Catching Up

One of my favorite things about summer break? Having time to sit down and work on this year's Project Life album.

I've got lots and lots of journaling to catch up on over the last few months. I'm pretty sad that the first half of this pregnancy has passed with very little being written down. Hopefully, I'll be able to do a better job of jotting down all these thoughts this summer.

With the new Project Life app, it's very easy to get bits and pieces of bunches of kits, but I seem to always return to the Midnight/Seafoam kits in the end. They just work for me. I made some new cards to showcase what's going on "at the moment." Everyone seems to have "currently" cards (myself included), and I wanted to try something different. I made the word art using the Adobe Draw app for ipad. Adobe has a nice new feature where you can send designs from the app straight into Photoshop; I saved it as a PNG for future use and made up the 4x6 card for these layouts.

As you can see, the baby is growing nice and big! I'm starting to really feel it when I'm trying to fall asleep, trying to sit on the floor, trying to sit cross legged, and pretty much trying to make any sort of movement at all these days. We hit 20 weeks on Wednesday, and I cannot even imagine what 40 weeks will feel like!

Wrapping up the school year

Sigh. I loved my 8th graders this year. Like, really, really loved them. I would keep them all again for next year. In fact, I wish they would never grow up and I could always teach them things.

They seriously are a rad, fun bunch.

And as much as I'm looking forward to summer, I am so seriously sad to see them go. Luckily, there's a good chunk of them this year going on to our high school, so I'll see them occasionally. But many are going on to other schools in the area, and it's likely I'll never see about a third of them again. So sad with this group.

The Monday of graduation week is always the worst. It's at the ceremony practice that I always start tearing up, looking around at all of them, and just wishing I could keep them in my class forever.




On Tuesday, we all go to Knott's Berry Farm. This year I got a group full of boys! Turns out, though, that the boys are way less drama than the girl groups. ;) And I got a pretty great group of friends and sweeties all around. They were so good to me all day, making sure I had a chair when we sat down for snacks and lunch, taking turns carrying things for me. Love those kids so much!




They were in line for the river rafting ride for a long time, and I waited in the shade of one of the nearby bridges to get some shots of the group coming down. They are such goofballs; I loved catching all their giddy fun.




And then Wednesday was graduation.



And, yes, I totally cried.



Have I mentioned how much I'll miss these kids?! They have truly made this an amazing year.

Thursday was "clean yo' room day."



I had to work especially hard this year, because I'm moving out of my amazing brand new (of two years) classroom! :(  We got our assignments for next year, and I'm part of a new program to help struggling students catch up. Don't know what that entails exactly; we're (myself and another teacher) waiting to hear the details. But man oh man was it hard packing up my room. I had moved a lot of stuff in there and had all my decoration just right. Now they're packed away in a bunch of bins in the back room storage area of the special ed classrooms.

Friday was staff luncheon.



We ate and chatted, awards were given out, pictures were taken, and then our principal sent us off for the summer. The picture above isn't actually at the end of year luncheon. It's from our end of year teacher-appreciation lunch a couple weeks before. This is the math team, 6th-12th grade. We're pretty much the best team. ;)


And that's it! Another school year done. This one went by so fast, but it was fun and jam-packed and I know the kids have tons of great memories from math class. I wish I was better at jotting down all the fun antics as they happen, so I'll always remember those goofballs and their funny stories. That's definitely something I want to work on next year.

Good-bye, school year of 2014-2015!

13 Weeks!

The bump is beginning!

It's Official!

At the beginning of the year, in my “What I hope for this year” post, I mentioned we were going to start trying for a baby this year. Well, I’m happy to report that it did not take long at all! As of the end of February, we are most definitely pregnant!

We’re pretty shocked that it happened so fast, but so excited, too. Baby T is due November 11, just in time for Thanksgiving.

And of course, we had to start doing “bump” pictures right away… even though there’s really not a bump yet. :)

8th Grade Antics

Found during fifth module. I’m proud they know how to work graphing calculators, right?

Happy 4th Birthday to Us!

It’s Valentine’s Day, which means it marks one more year that Next to Me Studios has been in business. We now have a four-year-old company, huzzah! To celebrate, Chris changed up all the main photos on our website home page to showcase some of our new favorites, so go check it out and see if you’re up there!

Valentine's Day 2015: What I Love

Here are some random loves of mine right now:

1) Chris! (Okay, not so random.) Love that guy! We went and had our Valentine’s dinner date on Thursday night because neither of us want to go out on actual Valentine’s Day with all the other people. We went to Bo-Beau in La Mesa and had a lovely meal and drinks: pork, mashed potatoes, and a mule for him, salmon, lentils, and a Tokyo Tea for me. Tonight we’re going grocery shopping. And maybe we’ll bring back some sushi and make our own drinks here. Or maybe we’ll just watch a movie and work on our laptops. We’re open.

2) Fitbit! Sooooo glad I got this for myself for Christmas; it’s seriously a game changer for me. I haven’t had it long enough to see any real weight loss yet, but it is making me so much more aware of how much (or little) I’m moving, walking or otherwise. Most weekdays, I’m able to get to 7,000-10,000 pretty easily from walking around my classroom all day, but man, weekend days at home are ridiculously low. And, since I’m using it to track my calorie intake, too, it’s way more motivating for me not to eat an unnecessary amount of food on those home day, since I can see how little I’m exerting. Crazy cool. Crazy motivating. Crazy easy.

3) Elise Joy’s podcasts! I’ve followed Elise for awhile now, and I even dragged Chris down to a craft thingamajig downtown several years ago because she’d posted she’d be there on her blog. So wish I had gotten over myself and told her how awesome she and her blog were, but I was too shy. :( Anyway! Elise has been putting up creative podcasts for awhile now, and they’re my new go-to at the gym during weight lifting. Currently listening to one on affiliate programs, as I type this. Loved the last one I listened to at the gym, where she interviewed a fiction writer. Man, it made me want to sit down and finish my book up finally! Maybe this summer? When I’m only prepping curriculum half the time?

4) Math = Love! Sarah Hagan is my new online best friend who doesn’t know I exist. Whenever I’m stuck for an idea of how to teach a concept or foldable ideas (or just want a laugh about the ridiculous things her students say) I think, “What would Sarah do?” Then I google the concept and her blog together and find something amazing. I’d guess a third of my Pinterest teaching items are from Math=Love.

5) Parks and Recreation! I am so sad the final season is almost over. This has become one of my all time favorite shows, and I can honestly say there’s never been a point where I thought they were running out of momentum or starting to shoot themselves in the foot (ahem, The Office, How I Met Your Mother, and Veronica Mars). The characters are all unique and ridiculous and just fun to watch, and why is it ending?! Why?! They’re releasing two episodes per week on Tuesdays, and I find myself trying not to watch them both at one to extend the time I have with this show.

6) My 8th graders this year. They are the sweetest, and I just adore them. They’re also really, really innocent for thirteen-year-olds, and that makes me love them so much more.

Happy Valentine’s, 2015!