Conference with Principal

Today I met with my principal to talk about my lesson he observed. The first question he asked me was, "1-4 how do you think your lesson went." I told him a 3 because I felt it went well, but there is always room to grow. He said that he usually would agree with me, but that in my observation he didn't put any suggestions for improvement. He said that my lesson has been the best he's observed so far. :) So that felt great. He said I did an outstanding job and moved well around the class and that he heard me give a lot of positive praises to my class. He says it is very obvious that I have my routines established in my classroom and that if I were absent, the kids would be able to know what to do because of the routines I've established with them. So it was a very nice conference and now I know I need to make sure my lesson in the Spring is as great or even greater. :)

My Teacher Evaluation

So today I had my first evaluation. As always I get so nervous the day of and my stomach has tons of knots! You would think I would feel easy about it after teaching for 3 years. But I always feel so sick the morning of. Well I have my post conference with my principal on Thursday to find out how I did. He left me a note saying, "Great Lesson!" So that made me feel better. So we'll see what he has to say on Thursday.

A side note....I have an ultrasound appointment scheduled for this Friday!!!! :) I'm SUPER excited. I get to hopefully find out whether we're having a boy or a girl. So I will be letting you know on Friday what happens! Yay!!!!

Weekend with the Ashbaugh's

This past weekend started off nice with meeting Ian and his wife Deborah for dinner at Olive Garden. Yummy! We were then invited to go over to their house to play a game. We decided to play Phase 10. It was pretty funny because Deborah picked up on how competitive Travis is when it comes to games. He was wanting to know the score every round and where everyone was. He was ahead for awhile until I was in the lead. He fell behind but in the end he actually won the whole thing. It was fun getting to know the Crittendens and hopefully we will get together more frequently.

On Saturday morning we got ready to head to Sedona. We stopped for lunch at Black Angus. I've been in the mood for their ribs for a long time! We met Sherry and she gave us a gift card to Lowe's and paid for our lunch! Thanks Sherry, you're so sweet! We're excited to use the card and get some things for our house. After eating lunch we drove up to Sedona.

The directions were kinda confusing, but we made it to our room. The reason for the trip was to go to a timeshare presentation. Yuck! We really didn't want to get away since we just moved into our home. But we thought it would be nice to go up North were it is a little cooler. When we got into Sedona it was very pretty!

It's weird how a couple of hours can take you somewhere that looks so different. They are known for their red rocks. We had beautiful views from our bedroom although the bedroom wasn't all that lovely. We did have a fireplace though. Isn't it beautiful!

Around our hotel they had a lot of little shops. We walked around for awhile to look at all the shops they had. In our hotel lobby they had a "cave" set up with a bear!

We just had to stop and take a picture. This is what happens when I try to take the picture. I never know if Travis is paying attention or not. When a nearby fellow saw me trying to take a picture he offered to take a picture of the both of us.

Here you get a better picture of the whole cave and bear. I really like how this pic turned out. Thanks to nice people willing to take pictures for us. They always come out so much better than my one hand holding the camera in front of us trying to stretch it out as far as I can without making it look too obvious.

While waiting to cross the street, I decided to take a pic of me with the mountains behind me. On both sides of this street there were a ton of little shops. There was one shop that had really pretty crystals that you hang up and the light makes all these prisms around the room. I wanted to get one but it was SO expensive.

We stopped in this shop where Travis got a chocolate milkshake. I couldn't decide what to get so I decided to take a few sips from Travis' milkshake. It was really good.

After looking at the shops we went over to the main resort where we would have our meeting. We had special bills that could be spent over there. So we decided to do putt-putt and eat dinner in their restaurant. The grounds for the resort were really pretty. They had a lot of trees and a creek. It was nice to walk around and enjoy the nature.

I wanted to walk through the creek but being pregnant I didn't want to take the chance and fall! It was really pretty though. Travis went out into the brook and reminisced of his younger days and going to creeks like this. I'm sure if I wasn't pregnant we would have walked down the creek. But we decided to go and start putt-putt. It wasn't what we expected at all. It was very puny. We played only to 10 holes. I had putted two hole in ones. We were getting really thirsty and a little hungry so we decided to go into the restaurant and eat.

Here is the water we guzzled down. I noticed I'm starting to love to chomp on ice...bad habit I know! But it feels so good. :) Travis got a grilled cheese sandwich and I had chicken strips. Travis and I weren't impressed with the restaurant at all. The service was really slow and the food was not good. We were spending their money though and not ours, except for the tip. I forgot to mention that they gave us $60 of their money to spend while we were in Sedona. We could only spend it in places they told us though.

Awww....aren't we cute together. :) Even though we weren't experiencing the resort feeling, we still enjoyed each others company. After our dinner we decided to head back to our room and get some shut eye. We had a long day ahead of us with having to attend the timeshare meeting. When we got up we got ready and headed to an food court type of area. I wanted to make sure that I had some homemade ice cream before we left. So in the morning before eating breakfast I had cookies and cream homemade ice cream. It was delicious! It tastes so much better than ice cream you buy in the grocery store.

