Loved

     As a teacher, I love getting special little things from students, but it really doesn't matter to me if they give me holiday gifts or not.  I have a really special set of 8th graders this year.   This year, 2 girls whom I am especially close to decided to do something special for me. So, they asked to come to school early to give me my gifts. One of them made caramels for me. The other got me a lotion she knows I wear. Together they put together a gift basket that had an ornament, a Christmas tree door hanger, a Christmas tree decoration, an ornament throw blanket, a Christmas tea towel, holiday themed hand soap, a votive holder, a serving platter and a candle. Then, remember my Thanksgiving tree?

    These 2 girls painted me this sweet little Christmas tree and cut out ornaments for all of the other 8th graders in chorus. All of the ornaments have really special and personal notes to me on the back of them.  (Some of the kids even attached other ornaments behind the first one so their message could be longer.)  I was extremely touched by this gift and by all of their messages. I am really blessed to be able to influence this group of kids and to help them develop their talents. I felt extremely loved when I left school for Christmas vacation.

Secret Christmas RR #2

I still need to receive about half of my cards, but these are my latest cards received in this round robin.

From Treksek in Estonia (Daire, have you always lived in Estonia? I thought you were from a different country for some reason)

 From Winterwolke in Germany

 From Mondkind in Germany

Secret Christmas RR- #1

     For the past few years I have participated in the Secret Christmas Round Robin in the Postcrossing forums. I love seeing Christmas wishes from different countries. Here are some of the Postcrossing cards, as well as some from penpals around the world:

Varnoja, Lithuania

 Ognesk, France

 Angie, US-

 Masako-k, Japan-

Manu86, Germany

 Barbizon, Netherlands

Christina and Tobi, Germany- Advent calendar

 Donna, Canada

     I will add more posts as they come in. Wishing all the people who read my blog a wonderful Christmas filled with many blessings!

A few glimpses into daily life

This weekend we had a lot of holiday activities. Here's some pictures from events lately. It has been a bit of an aggravating night so I'd like to spread some beauty around.
 David watching the live nativity at a local church (orange and gray jacket in front of pole)









 Look what we found! A giant post office safe. It's in a church hall. Yes, I know I'm a nerd. Yes, I'm proud of it.









 Matt and the boys at our Christmas tree lighting


 Our town's tree this year before being lit. It's a little.... Charlie Brown-ish this year






 That's a bit better.

 We have a festival of trees to benefit our historical society. People/companies decorate trees (with ornaments, gift cards, presents, etc) and then they raffle them off. I always lose. Someday I will win. Here are some trees (and a really creepy elf in the first one.. lol)


 Books! I was half intrigued and half upset that they ruined the books. lol Cool star though

 The church where I performed my Christmas concert on Sunday








Santa- not the best conductor. I like the enthusiasm though.


Our concert was videotaped and broadcast. If you'd like to hear it, here is the link. Sounds of Christmas Concert I don't play too much in this concert, but the music is nice.  Start at about 22 minutes. PS. Santa's violin was a prop. There was great concern. Check out what the audience sounds like at 1:59: ish 

Blessings

Based on my overwhelming response from the last post (none), I decided not to go with my original idea.  Instead I'll just check in occasionally.






Although I always try to be mindful of my blessings, I think Advent is a good time for me to slow down to prepare my heart for Christmas and to acknowledge the blessings that I have on a daily basis.
      Here are some special moments over the past few days:
1. Starting Unwrapping the Greatest Gift by Ann Voskamp with my family. The family time is as wonderful as the message and the activities.

2. The sweet and simplistic prayers of my sons. Why do we make praying so complicated sometime?

3. Today was a student's birthday. This is a student who is especially close to me. She has been singing for me for 4 years in 2 different groups, plus the musicals. I have also had her brother as a student so I have known her family for a long time. This is her last year with me.  I decided to get her a small birthday gift. So, I asked Matt to buy some candy that he has made at work. We picked out a candy cane, pecan turtles and some fudge. When I gave it to her, she was surprised that I had gotten her a gift, which was expected. When I told her that it was candy that Matt had personally made (She has met my family at concerts and has run into them a few times outside of school), she got a little teary and thanked me and told me that we made her feel "really special."  I guess that was my intention, but I didn't think it would mean THAT much to her.

