5 Excuses for Neglecting My Blog

1. Posting on Facebook gives me the impression everyone already knows what I'm doing.
2. Ted went to Chile to visit his parents and I lost my mind after being alone with three kids for a week.

3. I gave up sugar a month ago and can't find anything happy to write about since then. Our St. Patty's Day rainbow cake was my farewell to dessert. I don't miss fruity sweets, but I feel like I lost a dear friend when I think about the chocolate that I'm missing in my life. I must admit I made one exception when eating the homemade chocolate chip cookies a student made me for Teacher's Appreciation Day. I felt like it was part of my job as her teacher to eat them...

4. I'm potty training Madeline--if this is something that is going smoothly in your house, I'd be happy to trade you toddlers. I feel like my life revolves around washing laundry and cleaning carpets. Thank goodness girls go to the bathroom in pairs so I don't have to always be the one to drag her to the potty.

5. I'm getting my picture fix with the 13 scrapbooks I'm scrambling to complete for my pre-K class. I can't believe they're on their way to kindergarten--the year has flown by!

Reflections Results

We found out that Caleb's story "The Come-to-Life Origami Paper" won an Award of Excellence at the state level of the Reflections contest for grades K-2. Caleb was delighted to be recognized at the school and totally amazed when his entry went past the district level. I thought he'd be ecstatic to be one of ten students in about 7,500 entries to win the Award of Excellence for writing. Up until this point, all the Awards of Excellence have advanced to the next level, but each state can only advance one entry per category. There was one Outstanding Award of Excellence winner who will go to nationals. When I told him the results, Caleb initially thought his entry would advance to nationals, and when I explained it wouldn't, he had to fight back tears. It was hard for him to come so close and miss meeting his ultimate dream. The family went out for cookies at Celebrity Bakery to celebrate, and the sugar rush seems to have brightened his spirits. Maybe Texas is big enough that it's almost like its own country anyway. Hooray for our little author!

Journey to the Center of Cyberspace

Caleb's Destination Imagination team competed last weekend in the regional tournament. He and his six teammates have been working since September to write a play; make their own costumes, props, and backdrops; and practice performing for the competition. They all did a great job, and Caleb was in his element as the silly villain, a computer bug who messes up the websites in cyberspace by giving them confusion juice. The kids won the Renaissance award for their engineering, design, and performance. As you can see from the photo afterwards, they were VERY excited! DI has kept me busy this year--I coordinated the program at the school and coached Caleb's team--so I'm looking forward to a little more free time.

Here's the Youtube clip of their performance if you're interested. The play is hard to hear, so if you'd like to follow along, let me know and I'll email you the script.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-nYKAArh9A

Book Lover's List

I saw this on my friend Cindy's blog and thought it looked like fun.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.
Look at the list and bold those you have read. I confess that I have to add another category: books I started and know or think I didn't finish or those read very quickly for school. In my defense, my high school English teachers were always having us read books and skip the middle for time's sake. The sort-of-read books will be in italics, and I'd like at least partial credit for good intentions. I also must admit that I don't read nearly as much as I used to. Seems like I get interruped a lot(imagine that) and that it hurts my eyes and neck. Wonder who wrote this list? Seems like there are some good reads, but there are others that I wouldn't expect to be there.


