Home for the holidays....and back again.

Well, I haven't written in a really long time, so you would think I would have a ton to write about. I don't. Or maybe I am just feeling lazy becuase, yes, I have yet another cold and feel crappy this morning. Anyway, I am in New Jersey now at my parents' house. It is great to be home, and I feel like I am getting alot of time to see everyone. It is kind of hard though, to go from being alone the majority of the time to being with people nearly all the time. It's great though, I am certainly not complaining. Anyway, we had a really nice Christmas, my sister loved the jewelry box I made for her, and I loved all of the presents I got, including a new duvet cover, a pink jacket, lots of new clothes and some other things as well. It was a really fun Christmas. We decided this year to have a nontraditional Christmas dinner. We had picky foods first like crackers and cheese and pita chips and hummus. Then we had this really yummy baked shrimp scampi. With that we had salad and bread. It was delish! It was fun to try something different than the normal turkey or ham or beef with all the normal sides.
I went to NYC with my Califon friends a couple days after Christmas. It was crazy packed, and kind of overwhelming (NYC is SSOOOOOO much bigger than Boston, eek!) but it was really nice to see all of them. Then we went back and played board games at one of their houses. Those are the things I miss when I am in Boston, just sitting around playing board games with a good group of girl friends. I have good friends up there, but it is just different when you have been friends with people your entire life.
The other thing I am super happy about is that I have gotten to see my niece so much this week! She is soooo cute, and I get to go see her again today. It is amazing to me how different she is now than she was six months ago. She is almost four, and she is just so smart, I love asking her questions and talking to her, she can hold her own in a conversation with an adult very well. I think she is going to be a genius, but I guess I might be a little biased! :)
Anyway, I am looking forward to going back to Boston, but at the same time I am a little sad. I hate when I miss out on things that happen here, but when I am here, I miss my life up there, and especially D. I am looking forward to going back and seeing him and spending New Year's with him. Anyway, hopefully I will be back to write sooner this time, but it is possible this could be my last post of 2009!

The magic of the holidays

Well, today was a bit stressful, with crazy kids at work, lots to do before I go home tomorrow, and excitement for Christmas! I don't really have much to say to update here, but I will say this, I am sooo lucky to be in a classroom with 6 year olds before Christmas. They are sooo freaking adorable! It is so sweet to see their excitement, and to know they truly believe in both Santa and the magic of the season. It makes me feel like a kid again too, and I think that is the answer to the question people always ask me. "How do you love Christmas sooo much and not seem stressed?" The answer, I think, is because I always get in touch with my 6 year old self and enjoy it for the reason they do, because it is a magical season of joy, happiness, and pure magic. Even though it has been many years since I believed in Santa, I still believe in the magic of the season, and sometimes on Christmas Eve, I like to lay in bed and pretend there is a Santa, just for fun. You should try it. Try to think about being 6 again, and imagine how it would feel to enjoy the process of buying, wrapping, giving and receiving gifts, to believe in something, and to just enjoy something for the pure reason that it is fun and magical.

:)

A Very Binghamton Christmas!

I spent the weekend in Binghamton with D for his extended family's Christmas celebration. They are a fun bunch, lots of laughing and talking. It was a good time! We started on Friday by going to New Hampshire to work on a Christmas surprise for someone...I can't mention it yet! We got up on Saturday morning and got ready to leave, but then someone called to come get hay, so we ended up being a bit later than expected. We finally got to Binghamton around....3? and were just in time for dinner with the family. (they didn't know that we had eaten Panera for lunch around 2 and none of us were really that hungry...but we ate anyway! Oink oink!) We opened presents and hung out for a while then watched "the movie." "The movie" I speak of is National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, which has been a tradition in his family since it came out in 1989. So we watched that, and alot of us fell asleep...we are a crazy bunch. Lol, but, to be fair, it was around 11 by the time we were watching the movie, and we had been busy driving and stuff all day, so we were zonked! This morning we all went out to breakfast, and we exchanged presents with D's parents and two of his sisters. I was really happy with all of the presents I got, but the best was the mittens that D's mom knitted for me. They are gorgeous! I also loved the blue LLBean wellies with ducks on them! They are sweet! Anyway, it was a fun weekend, and a great start to the Christmas holiday...oh wait, I still have three days of work. Yay.

The theme of the day is....food babies!

I have decided the theme of the day is food babies. I say this because we had a staff breakfast this morning, at which I devoured deliciously indulgent things like homemade monkey bread, a blueberry muffin, and some grapes to make me feel better about the globs of butter and sugar baked into the aforementioned monkey bread. Then I had a normal lunch, ham and cheese sandwich, clementines, and a pudding..that part was fine, and a cheese stick for a snack after work. However, then I went to class tonight, and our teacher had sent us an email a couple days ago cheerfully saying we were going to "celebrate our learning!" today. I think "celebrate your learning!" is code for eat until the button pops off your pants and talk a little about the project I spent the last three months working on. (No, my button did not actually fall off). So anyway, she had told us to bring "little munchies" to eat while we "celebrated our learning". To me, this meant stopping at CVS on the way to class and picking up a bag of Stacy's pita chips, which I find delightful! Apparently I have no notion of what "little munchies" are. You should have seen the spread we had! Someone baked a layer cake with strawberries on top (which I didn't have the room in my belly to try), someone else bought a gourmet chocolate mint cake (this one I did try, yum!) and other people brought fudge, cookies and brownies. What the hell is this, a food tasting? One other girl apparently was on the same wavelength as me and brought two bags of popcorn...thank you, that is a munchie! I suppose I shouldn't be complaining about all of the culinary delights people contributed to our learning celebration, but since my stomach is cramping with sugary overload and my mouth feels cottony and parched, I am complaining. I think I have a food baby....oh well, at least they don't cry!

