Tonight I went with Savannah to Brownies.  It was our last meeting, so I thought it would be cool, since we are done working on Try Its to make a little scrapbook of our year.  I got some pictures printed and the Girl Scout scrapbook stuff at JoAnn’s was 40% off this week…so I made some little 6×6 booklets with some of the GS paper.  I sewed them together with my sewing machine.  They turned out really cute.  And I got some of the stickers for cheap too.  Anyway, at the end, before we left, we had each of the girls share their scrapbook, what their favorite thing was about their book and Savannah said how she like the pages that had the Girl Scout Promise and the Girl Scout Law the best.  She said she would “probably read them every night.”  It was just so cute how she said it.

A glimmer of hope I saw on my principal’s white board in her office…

“JD memart/robart”

probably no one knows what that means…to me, it means POSSIBLY I might get my old job back!? JUST teaching art…no more kindergarten.  No guarantees, for sure, right now…but HOPE…and hope is good these days.

I drew this little sketch of Parker during our computer lab time today.  My students were busy with Kid Pix Deluxe or Starfall…so I thought I would try to draw one of them.  I used the mouse to draw this in Kid Pix Deluxe.

…is procrastinate about saving my report card files somewhere else besides my flash drive.  I have been thinking about it and meaning to do it since January.  I am so mad at myself for putting it off.  Last week my flash drive started acting weird.  Sometimes my computer wouldn’t recognize the hardware and some files were missing…I found them, but at first I couldn’t.  So I worked on my sub plans for Thursday last week (I had a meeting in the pm) and then it was so late I went to bed and forgot about copying the files to my laptop.  So when I got up on Thursday morning, I remembered and I went to copy them…and my report card folder was EMPTY!!!  My heart started racing…and I panicked and ran upstairs crying…wanting Sam to tell me it will be fine, that he can recover the files easily.  He came down and tried and couldn’t copy them (to the mac) from the flash drive at all…he took it to work and him and Sid worked on it, but I am afraid it’s beyond hope.  So yesterday I sent home a note to my parents asking for report cards back, so I could copy them.  Today I got 4 back.  That’s a start.  I can probably come up with most of the data from written records I have kept, but it’s going to be a lot of work to re-enter all of the information from the whole year for every student.  I could just kick myself for being so naive about the dependability of a flash drive that I have been literally carrying in my pocket five days a week for four years!  I really didn’t think that anything would ever happen to it. I really don’t know how it got damaged…ALL I know is that I learned a tough lesson…and I will be so much more careful about backing up important files in other places in the future!

I’ll be the first to admit that we have made some pretty stupid decisions regarding our finances over the past few years.  The thing is, I never really understood how to be smart with money and how to live debt free…or even why we would want to.  It’s such a trap.

We have just completed a thirteen week course called Financial Peace University (Dave Ramsey) through our church.  We have learned SO much through this course and have committed to get out of debt (except for our main mortgage for our home).  We have a lot of work to do still, but we are happy to say we have completed baby step 1 and have been working on our debt snowball and have payed off four of our debts freeing up 340.00 a month that we can now apply towards the next debt on our list!.  It feels so good to do that.

I only wish that Sam and I had taken this course 15 years ago.  But then, I think, maybe we might not have been ready to make the commitment either.

But seriously, my opinion, EVERYONE should take this course…whether  you have a lot of debt or none.  It deals with so much more than just getting out of debt.  You can work through the course online for a small fee if you can’t take a class.  And the FPU member resources are amazing and so helpful.

Check it out…Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University

You have to go to this site and try this!

My Family from WiddlyTinks.com

We woke up to snow this morning…7 inches!  What!?  It WAS nice to have our Spring Break extended by one more day…and I’m looking at only 3 days of teaching this week.  That’s a nice way to ease back into the routine.

Today wasn’t such a great day.  I don’t know what it is, but my kids were like trying to eat all day.  By about 4 I decided it had to be because they were bored.  They were also fighting a lot.  Well, he have been spending a lot more time together this last week, I guess.  Anyway…after they have consumed half of the snacks and stuff I bought for lunches this week, I closed the kitchen…no more food till Dinner.  And I started giving them jobs to do. They were kind of motivated since we got back on track with the Dave Ramsey way of working for money to GIVE, SAVE & SPEND.  But it was hard to make them do a good job.

We did dye our Easter Eggs today.  I actually did half of them.  It just isn’t the same.  They don’t care about decorating them, they just want to eat them.  I suppose it will just get less important to them.  It’s kind of sad.

I also got paint out today for them to do a painting.  Savannah did a cute fairy picture…Karson painted something about firemen or robbers or something…Max just played and made designs and stuff.  It was really funny.  Karson wanted to PAINT his egg with watercolors.  It is actually really cute.   I thought it was funny that he wanted to be different.

