if the fat angel doesn't get off my shoulder, we're gonna have problems!

today was my day to sleep in!! only i didn't get to sleep in¡ (that's an inverted exclamation point at the end of the sentence, expressing negative excitement-well, it made sense in my mind).
nope, i had to get up at 7 to get the boys ready to go to the vet. bruno was going in for a routine teeth cleaning (included in his plan) and i asked them to do a urinalysis to see if bladder infection might be why he's peeing in random spots (like the arm of the couch where he usually sleeps...yuck, that took awhile to clean. poor guy. and chaco was going in for the bordatella (and i had them clip his nails-puppy pedi...b/c i can't get him to sit still long enough and i gave them permission to tranq him if necessary).  
when i left, i had these two on my shoulder:

recognize them?

 and....the cinnabon was delicious. oops. 
i went straight from there to aldi's because they were supposed to have beanbags on sale-i got there and they informed me that they ran out the first day-i gave my most disgusted look because i have had a difficult time finding a new beanbag for the boys(they absolutely love plowing into them-the run and jump into the soft, squishy goodness. and it tickles me to watch them). so i went to walmart to check and they didn't carry any either, so i got a dog bed and a cat tunnel to try to get them doing some tricky agility type stuff. then i came home and took advantage of being alone and i got to steam the carpets and clean up a little. and as i was cleaning, i got a call from the vet saying that yes, bruno possibly had slight infection, but more importantly his molars were loose. so under the advisement of the experts, i gave them the ok to pull his molars so they wouldn't continue to get worse. after talking to the vet, we're not sure why he's having such problems with his teeth-he's much too young for that, so we're going to get better at brushing the teeth (which is really bruno licking the chicken-flavored paste and then chewing on the bristles...). 
so after picking them up and bringing them home, bruno has been sleeping and i tried to get him to sleep on the ice pack for a bit. but he's been up/down/up/down because chaco was playing in the tunnel-ok, actually i threw his treat in and he was timidly trying to figure out how to get it, and i had to get down and coax him through. 

brought home pain meds for him, which we might use tonight before bed, but i want to make sure he doesn't get addicted, because he saw where i keep my meds-the caps are child proof, but not puppy proof...

chaco finally chilled out after about 10 leaps into the beanbag chasing his toy-oh, back up, i forgot to mention that i came home looking for how to make a beanbag. it didn't look too difficult, but in a last ditch effort, i checked target, and they had lavender beanbags with girlie-frilly stuff, and i thought i could come up with something clever to convince them it was a boy color, but i didn't have to because there was actually a plain red one! and fortunately target is right by my vet!  and when i got to my vet i saw carol, one of my co-teachers with the cutest little puppy! (it was her daughter's, but she was a cutie!); we caught up a bit and it just reminded me of how short my summer really is this year! boo. 
anyhoo, like i was saying, chaco finally chilled on the little bed i bought today and i guess i need to teach him how to sleep in a bed, because he didn't do a very good job even though it has a lip to keep him in.

 well, i guess at this point, i will let you go because i know you're captivated and having difficulty pulling yourselves away!
so..tomorrow i will sleep in!
julie


 

handlebars belong on a bike. period.

i know, it's been a few days. this week has been an un-interesting week and i've had writer's block and nothing has seemed incredibly inspiring or deserving of being written about. i think it's a mixture of feeling a little let-down by the summer school thriving minds program this year and trying to figure out what's up with bruno.

the best part of today was going to north park for lunch at the food court and seeing this man with his handlebar mustache...see it off the left cheek (sorry i didn't get a better pic) it was pretty creepy.

the worst part was waiting for panda express to get my chicken egg roll done. (obviously it didn't phase them that i was standing there in front of the straws handing them out to every customer because my tray was in the way and i must not have had my best 'i'm annoyed' face on because the promised 3 minutes turned into about 7. jerks). shoulda' gotten the fajitas.

ok, i never win anything, so you can imagine my surprise when my name was drawn today at the training and i got to choose my prize. hmm. it was between a math book and a reading book-guess which one the reading teacher chose. it figures that i would win a boring prize (it's just a comparison of elps and elar-if you're confused, it's ok, join the crowd)

they're good at trying to fool you by creating an intriguing, fun cover

this is a legit sampling of the book-every page is comparison-boo. boring.

