random reflections

No Child Left Behind?

I've spent the last two days scoring our district's fifth grade NYS Social Studies exams. It was an exhausting job. Teaching is so much easier--and a lot more fun. There was a wonderful article in Sunday's New York Times about the No Child Left Behind act. I agree with so much of it and wish there was some way to take the pressure off ten year old children who are now being asked to recall and synthesize three years worth of social studies content and then write an essay to answer a document-based question. So many kids did a great job, but there are many who are not yet ready for such challenges. They are left feeling inadequate and their teachers are wondering how they will ever be able to help them "reach the standard." When will the government realize that one standard does not fit all ten year olds? What happened to the true meaning of "developmental?"

Christmas Journal

I’ve signed up for Shimele’s Christmas Journal class. Just being a part of the yahoo group for this class has been so interesting. I’ve never been a part of anything so international. Very exciting. Today Shimele posted a manifesto for the course. I am so looking forward to completing these prompts and hope that the 15 minutes a day is a realistic amount of time for the journaling. I KNOW it will take me longer to decorate and embellish the page. So here’s the manifesto:

Manifesto: Noun. A declaration of one's intentions.

Starting December first, I will keep a Christmas journal. In it, I will write something every day to reflect on the holidays of my past, enjoy the holidays of the present, and dream about the holidays of my future. To some, this will be a stack of papers and trivial scribbles, but not to me. I am taking back my Christmas, I am letting it be something I relish and, most importantly, I am giving at least fifteen minutes every day to myself no matter how crazy this season becomes. I hope you will share, encourage and understand as I make something with my own hands, my own words and my own memories.__I may post some or all of my entries here. Other artists are doing this with me, and you can see their work at www.writtendown.com. Or you may join us here. 

Above all: cherish the season.

Black Friday

Times have changed. It’s been awhile since I hit the Black Friday sales early in the morning. There used to be several hundred people roaming about at 5 am. Now there are thousands!! Tracy and I were at Staples this morning before they opened. The line extended way out but it really wasn’t too crazed, and we got what we wanted, even after waiting for the hundred or so people in line to enter the store. The Staples staff had everything very well-organized and everyone was super relaxed and friendly. A great beginning. From there we went to Circuit City—truly a zoo. They had opened an hour earlier and all the surrounding parking lots were full. The lines had to be at least an hour’s wait. Fortunately or not, the item we wanted there was sold out. We encountered the same scene at Target. I went in, Tracy searched for a parking spot, and we communicated via cell phones. By the time I found out the items we wanted were already sold out, he had finally found a place to park. We had better luck at Linens & Things where we bought a full-size Areo Bed at half price. We’ve been wanting one of these but had never seen them at half off before. So it was a 50-50 deal—half the places had what we wanted, half did not. We went to breakfast at Mykonos and were home by 8:15. One lesson learned:  never attempt to do this alone and make sure you have your cell phones.

Grateful

The DW 2006 Challenge at 2Peas has been lots of fun this year. I've ended up doing lots of little projects and some scrapbook layouts I really like because of it. This month I made a little mini-album of four things I especially grateful for--there are certainly more than I could fit in this little Cosmos Cricket mini-book. Ali Edwards used one of these for 5 Favorites album that I saw in one of her newsletters, so when I saw the challenge, I knew just what I'd use. Here's the cover.  The rest of the album can be seen here.

Christmas Planner

I was inspired by a thread on 2Peas to make a Christmas planner. I had a Sara Binder on hand with everything I needed as well as My Favorite Memories kit from last December and a few extras from my stash.

The rest of the pages are posted on 2Peas here.

Christmas Planning

It was a beautiful day (sunny and 50 degrees) here in western New York and I used my day off from school to get a head start on my Christmas shopping. It was a very successful day and I accomplished a lot. Found a lot of things I was looking for and several gifts for people for whom I had no ideas. Tomorrow I'm going to start wrapping and hope to keep up with it as I go along. Every year that I get done early I have more time to enjoy the season myself. I got so inspired when I was grocery shopping, I loaded up on supplies for Christmas baking as well. Feels good.