It even tasted better than my fav ice cream brand Blue Bell. Here is a pic I took...doesn't it look yummy! Travis decided to have some of my ice cream. It was too good to resist! After having the ice cream we headed back to the resort and used their dollars for breakfast. Again, service was slow and food not that great. We were hoping it was just that night, but apparently we were wrong.

While we waited for our food to arrive, I decided to draw a picture. Isn't it nice. They didn't have many colors to choose from, so I had to do with what they had.

Travis was happy to see that his football team, the Bengals, were on T.V. They weren't doing so well though. But that kept him busy and coloring kept be busy.

After breakfast we had to head to our meeting. We wish we could have just left, but we wouldn't have gotten our gas card and our deposit back. We would have also been charged for the room we stayed in. So they told us our meeting would take 90 minutes, but could last up to 120 minutes if we fill out paperwork. Well we told them we weren't interested but we still stayed there for over 2 hours!!! They were rude and we were ready to get out of there. Although we enjoyed the scenery, we were really ready to go home.

Excitement at the Ashbaugh's

There was a gift waiting for us when we got into our house.

It was a fancy grill set! We now need a grill.

Travis painting our rounded wall red! He had to put 4 coats of paint. Doesn't he looked thrilled!

Travis hooking up our fan in our family room.

Here is Travis planting grass seeds in our backyard. Now we are waiting to see some grass!

As you can see, Travis has been very busy in our house. He has been "dressing" it up. I'm so grateful for him! Our house is looking great little by little. As things get done in the house, I'll post more pics. Travis and I are really enjoying our house and not having to drive so far for work anymore! Yay! We are in a search for a new church family now that we have moved. We went to Sun Valley Church of Christ this past Sunday and enjoyed it. We had an elder come by and bring us cookies and express how he enjoyed having us visit. We also received cards in the mail from church members. We are planning on going this next Sunday again but to the early service. We are very thankful to God for everything He is providing us with.

Moving

Well, things went well for Travis and Ian to move our things into our house. The trouble we're having is getting our refrigerator in our house. The moving guys came in and messed up a wall near our front door. :( They also scratched the refrigerator on the front, so they are going to have to get us a new one. They also tried to see if they could get it through our back doors. So they started taking it all apart. I'm so nervous that our sliding doors are going to be messed up now. Ugh. I guess everything couldn't be smooth sailing. I will give you all an update when everything is finally in.

Our Home Walk Through & Doctor Appointment

On Tuesday we got to go see our house!!!! It is beautiful!!! It took a long time going around the whole house and checking everything. There are some touch-ups that they need to do, but it was still beautiful. It made Travis and I even more excited to move-in. Today we went and signed all the important papers to receive the house this next Friday, yea!!!!! I took some pictures of our house and thought I would share them with you. Here is how our house looks as of now. Enjoy!

Here is a view of our kitchen with Travis and our Construction Supervisor.

Our Family Room

Our Lovely Tile

Our Master Bedroom

Our Master Bathroom

They need to put in the clear glass around our shower though.

OOne of the other bedrooms in the house. We got fans in all our bedrooms.

Today we had an appointment to have another ultrasound. At around 12-13 weeks they do a test to check the neck of the baby. This will see what the chances are for us to have a baby with down syndrome. Everything looks good! We got to see our baby move around and our baby even waved to us! :) It was SO nice to see that everything is going well with our baby. Our baby was being stubborn though and not cooperating...lol...the doctor had a hard time getting our baby to turn around. She did say that she is 75% sure we are having a _______. Travis and I won't say until we are more sure though. :) So things are going well and we are super excited with everything God is blessing us with.

First Week of School

I survived my first week of school. It is tiring having to get up at 4am to get ready for my day. By the time we leave work and get home it is 6:30-7pm! So Travis and I have long days during the week. I have 25 students in my class (the most I've had teaching). The parents have been wonderful to work with and very helpful. I've had to make some not so good phone calls home the first week of school already. I'm just making them change their card every time so that they don't think they can get away with misbehaving. So far I haven't had a same kid get on red during the week, so that is nice. This year is going to be a little different teaching 1st grade. A lot of the kids I have only had half-day kindergarten. At my other school all of them came from full-day kindergarten. I can tell the difference!!! But we will work on it and I will have them getting use to being at school all day.

Aside from school, this Tuesday we will have our walk through for our house! We are SUPER excited! We have about 2 more weeks until move-in. Hopefully everything is ready at that time and we can move in. So I will be taking pictures for the walk through and have another post of it. We also have an ultrasound appointment this Friday. So we're excited to see how the baby is doing. It's hard having to wait so long to see how everything is going. I got really sick this past Thursday. Travis had to pull over on the side of the highway for me to throw up (gross I know)!!! But I'm feeling better now and think something was in my system that just needed to get out.