Road Trip!!!

"The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

As many of you know, I am not exactly spontaneous. This weekend I stepped out of the box and went on a road trip with the girls. Last weekend Jackie, Melissa and I tried to find a craft show to go to and couldn't find on in the immediate area, such disappointment! We found out that the Chris Cringle craft show was last weekend at the University of Illinois, so we packed a bag and were on the road.

We started early afternoon on Friday after having completed 12 hours of conferences on top of full days. Needless to say we all needed to have a weekend to relax and spend time not doing school "stuff". Bags packed and dog in the back we were off. By the time we got to Melissa's house we were in need of a snack - Cheddars cheesy fries, margaritas and chocolate sounded like the ticket. Before you think that we were on an eating frenzy, we shared everything except the margaritas between four people.

The craft show was 3 stories of any kind of craft that you could possibly need, I was on the look out for a new Christmas wreath for my front door. I left with no wreath but a sweatshirt and two hand quilted items for my new house. Definitely worth the trip. Culvers chocolate shakes and a light snack was on the books for the post craft show time. We headed to Gordmans for some light shopping then off the church. "The best buffet ever" - the Pesi was out next adventure. I must say that it was a spread like I have never seen before, sushi, a Mongolian BBQ where you could pick your own veggies and meat, and then the traditional Chinese buffet food. It was busy with college students and "normal" folk as well. By this time we got home we were cold (even a little wind whipped), tired and ready to relax. Movie time! Baby Mama was the movie, which turned out not to be as hilarious as it was advertised to be. Bed called and we all turned in, 4 girl humans and 4 girl dogs.

IHOP was on the books for Sunday morning, "old school style". We all had our fill of pancakes and omelets and headed back to pack up and head home. On the road, we continued our conversations from the ride out, we talked our way out and back. One thing was on the list for our final day, "The Big Wick" a candle store we saw on I70 on the way out. We stopped, took pictures and perused the beautiful gift shop. The store was decorated for Christmas, I think we all were in the mood to get home and start decorating our own houses. I know I was ready and couldn't wait to get home to unload my packages and light my new candles.

It was a great trip, and we are planning more so stay tuned to see where we will end up next time!

Can you say exhaustion????

"Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success."
Henry Ford

After weeks of planning, research and hours on the computer election day is finally over. If you haven't heard me talk about it in the past few weeks, I was in charge of putting on the "mock" election at the school for all 450 students. It all started when Sue and I started talking about what we could do better than what we did for the last election. This year we had it "easy" as we both had student teacher and were able to spend time during the school day to plan and implement our plan.

We had as real an election as any school could have:

• each classroom was assigned a state, each grade had the same number of electoral votes so that no one grade held more power than the others
• each teacher covered the election process and candidates ahead of time
• I created a Power Point on each of the eight candidates on the Ohio ballot and where they stand on several issues ,Tad printed out these slides to help me create a beautiful bulletin board
• Sue went and got the old voting booths from the Board of Elections so that our students were able to have an authentic experience
• I found "I Voted" stickers online after the Board of Elections was unable to provide us with enough stickers for all our students
• The National Honor Society students from the high school came over all throughout the day to be our "poll workers" and were just GREAT!
• We had a mid-day news cast to tell students updated information that was compiled by the student news team. The team spent the entire morning at the polls surveying voters, conducting interviews and compiling data
• Sign in books, and ballots were as close to authentic as possible; one adult made the statement that the sign-in books look just like those at the actual polling locations

Let's just say that we are all tired and glad that the election is over. Even though the exhaustion is setting in, I am glad that we put in all the work that it took to make this a lifelong learning experience for our students. I know that the students might not all the details of what happened, but hope that they remember the experience and that they were able to vote and make a difference.

Tricks or Treats?

"We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow."
Oscar Wilde

Being in town creates a certain dilemma, to candy or not?

I decided this year I would forgo giving out candy for trick-or-treat and have a great night out with my friends instead. We started at Mi Jalapeno for some great Mexican food and of course margaritas! Raspberry rocks! We then proceeded to have our own version of fun: movies, munchies, drinks and hot tub.

What a wonderful way to spend the day when you either get trick or treats, I definitely got treats!