Home

Today’s 2Peas Blog Challenge was to blog about your current home. What do you love about it? What do you hate about it? Although there are certainly a few things I would love to change, there’s nothing that I hate about my home and lots that I love. I love the location. We’re on a dead end street, old homes (most built in the 1930’s) with lots of old trees and a fair amount of privacy. We have diverse and lovely neighbors. All the houses are significantly different—no track feel here. Our yard is on two levels with stone walls and steps. A little out of control but it has lots of possibility if we only had the time and the money!

We have pegged, random width hardwood floors through the whole house, a huge stone fireplace with built-in wooden bookcases with cupboards on the bottom on both sides of the fireplace and wood panels around the bottom of our living room walls. It’s an elegant but cozy room. The double-width door to the dining room makes the space feel bigger than it is. I’d love to to add French doors in the dining room that would lead out to the patio. It would add a lot of light to the downstairs which we could use.

The kitchen is a narrow-galley style kitchen with an eating area at the front of the house. We’ve updated most of the appliances, and I can live with the cupboards. I’d like more space, but I have enough. Here I’d like to bump out the wall near the eating area and add a bay window and floor to ceiling shelves. I could use the extra storage and the eating area would seem a lot larger with not much of an addition.

We have an elegant stairway from the front hall to the upstairs—wooden banisters and a large landing in the middle. You can lean over the banister upstairs and see the hallway downstairs. Our bedrooms are generally small and the closet space is awful. There’s no affordable way to alter any of this, however, so we make do. I took over the smallest bedroom when the kids moved out and have a small, but efficient studio/study. I love having my own space and being surrounded with all my scrapbook goodies. It’s also the place where I do schoolwork every night.

I wish we had had a finished basement or a family room when the kids were growing up. The house did not lend itself to entertaining teenagers—no pool table, not much privacy, no big screen TV, so it wasn’t a hang-out place and I wish it had been. Our basement is AWFUL—dirty, disorganized—lots of storage space but all added at different times before we bought the house with little sense of coordination. It functions as a storage space and a pretty crummy laundry area but my husband does the laundry and has his “desk” downstairs (so there is never any pressure to pick up!) so I don’t have to spend much time there except at Christmas when I’m wrapping gifts.

My daughter once described our house as the “perfect house on an idyllic street” and I would have to agree that it comes close. I haven’t any desire to move except on rare days when I think it would be really nice to have a bigger area to scrap!

A Needed Break

    Report cards (147 pages of them) and preparing for parent conferences (two days of them, beginning tomorrow) have taken all my spare time recently.
    Last weekend, however, we had a wonderful break. For the last several years, we've planned an October weekend in Niagara-on-the-Lake with good friends of ours. We order tickets for a performance (or two) at the Shaw Festival and reserve the second floor of our favorite bed and breakfast, the Bide-a-While. Our hosts, Pat and Ian, make our arrival feel like a homecoming. Pat's breakfasts are superb--not only in taste, but in presentation.

Pat's pineapple boat--the appetizer--followed by eggs, tomatoes and asparagus and accompanied by Pat's famous scones.

    This year, they even made reservations for dinner for us. Friday night we ate at a tiny little restaurant called Rest, less than a mile from the B & B. Saturday night we ate at Treadwell's--listed in a Canadian survey as the 8th best restaurant of 1,000 visited--in Port Dalhousie. Both meals were superb.
    We saw two shows.  Friday night we saw High Society, an elaborately produced Cole Porter musical at the Shaw Festival, and Saturday we went to a little theater in Port Dalhousie to see Vanities--a dark comedy about the lives of three cheerleaders over the course of several decades.

Grapes on the vine at Kacaba Winery.

    Saturday we went off in search of new wineries to try. We stopped at several, including our old favorite, Strewn (wonderful semi-dry Reisling). Our new favorite from this trip was Vineland. It's a beautiful place and we found a Cabernet Franc we liked a lot. They also had a great Reisling.
    Good friends, good food, good wine. Couldn't ask for anything more except great weather, which unfortunately we didn't have. But it didn't dampen our good spirits!