Home Sweet Home!

Our home inspection went very well today and it looks like we'll be moving around the end of September/early October. We are SO excited! Here are some inside pics for those of you that haven't seen them yet. You do have to look past the wallpaper and decor choices of the sellers - but cut 'em a break, they've been there for fifty years. (Emily wants dibs on the bedroom with the rosary!)

Back bedroom.

Master bedroom - look at those floors!

Front bedroom.

backyard

front porch

living room and dining room, seen as you walk in the front door

living room and picture window! Hellloooo Christmas Tree!

That's my mom and our Realtor chattin' it up in the kitchen. Notice the tiny cabinet with a window full of matching wallpaper!

steps to the basement

Basement - Don't worry, they're leaving the light fixtures!

The Cutest Li'l House in the Whole Wide World!

Okay, don't get too excited yet, we're still waiting on our counter offer to their counter offer to be accepted, but we'll know by 5:00 tomorrow. I don't see why we wouldn't get it, though (knock on wood - hardwood floors, that is)! We went back to look at the house again tonight because in the midst of all this number crunching and counter offering and real estate agents and mortgage lenders, I decided that I just had to see it again before we took another step.

I lost sleep last night imagining the house in my head and thinking "How big were those bedrooms?" and "How much of that basement really was finished?" and, I kid you not, "I don't remember seeing any outlets in the bathroom, where will I plug in my hairdryer?" These are the things that kept me up until 1:00, even though I took my trusty old Tylenol PM around 10:00. Yes, it relaxes the body, but it does NOT slow down the mind! I laid comfortably in bed just wondering, and wondering and wondering.......

So, after twenty four hours of waiting and worrying and budgeting and worrying and asking questions and worrying, we finally decided that yes, we CAN afford this house; yes, it IS in a good neighborhood; and yes, we WILL be rediculously happy there - but I had to see it again just to be sure. I took my camera, and the batteries only lasted long enough to get these pictures of the outside, but as soon as we pulled in the driveway, I knew we had to have that house. It's just so darn CUTE. The rooms were plenty big, the basement was plenty finished and there were even outlets in the bathroom. All that worrying for nothing! Take a look and tell me you can't wait for our first backyard barbeque!







**Shreiks of Delight** And the inside's even cuter than the outside, if you disregard some horrible carpet and wallpaper choices on the part of the previous owners. Wish us luck and I'll let everyone know how it goes tomorrow.

Thank you Mom and Meredith for talking me down off of ledges, thank you Emily and Laura for getting excited with us! I can't wait for all of you to see it - once it's ours, of course. And thank you to my darling husband who is the ying to my yang when it comes to freaking out about things. If he had a dollar for every time he said, "It's going to be fine," he'd have at least ten dollars.

The Next Step in Becoming a Real, Live Grown-Up!

Holy Crap! Chud and I just put in an offer on this lovely gem of a house. It might be the scariest and most exciting thing I've ever done. This is way more nerve wracking than getting married!

Let me tell you all about our potential home sweet home:

-- It was built in 1956 and has had the same owners for 50 years. On our first visit, it was clear that they've kept the house in impeccable shape! I'm fairly certain they won't find anything huge or scary in the inspection.

--It has a beautiful front and back yard with a shed and some dogwood trees. If it were up to me, we'd have the biggest yard we could find, but Chud's main concern is cutting the grass, so this one is perfect. Not too big, not too small.

--It sits on a cul de sac where kids like to ride bikes. There's a street lamp in our front yard. There's a small porch on the front which I plan to put a fence around someday so it looks like a real porch - with a rocking chair. I have to have a rocking chair.

--3 bedrooms, one bathroom, and a finished basement with a shower stall in it. A great house for hosting out-of-town guests, like our family!

--new roof with gutter guards. I guess that's good but I don't know anything about gutters.

--the neighborhood is old, cute and quiet. It's still close to all the fun things going on in Louisville but it's far away from the city sounds. The elementary school nearby is not that great, but we don't have to send our kids there if we don't want to.

Overall, it's the perfect house for us! If all goes well we could be moving again in a month. Yipes!

Another Summer Gone

The school year has started and I have to say, I love my new school! Don't get me wrong, it's VERY different from my old school, but the things they do here are great. I have some wonderful kids who are so anxious to learn, I almost feel like I'm doing them a disservice at this point in the year by wasting their time with procedures and routines. Every time we start a real lesson, they get so excited! Well, most of them do, anyway. I know it's just a honeymoon phase, but I love it. They pull out their notebooks and pencils and sit up straight in their desks and I can tell their thinking, "Look at me! I'm in fourth grade! Look how big and smart I am!"

I could go on and on about how different my new school is, but instead I'll just write about how great it is to be in Louisville. I went to bed Monday night, the night before the first day of school, and I was so content. Chud came to bed and I let out a sigh of relief when I realized that we're both going to get up at the same time tomorrow, we're both going to drive ten minutes to our schools (no commute!) and we're both going to come home when we're done (no graduate classes)! How nice is that? The last two nights we've been busy with beginning-of-the-year jobs that need to be done, but it's so nice to be able to talk to each other about school. I love being married to another teacher!

Here's to a great school year!

Reflection

Tonight was a totally appropriate night for some old-blog-reading relfection. I've been going through the Jefferson County "New Teacher Induction" all week long, and it's been a doozy! Lots of lectures, workshops, powerpoint presentations and whatnot, while many many teachers from all grade levels sit around and tell each other how much they hate the whole thing and how much they'd rather be in their classrooms. I learned a long time ago that complaining is toxic to an effective environment, and although I'm guilty of the occasionaly complaint or two, I truly believe that these other teachers did a lot more complaining than I've ever heard before...but by the end of the week we were all glad we went. It's nice to know that your county cares enough about you to give you food and information for a whole week prior to your starting your first teaching job.

So, tonight I was looking through my old posts and realized that this blog has been a great chronicle of my life as a teacher. I didn't intend for it to be that way, but that's the form my writing has taken.

And I'm so glad!

I read through some of my old posts - the ones about the hippie bus and the F word and the chicken hatching - and I realized right away, that this is the best job in the world. I hope this blog will serve as the vehicle for many, many more funny, insipiring stories of fourth grade students. I firmly believe that they can teach me so much more than I can teach them. I know that my kids next year (which I will meet next week!) will be so different from the kids I had last year, but I'm positive that these kids will have just as much, if not more, to offer than those kids from my old school. I can't wait to see their smiles, learn about their sense of humor, and help them through a ten year old's triumphs and troubles. I was born to be a teacher, and I'm so glad I get to go it AGAIN next school year!