i wouldn't have won anything, but 2/3 of the class did not return to our session today, so they called about 10 people who weren't there and finally my name. lucky me. if i get a chance i may look for some little nuggets of goodness and see if there are any gems hidden in the rough, but i have a lot of summer reading which will take priority.

right now chaco is trotting back and forth all over the house looking for a place to cache his rawhide...he just yelled at me, "momma! stop watching!" as if i was planning to dig his rawhide out of the folds of the beanbag to chew on it while he's off at the vet or something... he's a puppy on a mission.

well, if you meet up with a man who has handlebar mustache, don't try to grab it and drive away-that would be considered assault.

julie

it may be a green bag, but at least it's an honest bag!

while i was in oklahoma, kb mentioned how dogs curled their tongues to bring the water up under their tongues when they lap water...so i had to find a video! check it out here on a discovery video-very cool (and short). no wonder bruno hates it when i force drink (force feed...) the water with the syringe-so unnatural to him! so every time he drinks from the glass bowl, i watch and blink my eyes really fast (to make it look like slow motion frames-try it, but be careful, because it could be addictive...and no one wants to be known as the 'lady-who-cannot-stop-blinking,' it's almost as bad as the professor who spits when he lectures).

today my goal was to get dog food (that's right, set your goals high...that's what i always tell the kiddos!), i also went to get a new shoulder-bag because chaco has ruined the strap and i can only cut off so many of the fraying strands before the strap no longer holds the bag up. i've put up with the tape and frayed strands for about 3 months now, it was time.

my biggest grievance was that when i got to rei, they didn't have the exact same bag-in black. so i opted for the green one. who cares-i've never been a fashionista anyway. while i was at there, i decided to look around the camping section and i was so thankful for the nonstop chatter-girl who was talking to the associate, that way i didn't have to talk to him. (too much customer service is a bad thing). anyway, she had her big dog with her and was talking about a 14 mile hike and then sleeping in her car. and how her dog was great because he doesn't drink stagnate water, but he will drink from running water. (fyi lady, if your dog is thirsty enough, i'll bet money he'll drink stagnate water). then i saw the store associate try to break away toward me, but she kept talking to him about the next thing she saw and i was able to slip to a different section of the store.

once i found the bags i was looking for, they didn't have an identical to mine, so i settled. it basically looks the same. just that it's green (as i mentioned before).

the tag says 'simply honest bags'...i guess that's a good thing-i wonder what a dishonest bag looks like.

there was another lady standing beside me and she was looking for a bag because she had one in europe, but it just didn't work for her. she told me she 'found the perfect one at marshalls of all places' and for 17 bucks, i thought that should be a no brainer-if she liked it, she should've gotten it then. (or maybe she was just a marshall's spy/advertiser sent to other stores to lure customers to the marshalls around the corner).

my last stop was the dog food and as i was leaving, i saw this car and i'm pretty sure it is not a mary kay rep car...perhaps a pepto bismol door-to-door sales person.

i remember when we were in honduras the last couple of years, my parents got a celebrity and it was powerful and really comfortable! but it wasn't pink. thank goodness!

and that's a wrap-time to check on my homemade fruit rollups and prepare tomorrow's lesson!

remember go green-it's the new black!
julie

..and i called the dessert 'better than dirt'.. when i first came to this land..

not gonna lie, today i may have gotten a little huffy when i walked into my classroom and saw chairs askew, none of the desks lined back up in order and the other teacher's books pulled out and laying around.

maybe it's just me, but i learned a long time ago to leave things better than you found them. this would be a non-example of that.

i'm pretty sure that i won't have a problem with that tomorrow. (i've taken measures to ensure that). 