So....when I get to the point tonight when eating again is actually a possibility (which, knowing me will probably be an hour from now!) I am having minestrone soup for dinner.

I don't anymore sugar tonight, I don't want any bread tonight, I just want vegetables. My mother would be so proud!

productivity is key!

Well.. I was productive today. After a semi-crazy day of work (the kids are nuts because it is a week and a day until break), I went to the post office, put in my laundry at the laundromat (ugh!), went to CVS, switched my laundry (ugh!), then went home, dropped of some stuff, went back out to Rite Aid because I realized I forgot to buy tape to wrap presents, came home, got my Christmas things ready for my work friends, made dinner, went back and got my laundry, and then came home. It is 7:39. Not bad for an afternoon's work!

Now I am going to wrap presents and enjoy a cheesy holiday movie....Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Haha...come on, you know you like it too, the Christmas movie, the crazy pigeon lady who ends up being nice, and the KEEEEVVVVIIIIN scream at the end when they get the hotel bill. Its great! Haha, anyway, some highlights and lowlights of the day.

Lowlights
1) the kids were crazy, loud, and disrespectful for alot of the day
2) I actually had to sit the kids down on the rug and talk to them about not peeing on the floor in the bathroom, not putting the door stop in the toilet, not unrolling the entire roll of tp, and not squirting soap all over the floor. That was interesting.

Highlights
1) There was a teeeeny tiiiny baby with his mom at the laundromat today. It made the laundry process much less painful as he was just so cute and tiny and innocent.
2) Christmas movies rock!
3) I was productive
4) My dinner was yummy....yet simple!

Yay! I just finished my last assignment of the semester...a 20 page paper on how text and internet language is affecting our students' literacy development! I feel happy that that is off my plate now, and now I just have to get through two more classes, one Wednesday and one Thursday, then I am done until the middle of January! Sweet!

I have decided sleep might be at a premium this week, because I have so much stuff to get done before a) Binghamton Christmas this weekend and b) New Jersey Christmas on actual Christmas. It is a busy time of the year, I suppose, and at least most of what I have to do is fun stuff, disregarding the completely annoying things such as laundry. ugh..I hate laundry. Actually, that statement is a lie. I don't mind doing laundry, in fact, I kind of like adding the soap and the satisfaction of knowing the laundry is clean when you switch it from the washer to the dryer. Its a great feeling of accomplishment. Here are the things I do hate about laundry: 1) I hate folding and putting away my clothes. If I could have someone do that for me, I would be perfectly happy to wash all the laundry in the house. 2) I HATE HATE HATE going to the laundromat. It is awful. First of all, it requires me to lug my laundry down two flights of stairs and to my car. Second, I always seem to wait until the day when it is snowing/raining/some other form of awful weather-ing, and I can never wait until the next day, when it is inevitably beautiful and sunny, because I run out of things that are pretty essential, like underwear and socks! Third, I NEVER have the coins I need, and that usually means I have to either go rooting around my house for quarters, or go to somewhere where I can get cash back, buy something, and then use the quarter machine, or go to the bank, which is located on a one way street where the parking lot is ridiculously small and hard to manage. I also am not fond of the idea of washing my clothes where hundreds of other people wash their clothes...something about the idea that I could be washing my sweater in someone else's leftover jock strap gunk really disgusts me. Anyway, that is my laundry rant for the day.

Just for a laugh, here is the story of a day in the life of a first grader, written in the language of a first grader.

FrsT i waKd up and then i go t drsd and i ward my favoort shrt and then i eetd bekfust and then i wokked to scool weth my mom and dad and then i did scool and it was fun and i had piza for luch weth chez on it and then i went hom and i playd outsid and then i went to bed and red a bok.

It's beginning to look alot like Christmas :)

So, I have found it hard to get into the Christmas spirit this year, and I think I figured out the reasons why. First, it was such a weird fall, it was warm for so long. Usually I feel Christmassy before Thanksgiving and I am in the mood by then. This year though, I felt like it was September/October weather until about two weeks ago. The second reason I think is because this fall has gone ridiculously fast! I have been so busy that it seems like all the sudden here it is a week and a half from Christmas, and I feel like I have hardly enjoyed the spirit yet. I think I finally morphed into the spirit though. When my mom was up last weekend, we went to see the Urban Nutcracker, as I said before, and then on Sunday we were walking around the Pru. When we came out of the mall, it was snowing. It was so beautiful, and we turned onto Boylston Street and strolled along with the snow floating down on us. It was amazing, so Christmassy. Then it starting raining and it all melted, and there went that flicker of Christmas spirit. This weekend, I went up to D's house in New Hampshire, where they have about a foot of snow on the ground. I could feel my spirit growing as I drove past the snowy farms listening to Christmas tunes on the radio and thinking about the Christmas shopping we were going to do. Last night we went Christmas shopping, and we spent the majority of the weekend working on a Christmas surprise for someone. Today I wrapped the Christmas presents we bought, and then we came back to Boston. I have been home for several hours, and the spirit is still with me! I think maybe I finally got into the season...jeepers, its about time!

On another related note, I have been feeling alot lately how wonderful it is to be in love during the holidays. Don't get me wrong, I love D so much all year round, and I am thankful for his love all the time, but during the holidays there is some special spark that is in the eyes of everyone who loves someone. I walk down the street and see a woman wrapped in a scarf on her tip toes in fluffy boots with a man's arms draped lovingly around her shoulders, just barely kissing her forehead, and it makes me feel so lucky that I know exactly what they are feeling at that moment, that feeling of complete satisfaction and comfort. It's wonderful. I just thought I would share that with everyone....because it is important to remember during the holidays and all the time to be thankful for the people you love, and those who love you in return.