Following the Fowlers

My friend Sharon gave me this award, meaning I have to share 7 things you may not know about me. These may or may not be interesting, but here we go.

1) I really like for my feet to be comfortable. Because of this, my shoe choice of preference is usually my tennis shoes. I rarely walk around without any shoes on. Even at home, I almost always have on my tennis shoes or house shoes.
2) I don't like to cook. I feel guilty about this fact because I feel that I should like to cook. It seems like most of my friends do. However, I do really like to bake!
3) I blush very easily when embarrassed. As an adult, this has been a huge nuisance to me because I cannot control it or stop it from happening.
4) At home I am much more relaxed about how clean or picked up my house is. At school, I am obsessive about having a clean room. It is my daily goal and constant task to have a cleared off teacher table and desk. Because of this, I am constantly shuffling and reorganizing. I know that I should just relax about it, but it gives me great pride to have a clean classroom!
5) I do not like shopping at department stores. I LOVE to shop, but not there. It's not that I have anything against department stores, I just find them to be overwhelming. I don't want to take the time to look through rack after rack to find one good buy. I would much rather walk into a smaller store where everything is on display and easy for me to see!
6) I detest dusting. The dusting task in my house is greatly ignored. I think this stems back to my childhood. Every Saturday morning was our time to clean. My task was always to dust. I hated it then, I hate it now!
7) I LOVE the Olympics. I can't help myself. It doesn't matter to me whether it is the Summer or Winter Olympics. It doesn't matter to me that it may be a sport that I would never otherwise watch. I will sit for hours mesmerized in front of my television. I think it is a combination of two things: my great patriotism (I love seeing Americans win) and watching people's dreams come true. I get choked up every time!

How many of these did you already know about me?

It seems like just yesterday I was blogging that I had less than 100 days to go. I am now under 50! I am 33 weeks, so hopefully, we have no more than 7 weeks until we meet little Charlotte. We are commemorating today with an all day child birth class. Mark is so excited . . .

I woke up this morning about 6:15 and thought that our bedroom looked a little brighter than normal. I thought to myself that perhaps the time change is getting to where it gets lighter earlier now. However, I did think it was a little strange and the thought crossed my mind that it kind of made me think of the light reflecting off of snow. I don't know why, but for some reason I didn't bother to actually take the next step and look out the window. I just went about my normal routine. When a coworker called me at 7:00 and told me to drive safe, I finally looked outside and saw about 1-2 inches of snow covering the lawn! However, we still has school. The kids were definitely crazy, but we buckled down and got some work done. I had to close the blinds in my room to keep them focused. I couldn't believe that every time I looked out the window, the snow was still coming down. Not just a little bit either! It was coming down in huge flakes . . . all day long! Well, thank you snow, because about 1 hour ago Mark and I found out that school is canceled tomorrow! It is always so wonderful to find out the night before because then you can sleep in :) What to do, what to do? I think I will be able to talk Mark into putting together the baby furniture! Yea!

This email was sent to me by a coworker. When I was trying to read it aloud to Mark I was laughing so hard I was crying. My favorites are #3, 7, 9, and 17. Enjoy!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual similes and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year
to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E.Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on
vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River .
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are known to do.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

The last two weeks at work have been a huge drain on me. It seems that one thing after another keeps piling up on me. I have had to contact more parents and have more parent/teacher conferences in the last two weeks than I have in the last two months. It seems that just as soon as one problem is solved, another rises up. It is starting to become very wearing upon me. I am at the point now that I am thinking, "Is it me? Am I a bad teacher?" It doesn't seem that anyone else is having this much difficulty. I am trying to not get too emotional about it because I'm thinking maybe my pregnancy hormones are just taking over rational thinking. However, there were several times today when I wished I could just lock myself in a closet and have a good cry. On top of that, my pile of grading has now become as deep as the Grand Canyon. I don't know how I will ever catch up! I stayed until 5:30 on Tuesday and 5:45 today. In reality, I could have stayed until midnight and I'm still not sure I would have caught up. So, all in all, I am very ready for this week to be over and am hoping for a much brighter February.

This past weekend my sweet mom and sister threw me (and Charlotte) a baby shower in my hometown. It was so wonderful to see family, high school friends, and church friends. I really had a great time visiting with loved ones and sharing the joy of our upcoming arrival. We were incredibly blessed by so many wonderful gifts. Thank you to everyone for your amazing outpouring of love. We are just so excited about Charlotte's arrival that we can barely contain ourselves!

Over the Christmas holidays my family had portraits made together. I posted a link to a slideshow of them in December, but here is a better look at the pictures.