when the music man came to our class today, i was trying to hang with them and pay attention to what was going on, and i recognized the song and book he was singing about the poor immigrant who came to america (when i first came to this land, i was not a wealthy man so i bought myself a farm, i did what i could and i called my farm muscle in my arm ...who names a farm like that? dummy. and he called his horse 'i'm the boss'...that doesn't rhyme with horse. helloooo. and he called his son 'lots of fun' -which reminded me of a joke: if his daddy's name was winchester, he'd be a son of a gun!) ba-da--ch(the ch is like a cymbol). once he started playing music for them, i almost fell asleep-i know i was in a daze.

i don't know what's wrong with me, but i forgot the binder at home again! worst teacher ever! actually, no, there are worse, and at least i'm amazing at using my resources and improvising...in fact, i think my idea is better than the original was anyway! and the kids had fun!

and tomorrow the other 4th grade teachers decided that they wanted to have 'potluck dinners' at the end of each week. i was volunteered to bring something sweet, so i made this truffle type cookie bar, only...i didn't have pecans. but wait! i do have mixed nuts! so i decided to chop those up and see how that worked...and just an fyi, the off brand chocolate chips...they don't spread very well even when melted. boo.
ok, so i tried the bars and it might've been good choice to go purchase the pecans! oh well! 


just remember that if your recipe calls for pecans...go get the pecans!
julie

what do tiny bubbles have to do with lawrence welk?

today we had another wave of kiddos show up to the classroom. a couple of mishaps yesterday-one of the busdrivers never showed up so our principal had to call them, and one of the buses that was supposed to show up took kids to the wrong school.

i know, it may seem strange that dallas is offering summer school/enrichment camp in july. the reason that we are doing this is so that the the timing is closer to the beginning of the school year so that the kids don't lose everything that we go over. and it's mixed in with the integrated arts program so that the students are doing arts and having fun learning.

so, before i left yesterday afternoon, the afternoon arts guy asked if i had books for them to read. (this was a strange question to me because they are supposed to be doing dance, theater, cooking, visual arts, music, etc) when i came in this morning, i asked the kids what they did and they said they read the thesaurus for awhile, then they stretched and danced a little, then they read the thesaurus some more and he read something to them. hmm. then i noticed my mentor book for writing that talks about different childrens' story authors over on the table. that must have been what he read to them. strange.

during the day, our music man came in again and this time he played some different arrangements of popular songs for them, and after playing a jazzy/blues song, he asked the kids which genre of music the song was and one of the boys said: bartender! bet you didn't know that was a musical genre..i didn't!

so this afternoon as i was leaving, i said now comes the fun part of the day! (and one of the boys shook his head no and muttered under his breath,  'no.') they'd better have more fun today than they did yesterday or i'm going to be  very frustrated.

when i got home today, i asked bruno what part of the trip to oklahoma he liked best and he said he kinda liked a lot of it, especially when shea and griz were playing with the see-through balls that disappeared in mid-air. i cocked my head and asked what he was talking about, then i remembered the bubbles! so i found some wedding bubbles i bought for my class to celebrate with and pulled them out to let him play a little and guess what, he did! he tried to eat some of them.

this reminded me of a song i used to hear in my parents old car (you know, the one with the 8track!)...please click here to see tiny bubbles on the lawrence welk show! and the funny thing is she has such a twang that i used to think she was saying tiny bubbles in the water (but the lyrics are tiny bubbles in the wine although tiny bubbles in a jet tub or in the ocean spray is what i was thinking-wine was taboo in our home). and of course as i was looking for that song, i came across one of my all time favorites from SNL of the lawrence welk show-check it out! thank you kristin!

alrighty, hope the tiny bubbles make you feel fine!
julie
p.s. hopefully there aren't too many mistakes because i do not feel like proofing tonight!

binder, if i didn't know better, i might think you stayed home on purpose!

well, today was the first day of summer school/camp. it was a pretty good, until i got to school and realized that i had left my binder sitting on the couch in my front room and brought the binder from my AVID training. hmm.

good thing i read through the lesson last night and had a good idea of what i was going to do!

when we left on thursday, we were under the impression that we would be getting about 38 students each (in 4th grade), but when all was said and done, today only 7 of my students showed up...either they forgot, or umm..i don't know. hopefully several show up tomorrow so that everyone can keep their summer jobs!

