My 4 snow days..........

Never in the history of my life have i ever had four snow days and all of them right in a row! Outrageous! Unfortunately there are rumors of them taking them from our spring break,but i dont know. We usually tack the time onto the end of the day and just make our days longer, but that sucks, 7:45-3:00 is already long enough for 5 year olds! But i am almost positive they wont put them at the end of the year because they must must must make up that lost time BEFORE testing or else the world will end and our children will explode at test time, or at least that is how it seems. There is sooooo much emphasis on testing that i know longer am allowed to teach authentically or use applied assessments, but everything must be written in the form of a standardized test and the only thing i have time to teach my kids is how to respond on a test. Even in kindergarten, we must have multiple choice and open response questions for everything we teach. And i must follow the formula to teach them how to respond. Now i understand the government makes these tests so significant and the only thing our district can do to survive in the state is teach the test, but i truly and honestly believe they are going about it the wrong way. Instead of teaching kindergartens testing skills or just enough knowledge to spit it back out in the manner they want to hear it, they should start from the beginning and let the children learn concretely, through their development and emphasize hands on, applied learning and then maybe they would be able to apply what they have learned and respond appropriately on a test! Maybe their lack of background knowledge and experience because of their economic status or transient nature also hinders them and we should provide a rich education for them to be able to compete with the wealthier schools that have support coming out their ears! Maybe it is not about just what i teach and following a formula, but knowing each child and supporting them in their explorations of the world and providing a safe and educationally rich place to do that. I admit we have the odds stacked against us most days, but Mr. kentucky government, you cant keep taking away our funding! We already are overworked and underpaid, dont take programs aways from our needy kids, dont start taking from the kids too!! We are used to having things cut, but when you start taking from the kids, then you are going to get very unhappy teachers.

Wow that took a turn I didn’t expect! I wasn’t planning on writing all that, sorry for the tangent.

Anyway, so over these four days I have figured out why I cant keep up with my house cleaning, because it is an absolute full time job to clean up after my daughter and my husband. Since I already have a full time job, I don’t feel so bad now about never feeling like I could keep up with my housework! I have mopped the floors everyday, swept everyday, cleaned the bathroom, cleaned toys, cleaned the kitchen, etc. etc. etc. Just keeping up with the trail of stuff my daughter and my husband leave behind is crazy, and they are home all day! The plus side, is I was home to cook all three meals a day, so I was doing a lot of dishes too, but I could make sure my family was eating well, (and I wasn’t worried about what jimi was feeding Olivia) and it was a lot of fun! Thanks for all the wonderful recipes tracy!

So I got to spend a lot of time in my kitchen this week, and by the sound of things you would think I had never used an over before. You just gotta hear this……….So I was preparing to make some fruit pizza for dessert on Wednesday, I preheated the oven and went on preparing the fruit, then I noticed that my oven was smoking and giving off into a strange odor. I opened the oven door thinking my oven was broken, but instead I saw melting plastic, I had forgotten I had stored some large plastic bowls inside my oven! And they were now a puddle of goo! It was a mess and the house was filled with smoke! Livi and I bundled up and opened the doors and windows and tried to clean up. Needless to say, I now have a unusable wire rack. Do they sell oven racks individually, because I’m going to need a new one.

So that was incident number one…………yep, you guessed it, there’s more……… ☺ So Friday morning I was making some eggs for breakfast, I put the burner on warm while I was serving them to jimi and Olivia and I guess I didn’t return the pan to the burner, but we were all sitting down eating in the dining room when jimi said, “Do you smell that?” I didn’t smell anything, but he said he thought something was burning and then livi goes ooooooooo, I looked in the kitchen and saw a fire on the stove! Apparently, jimi had put a towel on top of the stove and the burner was still on so the towel went up in flames! So then I was stuck cleaning up ashes from the burning towel.

I felt so stupid, I promise I do cook and I do know how to use an oven! ☺

And another plus about my unexpected time off, stuck in the house, is that I got to spend it with Olivia. Now she wont leave me alone, since daddy works most of the time, it was just her and I and we had a blast, and now she is used to all mommy’s attention, I’m afraid she is going to have trouble transitioning back to daddy next week! She has been a complete mommy’s girl!

I’m afraid of what I am going to walk into on Monday, but I’m excited about what the next couple of weeks might bring. But it’s late and I’m hungry, so I am going to get a snack, make some superbowl snacks, and head to bed eventually!