4.  On my drive home tonight- rushing, as usual- I needed to stop at the post office to get something postmarked. The community is on the coast. As I rode up to the top of a hill (right by the governor's house), I was greeted by a beautiful view. The ocean was slightly choppy looking and the color of the sky was fading to the colors of dusk. What really drew my attention was the clouds, which looked like they were illuminated from below.

5.  I came home to a giant pile of mail! I will share my week of mail at the end of the week. I've been getting some great stuff. I probably won't share any of my picture cards since I won't usually put a picture up without asking permission (except my father-in-law that one time..)

Screen free weekend

     This weekend my family and I cut back on screens A LOT. I will admit, I did play Bingo Blitz for a few minutes a day on Facebook because I'm sad, but other than that the TV, cell phone, e-mail, etc. were off. It was wonderful. Part of me wishes we could do this every day. Each day seemed so much longer. I got a lot of writing done (Postcrossing RR with 15 Christmas cards, 2 letters), cleaning, LOTS of board games (I love David), and we even painted together. Unfortunately, I didn't do much grading so I will be working hard for the rest of tonight.
     Today we set up our Christmas tree. I love Christmas. It's my favorite holiday.

    I was thinking that I haven't been writing much here lately and I'd like to do more. I thought about snapping a picture every day in December and just giving a glimpse into my everyday life. Is that something that might be interesting to you? Any topics you want me to write about?

Timmy's Christmas gift to me

     Timmy decided to make my Christmas gift this year and I love it. What do you think?

    Can you see the little envelope on the snail shell? He's so cute.
    For all of my friends, I hope that you had a wonderful day and know that you are deeply loved. If any of my friends have not heard the good news of the gospel and would like to hear about Jesus, please feel free to reach out. Merry Christmas!

Christmas mail

     I know that it has been a while since I have updated. It has been busy with concert season and I have a broken wisdom tooth that has kept me in lots of pain. I wanted to share some of my beautiful Christmas mail with you. Most of these I have received from a Christmas card exchange through Postcrossing. I love seeing the different images from Christmas across the world. I'm still waiting for quite a few so I will post them when they come.

 From Nicole in Germany

 From Marina in Ukraine. How beautiful!!!!!

 And the stamps! Speaking of Ukraine- check out the ornament I just received from one of my Ukrainian students.

 From Nana, the woman who sparked my postal obsession :)

 From pumpkin1990 in China

 From my dentist :) (This is the most beautiful card!!! It would make any person who loves stationary/letter writing drool.)

 From some of our friends in town.

 From Alevtina in Russia

 From Matt's aunt and uncle

 From my sister

 From my friend Cheryl from church

 From Anna in Russia

 From my penpal Donna in Canada.

 From a friend of David's.

 From MitchS in the Philippines. It had some cute Christmas stamps too.

     This beautiful card is from a former student's family.

From Germany from desi-eich

From Germany (I believe from Samantha 21. Please correct me if I am wrong)

Unwrapping the Greatest Gift

   This year for advent I wanted to make it a priority to slow down and recognize the importance of Christ in the Christmas season. I would like to decorate and o all the fun activities as well but I want to discipline myself to teach my children about the real meaning of Christmas. So, I bought Ann Voskamp's Unwrapping the Greatest Gift.  I was curious if any of the readers of my blog are also studying this book. I say down with the boys tonight to read it and they seemed to really like it. We planted our seeds, wrote our prayer list and Timmy colored the ornament for the Jesse tree. We will alternate who designs each ornament.
     What are you doing to celebrate Advent? Does your family have any Christmas traditions? Special recipes? Share your wisdom!

Happy New Year!

     Happy New Year! I've seen many more readers from Finland and a few places that I haven't seen before (Serbia, Pakistan, etc) on my blog. Welcome! I'd love to get to know you all. A large snowstorm on the East Coast delayed the end of my winter break so I got an opportunity to stay home a few extra days. Here are some pictures since I last wrote.

 The boys dressed up for Christmas. Sorry the lighting is bright and you can't see how nice the tree looked.

 He was slightly excited with his new tablet.

 David and I and the ornament he made me at school.