my favorite part of today was when the music man came to our room (not like the musical). he brought his clarinet and sang and played games about texas with the students-yea!

when we took the kids out to play for about 10 minutes, there were 2 benches. one bench had three of my coteachers on it, and the other had no one. which one do you think i went to? and as i was passing by, they were trying to make space on their bench. i said, "no, it's not that i don't like ya'all, but i need space." in other words, i really don't want to be crowded in hundred degree weather stuffed between you.

how fun would it be to be a food judge on chopped or iron chef? (yes, the boys made me watch food network with them tonight)


it's getting late and i have an early morning wake up call, so i'm out!
julie

oklahoma weekend with friends

it's the 4th of july!! as i was slipping off to sleep last night, the thought going through my head was that it sounds an awful lot like the 4th of you lie (when some people say it); somehow there is a movie script in there with an evil witch casting a spell on someone as a baby and on the 4th of every month the child/adult cannot help but lie all day long. like i said, that was the thought as i was falling asleep-as you can tell..

i took this weekend to go up to oklahoma to hang out with some great friends i haven't seen in awhile- too long to be exact. i had been debating with myself all last week whether or not i was going to actually go because my back was still not feeling great, and bruno has still not been himself. but i knew that i had to go because if not, i would've regretted the opportunity to play because as of right now, summer is not really going to be much vacationing.

so i packed the boys up and we drove up to edmond, met up with shea and bmayes and then we drove on up to spring valley ranch in spavinaw hills. we had the directions, nonetheless, we weren't sure we were going the right way until we crossed the creek on the small concrete bridge and took the right fork. when we drove up to the lodge, it was huge. so we met up with kb (another friend from kamp who i haven't seen in ages), then went in and cooked up some spaghetti and made some salad-we corralled the boys and reagan, chaco's sister, into the kitchen so they wouldn't sneak out the door into the night and get eaten by owls or bobcats or the huge dogs.

after dinner we chatted and played a fun celebrity game (new to me, but fun), and midnight sneaked  up on us really quickly. not sure why, but i kept getting justin timberlake, and there was only one thing that kept coming to mind to try to get shea to guess (i just don't know enough about him or his music i guess). of course it probably wasn't fair that john adams and samuel adams were thrown in there. it's a little difficult to act them out or think of one word to describe them.

saturday we woke up late and after breakfast, we went riding on the 4wheelers and kb showed us around the property. it is beautiful! and as we were going up hills, down hills, around bends by the lake, scenes from i shouldn't be alive were replaying in my head of rolled atv's. i'm glad it wasn't just me because shea said she kept thinking about what if's too.

two of my awesome friends-kb and shea (kb's parents own the ranch and they have retreats and rent out the lodges and it's such a beautiful area!!

4wheeling is great, but the entire time i was wondering how this would fare on my back-but it really didn't matter-it was good for the soul. it was so warm by the time we finished that we decided to jump into the creek and float for awhile. when we finished, it was time to go.

once we got back to shea's, i was in bed, ready to sleep when i felt a pinch between my toes and it really caught me by surprise, so i reached down and i immediately knew what it was, so i went into the bathroom and sure enough, it was a little tick! gross!! glad i found it right away! that of course caused shea to get out of her bed and check herself as well (it's like the lice thing i mentioned before, when every time your head itches, you feel like you have lice too).

well, the next day we played on paddle boards and kayaks! woo hoo! i'm so glad i got to come up and enjoy the fun!

on the way home, the boys were tuckered out and i think they were just happy to be going home. they were fine the first half of the trip, then chaco decided that this would be a good idea

which i did not encourage. it was ok until he fell down behind my back as i was trying to grab him-which makes me look like a terrible driver. so for the rest of the trip i had to strap him into his seat. the worst part was the: are we almost there yet? from both of them.

and when we finally reached home, fireworks were going off..not so much for our arrival as for celebrating independence. although i really hope there are fireworks tonight as today is actually independence day.  we had brats to celebrate and i watched how the states got their shapes- i thought that was pretty patriotic.

happy 4th of july (4th of you lie?)
julie