Sunday, December 1, 2013

Cotton gin, Thanksgiving and Christmas Oh My!!!!

Woo hoo! We had a wonderful Thanksgiving feast last Tuesday in our class and I had a wonderful break with my family!!! It just went too dog gone fast. It does help though knowing that Christmas break is just around the corner.:) We will hit the ground running tomorrow to make sure we finish up all the standards addressed during this six weeks so that we can get those assessed. Of course, I stated pulling out all my Christmas books to take and get started reading on at school. To say I have a lot is an understatement!!!
The Monday before Thanksgiving break our kindergarten classes toured the cotton gin in McLemoresville, TN. My brother is the owner there as well as a cotton farmer. The gin has been in our family for MANY years. Thankful for my brother and all of our farmers. :) As I said, our Thanksgiving feast went off great! I had lots of compliments on how well the students were behaved and that always makes me happy to hear that.:) Once again, I have been blessed with a class of sweeties and I'm so proud of the progress they have made this year.
Kara is participating in the St. Jude half marathon this Saturday in Memphis so Kali and I are going down with her the night before. Marty has to leave Thursday morning and stay through Sunday at Nashville for guard duty. Kirk will come home and help hold the fort down.:)
In closing, I'll leave you with my thoughts that I posted on my Facebook status:
Every year I look at Christmas trees in the stores and of course I have seen lots of pics on Facebook and it seems that many of the trees seem to have a theme to them. I caught myself the other day saying "my tree is nothing fancy it's just simple with lights and ornaments that we have collected through the years." I thought about that and realized in some ways that's true because it's not fancy in the likes that you would ever see one like it in a store display but it represents our family and that makes it special. Marty and I married on December 18, 1993-that's right almost 20 years in the books. and one of my wedding showers was a Christmas decoration/ornament one so many of the ornaments date back to then and are even engraved with our wedding date. Each child has their own collection of ornaments from their first Christmas to all the ones we made at home or made at school through the years. There are ornaments from various countries and favorite vacation spots that we traveled to or Marty traveled to on his deployments/guard duties. There are ornaments commemorating the year Marty was away and spent Christmas in Kosovo. We have ornaments from Ft. Campbell representing the years he served there while we were dating and even some we got from the cruise ship on our honeymoon. Many of the ornaments have been given to me through the years by my students. There are ornaments for our dogs that we love and others we have loved and lost representing the joy they have brought us. There are ornaments from Ms. Elizabeth Radford because each year she would give the kids an ornament. Last, there is an ornament from the Christmas of 1985. We never dreamed that would be the last year that my daddy would spend Christmas here with us. So my tree does have a theme and it's called "our lives"-by no means fancy but definitely a wonderful and blessed life!!! I pray that as you decorate your tree this year that you too are reminded of the love of family, special memories from the past and the precious memories of the loved ones who are celebrating Christmas in heaven!!!!

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