 David at Grammy's.

 The boys and their cousin. We took a series of pictures. This is the least awful- and David makes me laugh.

 Tin can robot. I'm sure he'll love putting this together.

 Our most recent snowstorm provided many opportunities for the boys to go play. David is by the telephone pole, buried up to his shoulders. He is throwing snowballs at Tim, whose head you can see on the right and is also in a big pile.  They were having a blast.

The dagger icicles hanging from the house. They were huge.

Resolutions?

    How do you feel about resolutions? Every year, I pretty much make the same ones- get in shape, get the apartment organized, etc. This year, I have read many posts from bloggers about how they picked one word and focused on that 1 word for the entire year. Rather than fail at a list of resolutions, they chose something that would help guide their decisions. I have decided that this is something I'm going to try this year.
     I sat down and considered which word I would choose to focus on. The first word that popped into my head was "Declutter." I have had so much going on this year that I felt kind of frantic for a lot of it. Anyone who knows me well will know that I'm a pile person and frequently my apartment (and my car, classroom, office...life)  gets pretty cluttered because of it. However, declutter does not really have positive connotations in my head so I decided that I would like another one. I decided to go about this in a backwards way. I thought about what I wanted to change and why I wanted those things to change. Ultimately, what were my real goals rather than the superficial ones?
     This year was tough. There were a lot of events that slowed me down to think about life, and quite honestly, there were things that really made me extremely concerned about the world my children are growing up in. (Not like I haven't felt this before, but it was one thing after another this year.) The Boston Marathon Bombings is one of the events that I'm thinking of. After some praying and thinking, I realized that this past month I have been pretty burnt out and anxious. I have let some friendships get weaker, stopped writing, been somewhat content in the messiness and gotten used to feeling stressed and frantic. I have also felt like, since I have not felt 100% myself, I have not been myself in my relationships with people.  So, I'm choosing my word: REJUVENATE.

     Good ol' Merriam Webster defines rejuvenate: ": to make (someone) feel or look young, healthy, or energetic again, 2 : to give new strength or energy to (something)"

   Ironically, as a Christian, I don't think I can rejuvenate myself so one of the major things I'd like to focus on this year is my relationship with God. As Galatians 2:20 says "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." I think if I concentrate this year on strengthening my faith, renewal and rejuvenation will come. 

     There are things I can work on though- getting healthy, making my life less cluttered so I can do things more effectively, investing in my relationships with friends and family and reconnecting with some of them as well. I guess the main reason I decided to choose one word is that I can use the word to help me in my decisions. How often do I say "yes" to things I don't really want to do or things I feel I have to (that aren't actually things I HAVE to) and then feel more overwhelmed?  I actually started considering this in late December. It led to me accepting invitations that I would've turned down normally and resulted in some nice times with friends. My kids are also enjoying me being a little more relaxed. 

     I'll be joining the community at oneword365.com to encourage others and keep myself accountable. I'm sure I'll blog more about it during the year.  If you were going to choose one word for yourself, which word would you choose? What are your goals this year?

 

Mail..

    Speaking of the blog, should I try the 366 challenge again? I will eventually succeed at this. Since writing is a huge stress reliever for me (when I'm not making myself anxious about not getting back to people within a certain time frame), I will continue the challenge. If I don't reach my goal this year I will probably not try again. I will not stress about it. If you don't know what my challenge was, I was hoping to send and receive at least 366 pieces of mail within the span of one year. (That year had was a leap year.)  I was doing fairly well this year and then my laptop broke and I lost track of everything.This also affected my blogging.

     So far I have a letter out to Katherine in Australia and Larry in Minnesota. No mail received yet. NOTHING at all, not even a bill.  If you'd like to send me something, or start penpalling, leave me a message and I will get in touch with you. I would like to get caught up with all of my normal penpals before I take on any new pals but I'm hoping that I can do that fairly quickly.  If you'd like to correspond, please add your address to my postable.  If I see anybody new added, I'll send you a postcard :)

2014 Mail Challenge:

Sent: 4- Letter to Katherine- Australia,  Letter to Larry- USA, Postcrossing card  US-2570859     to Germany, and a US to US postcard swap headed to Washington.

Received: 0