I told you I’d post my pages from the Scrapbook Weekend I went to last weekend, so here they are.  They are from Jasmin’s album.

I know…7 pages isn’t much…but I spent Friday evening and some of Sat. morning preparing for the workshops that I taught in the afternoon on saturday.  And after I taught them, I slept until dinner…so really…I only worked on MY scrapbook for about 8 hours all together ( I’m guessing.)

The last page I really love.  I made 3 pockets, with notes that slip out.  The first one tells about how Jasmin was named after our babysitter Jasmin (aka MIMI), the last one is about her and how she is important to our family, and on the middle one I have asked Jasmin to write a note to baby Jasmin about her.  I actually would like to make a page like this for each of our kid’s albums and have her do the same for them. I asked her to think about what she might like to write.  I think it would be so special for them.  She has been so much a part of their lives the past 5 years.  I know they will enjoy looking back at something like that when they grow older and perhaps won’t see her as often.

…I think I’ve kind of developed a theme with color, embellishments and techniques in this scrapbook of Jasmin’s.  I really like the unified way it looks compared to my other album…where the pages are designed around the event.  You should see some of my old albums.  Too funny, yet, I love to look through them.  They are so different than what I do now.  You can see how I went through phases of materials and design.  Interesting (to me) to compare all the albums.  I have finished 1 wedding album, 1 album of a trip to Florida, 2 baby albums of Savannah’s, a college album (me) and 2 Sam and Julie scrapbooks (1990-2000).  UNFINISHED:  Karson’s (left off at 3 wks), Max’s (left off at 6 mos.), Jasmin’s (about 3 weeks done), & Savannah’s from age 3-9!, a super cute ABC album I started when Savannah was 3, and another Durocher family album that ends at 2002 and only has about 17 pages in it.  I really do like to scrapbook.  I should do it more often.  I have a friend that does 30 pages in one day!!!  That’s not me.  We approach scrapbooking from two totally different views.  I really think mine out.  Envision it in my mind, sometimes sketch the design.  I have a lot of layering.  I coordinate colors.  I often add embellishments and draw/doodle on my pages to enhance the design of the page.   It’s more of a work of art by the time I am through, I’m afraid.  Which doesn’t work well for me in getting anywhere with these unfinished albums.  But I enjoy it when I get the chance to work on them (over the past few years it has only been 1-4 times a year).  What I really should do is instead of blogging about it, get up and go clean up my room so I can set up my scrapbook stuff to do some more pages.  Yeah.  But it’s now midnight, so maybe tomorrow. 😉

So last night the kids decided to go swimming.  I went along, but didn’t get my swimsuit on and so I was the official photographer.  Jasmin had a great time in the floaty and Max loved jumping in.  Grandma and Grandpa went swimming too.

This afternoon we headed over to the nature center and because we were the first ones there, the kids got to help fill the birdfeeders and hold the snake! We were going to walk back on the trails but it started to rain just as we were entering the trail, so we decided to ride back with Aunt Cyndi.

After we got back we had lunch.  We put together all our stuff and had a pretty good lunch of PBJs and apples, veggie chips and cheese.  And we didn’t have to go out.  Jasmin got to eat a whole apple for the first time!  She loved it.

After we ate, the kids wanted to go to the craft room and they made some stuff.  Mom and Cyndi stayed with them. I took Jasmin back up to our room.  Too much stuff for a toddler NOT to touch!  Jasmin had her nap before lunch and right now she is laying on the floor crying.  I am not sure she is sleepy enough to go back to sleep, but she is sure not happy.  Stupidly I forgot to bring toys for her.  She isn’t really one to play with toys too much anyway.  But she is obsessed with the hotel phone and keeps shutting her fingers in drawers!  Argh!

Sam is over at Colon this afternoon.  He bought a poster from a guy over there and decided to not pay for shipping and pick it up himself.  There are a couple of magic shops over there and he wanted to talk to the guys that own them or something.  He’ll be back later, hopefully meet us for dinner.

We ate dinner at Las Limas in Angola.  It was ok.  Jasmin was really cranky because she was tired, so I didn’t really get to enjoy my meal.  I had to eat it super fast so I could deal with her.  When we got back to the hotel, the kids went swimming again and they decided to sleep in our room last night, since Alyssa and Andrew were staying in their room. So Grandma and Grandpa had the whole place to themselves.  I wasn’t tired, so I decided to draw them sleeping.  It sure didn’t take them long! They were whipped!

Today, we are heading back home.  I have to pack up our room and get it ready and then before we leave I think we are going to go for a walk on one of the nature trails. It’s really a nice day.  A little windy and chilly, but sunny!  See ya!