1 - Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 – The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 - Jane Eyre--Charlotte Bronte
4 - Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 - To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6- The Bible (yes, cover to cover)
7 - Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 - Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 - His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 - Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 - Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 - Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 - Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 - Complete Works of Shakespeare (how about a pretty good dent in it?)
15 - Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 - The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 - Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 - Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 - The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 - Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 - Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 - The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 - Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 - War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 - The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 - Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 - Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 - Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 - Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 - The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 - Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 - David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 - Chronicles of Narnia
34 - Emma - Jane Austen
35 - Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 - The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 - The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 - Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 - Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 - Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 - Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 - The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 - One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 - A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 - The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 - Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 - Far From The Maddening Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 - The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 - Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 - Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 - Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 - Dune - Frank Herbert
53 - Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 - Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 - A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 - The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 - A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 - Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 - Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 - Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 - Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 - The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 - The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 - Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas
66 - On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 - Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 - Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 - Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 - Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 - Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 - Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 - The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 - Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 - Ulysses - James Joyce
76 - The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 - Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 - Germinal - Emile Zola
79 - Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 - Possession - AS Byatt
81 - A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 - Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 - The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 - The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 - Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 - A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 - Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 - The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 - Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 - The Faraway Tree Collection
91 - Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 - The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 - The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 - Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 - A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 - A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 - The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 - Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 - Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

That makes 29 I've read, and at least 10 that I put a good effort on and am not sure I finished. There are quite a few others that I started and probably didn't make it past the first 50 pages. One of the books on my sort-of-read list, Bleak House, I actually taught. What kind of English teacher was I? Cindy, you win!

Uncle Miles Visits Texas

Ted's brother Miles flew in from Utah for a long weekend visit with our family. Ted and Miles attended the King Tut exhibit together and ran the Dallas Half Marathon. The Biddulph family calls Miles The Human Jukebox since he can immediately pick up any pop or rock tune on the guitar. The kids had a blast sounding like real musicians as they strummed the guitar while he did the fingering, and Caleb and I got some pop piano lessons so we can play The Beatles and Belle and Sebastian a bit by ear. When Miles left, Sierra told me in her wistful princess voice, "Our guest was just so nice." Madeline misses him too, and has taken to saying "goodbye Uncles Miles!" when we're ready to leave somewhere. I've been pondering whether Miles's grooviness could have led to the drug bust? He does sport that daring bit of stubble!

Much Ado About Nothing

This week, I was driving down Lebanon Rd. with my brother-in-law Miles and 2-year-old daughter Madeline and didn't notice the speed limit went from 45 to 40 mph. A police officer pulled me over to give me a warning for speeding--a first for me. When I removed my sunglasses to talk to him, he thought my pupils looked constricted. He asked if I was on any medications, and when I said no, he asked if there were any illegal drugs, firearms, or samurai swords in my car. (I swear, he asked about the swords.) I can't imagine how he thought my small pupils looked so suspicious, especially given the fact that the sun was shining brightly. The officer radioed for two cops to join him so he could search my mini-van while Madeline sat in her car seat, completely unaware of the drama. After finding nothing more than some cheerios and apple cores under the seats, he let me go on my way without so much as a traffic ticket. At least I have a funny story and my perfect driving record intact.

Cupid's Arrow

Last week I came home from the park during the middle of the day to find chocolates, tea, earrings, a candle, and card waiting in the kitchen. Ted had calculated the date of our 5,000 day anniversary on a financial outlook program years ago so he could do something special to surprise me. (I, of course, was oblivious to the date.) Ever the goal setter, he already has a date in 2022 planned for the 10,000 day celebration. I'm just sad that I missed the best part of the surprise by not being home--he brought the gifts over wearing his wedding tuxedo!

Since one good surprise deserves another, I put together a creative plan of my own. Greece is one of the places Ted and I would both like to visit someday, so while he was flying a kite with Caleb and his brother Miles, Sierra and I raced around the house putting together a Greek-themed treasure hunt, constructing a make-shift toga and laurel leaf headpiece, and decorating the outside of the house with Ionic columns and a sign on the front door reading "Aphrodite House." (And some people told me being a Humanities major wouldn't have any real life application!) Ted didn't get much of a chance to solve the treasure hunt about Greek mythology and history since a very excited Caleb was a clue or two ahead of us the entire way. The prize was a date to a Mediterranean restaurant. Ted and I are all worn out being creative and romantic, so I think Valentine's Day will be very simple this year.

Thanks to Miles for serving both as the decoy and the babysitter!