually reading it, lol.

Need your opinion

So I am going to enter this birthday cake contest at cookie.com, but I can't decide which cake to enter!! I've narrowed it down to these 4, so let me know which one you think is the best! Thanks!!

Back to school

I always stock up on crayons and such during the back to school sales. Starla found 2 new boxes of crayons and dumped them out and then started sorting them before I caught her! lol. I swear, she's my little rain man. She sorts and counts everything!!




Wednesday is my mom's birthday, so Sunday we spent the day with her & my dad, my aunt and her grandson in bricktown. First we went to Toby Keith's for lunch, and then we took a ride on the canal. It was lots of fun!





















I started school on monday, which was a tough day. First of all it was from 7:30a-5pm, so it was alot of sitting. We had several speakers going over various topics. Monday was bullying, bloodborne pathogens, suicide, and child abuse (which included lots of horrible pictures and stories of child abuse) so it was hard to get through. I know it is all necessary, and good training, but never much fun. The Teacher of the year from last year also got to speak with us for an hour, which was awesome. Then today we had 2 different lawyers talk to us about our rights, what to avoid, etc, etc. We also had another teacher come talk to us from Putnam high school who was amazing. Tomorrow we only go from 9a-12:30pm to talk about what happens at student teaching, so that should be interesting. And then student teaching starts on monday! I am so excited! For the first 3 weeks we only go to our school for about 3 hours in the morning and then head to UCO from 1p-4pm for a class. After that we are in our teaching position for full days for the rest of the semester. And then I graduate on Dec. 12th! Woo hoo!! It's hard to believe it's finally here!

Both lawyers today, among others, have given the advice of limiting information about ourselves on the internet, and making all of it as private as possible. I can't give up my blogging habit just because I am a teacher, but I can make it harder to access. So, probably in the next month or so, I am going to make this and all my other blogs private. You have to join blogspot, and request to follow my blog in order to see it. So if you read this and aren't already doing that, I encourage you to do it!

Tonight was meet your teacher night at the boys school, so that's always fun!


Roman is in the 3rd grade this year, and this is his new teacher Mrs. Olliver. He took the test for the gifted program at the end of last year, and they told us tonight that he passed with flying colors and will be joining Bourbon in the gifted program once a week, so he is excited. When Bourbon took the test he got a 98% (you have to get a 95% or better to get into the program) so I am curious to see what score Roman got as well!





Bourbon is in the 5th grade this year, and this is his new teacher, Ms. Kilmer (I know, she looks 12 right?! lol) She was also his flag football coach last year, so he already knows her, which is nice.



Thursday is their first day back at school, and my surgery. I have to be at the surgery center at noon and my surgery is at 1pm. My best friend Jamie is taking me, and staying with us on thursday and friday to take care of me and the kids while I recover. And my amazing friend Kristal has arranged for meals to be delivered to me from thursday to monday!!! Which just blows me away! I am so blessed to have such wonderful people in my life. :)

The terrible twos

Starla has such horrific tantrums. I swear, she is the worst of the 3 of my kids at throwing fits! Of course maybe it has just been so long since the boys were this age, and I don't remember it that well. I do remember Bourbon used to bang his head on the floor and pinch himself when he was mad, so I guess that's bad too, lol. But Starla is soooo loud!! And mean!!

I decided to video tape an episode. This was actually AFTER the screaming like a banshee at the top of her lungs, kicking and screaming, which is why she is in the naughty chair. My neice Karli was staying with us, and she had gone outside to play with Roman, which made Starla mad.



It lasted another 4 or 5 minutes before Starla put on a smile said "I'm sorry for throwing a fit mom" and got up and gave me a big hug. Silly girl.

My birthday & the Watermelon Festival

So I decided on my birthday I wanted to go to the Watermelon Festival in rush springs. This is the giant sign they leave out year round, and we pass it when we go through Rush Springs on our way to Duncan to visit Alan's family, and I always say I want to go, but we never do. So this year, I wanted to go!



Alan usually gets off pretty eary on saturday by like 9am, but the delivery truck with his bread on it was running late from denton, and he couldn't start as early as normal, so he ended up working late and couldn't go with us. :( And Bourbon was at his dad's for the weekend, his weekend fell on my birthday last year too. :( But Jamie came with me. My neice Karli had spent the last 2 nights with us, and we were meeting her family there to give her back as well.


I was expecting a little small town, country charm, festival with lots of farmers selling produce, tons of watermelon and watermelon products around, maybe a hay ride, a crafts bazaar, stuff like that. But there was a giant carnival area, tons of booths selling stuff, a car, truck & motorcycle show, and one place selling watermlon slush and one place selling watermelon by the slice. Which the "slice" was actually a watermelon cut into 4ths, a giant quarter of a watermelon! They were selling these for $1 a slice, and my nephew Landon (who's 20, so he's not a little guy) ate 12 of them while he was there!!!! That's 3 whole watermelons!!!! Crazy!!

But, it seemed more like just a festival, not a watermelon festival!





There were rows and rows of booths where people were selling arts & crafts, homemade goods, toys, purses,clothes, etc. Kind of like a swap meet or a craft show, but there were all kinds of different things there. I love looking at all of those kinds of things!





They had a ton of playground equipment, and we stopped and played for a bit









They had several monster trucks, and a car & motercycle show going on





The prize winning watermelon for largest melon. It was like 132 lbs or something like that!!





Watermelon slush! Which actually turned out to just be watermelon juice on ice, but it was still yummy.









The seed spitting contest





The kids rode a couple of rides











Alan's mom, and sister met us out there. It was hot, but lots of fun!





Our haul! We stopped at a little farm stand after we left the festival and we got a giant watermelon, a cantelope, and a cross between a honeydew melon & a cantelope, which I am excited to try!




Yum! Rush springs watermelon!





Starla helps put the candles on my cake. If you count the candles, you will see that I am 19.... :)



I have such wonderful family and friends! Look at all the great gifts I got!! And this wasn't even all of them, some of them, like the awesome scrapbook kit Melissa got me, and the fun basket Kristal gave me, were already broke into and put to good use before this picture was taken!! My wonderful Hubby got me the Paula Deen 10 piece pan set!! I can't wait to use them! And Jamie got me a ticket to the "Little Shop of Horrors" musical, I can't wait to go!! Thanks so much to all my amazing friends and family who spoiled me rotten on my birthday!