Back on Board

Finally, I am back. I have had some trouble getting my blog spot to work. Now, thanks to Megan, things are ready to go again. I have never been "Techno" minded and when things go wrong, I get very confused and feel defeated quickly. Now I can blog, though I can't embed photos yet. That will have to come at a later date. We have been able to do some terrific things in the two years since I last blogged. I think I will attempt to put them in a somewhat chronological order - but for now, I'm just back. Love you all. Mom

THANKSgiving!

Thanksgiving at our house was just what it should be. Everyone was here except for Megan and she was in Texas. We had a houseful. Here's the run down of who was here - Tory, her husband and 4 boys ages 5 -12. Erin and her husband, their 3 boys and their little girl, ages 1 - 8, Lucy and her husband and their new little girl - 4 months. So, that makes 17 of us. It is so great when we all get together like this. There is so much noise and so much going on all 0ver the house. Some of the kids are upstairs playing in the family room - where some of the guys are watching a football game! The den has kids singing, playing (I use the term loosely) the piano and planning a concert. Most of the adults are standing around in the kitchen watching each other make something. Erin, making rolls, Tory, making cookie salad, Dad, checking on the turkey and his oysters ;-), Lucy, helping mom with the salad and setting the table AND little 1 yr old Scott, playing with his shake and speed car on the floor among us!! Of course everyone is trying to sample everything. Well, everything except the oysters! Finally the 29 lb. bird Lucy and Derrick brought us is cooked through and we start the process of serving one and all. We are truly blessed! Wonderful people, wonderful food, wonderful lives! We eat too much and love it, anticipating yummy leftovers. Even our youngest member, Lucy and Derrick's daughter at 4 mo. gets to join us at the table for a tiny taste of cookie salad. Welcome to the Sibbett family little one! You will be loved and nurtured here - and well fed!! When some out of town friends drop by unexpectedly, I hurry around and try to tidy up the place. Bringing all the shoes to the front door shoe basket, it overflows with 17 pairs of shoes and looks very overwhelming. The house sounds like and bunch of Indians (Wampanogans?) but is the sound of joy and love and family. See, just what it should be. And we are thankful. And we get to see Megan in 3 short weeks!

Mayflower in Rm 14

Several years ago, while teaching 4th Grade, I was attempting to make the Pilgrims plight and their voyage in the Mayflower more meaningful to my students. I had a small, about 3x5 in. drawing of a cut away view of their tiny ship and wanted to enlarge it to be bulletin board size, about 4x6 ft.. I told the class that I would put the copy under the large overhead projector, project it on to a huge piece of bulletin board paper I had taped to cover the green chalkboard and make a huge tracing the ship. I would then make a second tracing of the body of the ship and they could cut out the small sections of the boat and draw and color the contents of each room or area complete with several pilgrims. Finishing that, we would put the whole thing on our hall bulletin board for everyone to see. They became very excited wanted to see this all take place, but I told them that they should eat their lunch, go out to recess and see how the work was progressing afterwards. The lunch hour quickly sped by while I hurriedly traced the big ship onto the paper with a large heavy duty magic marker. I was just about finished with the top rigging when they returned to class. They were amazed to see the Mayflower almost completed and in a few minutes we had the second tracing down and they were busy coloring their individual sections of the cross sections of the ship. Soon I was ready to remove the big underneath tracing and take it to the hall bulletin board. Everyone was excited and things were going well. That is until I took the tracing down. There, underneath, the tracing was the Mayflower's heavy duty black outline on my chalkboard! Big and black and permanent!! I threw my hands to my face and stepped back in horror. The children chimed in with, "Mrs. Sibbett what did you do ?" Permanent marker on my two chalkboards in the shape of the Mayflower!! And I had no idea of how to get it off. Chalkboards had risen to the state that you really weren't suppose to just wash them and permanent markers were just that, PERMANENT! To say the least the project for the afternoon had changed remarkably. After about half and hour of problem solving, a few students went to get our favorite janitor. I would have loved to see that encounter with those ten year olds and our janitor. Somehow the students explained my mistake, our awful finding and our struggles to find a solution. When he came into the room, he was trying to hide (and not very successfully) his chuckle and smile. Luckily, and wonderfully, he was pretty sure he could clean it off! That day, all gratitude lessons aside, twenty students and one teacher were very thankful for our janitor! The next day we returned to find a clean chalkboard and set the Mayflower sailing in the hall.

Watermelon Creek

Watermelon Creek

Off We Go - Fall Tour

Monday, C and I, drove up into the mountains to see the fall leaves and some of our favorite country in Idaho. Our lunch picnic stop was "Ten Mile" campground above Idaho City. This place has been near and dear to our hearts since camping there with the Jacksons last summer. The boys nicknaned this "Watermelon Creek" because we stored our watermelon in a stretchy, mesh bag in the creek there. We had so much fun there with the J boys. The scenery was great and the trip was exactly the kind of thing C and I love to do. When we moved here from Wyoming, three years ago, I thought we would really miss the Uinta Mountians outside of Evanston. But we love the mountians of Idaho and are having a blast discovering new places. Fall, you gotta love it!

Yankee Stadium

NEW YORK - Even Yogi Bera knew this was the end. As baseball said farewell to Yankee Stadium, one of the game's most beloved players stood beneath the stands in a full vintage uniform. Now 83, the man who coined the phrase "it ain't over till it's over" put his own stamp on the day. "I'm sorry to see it over, I'll tell you that," Bera said. The goodbye completed an 85 year run for the home of baseball's most famous team. What began with a Babe Ruth home run on an April afternoon in 1923 ended Saturday, September 20, 2008. -The Associated Press.
And I am sure my dad, Stuart H. Simpson, peering down from heaven, had more than one tear in his eye. My father was born in Brooklyn in 1912 and went to Yankee Stadium as a young boy. He and his "pals" usually couldn't afford a ticket in to see the game, so they would hang around the outside of the ball park until they let the youngsters in to the bleachers for FREE, sometime around the fifth inning. I can still see the look of wonder and excitement on his face as he would tell me of those times. "Barbi," he would say, "can you imagine a bunch of young kids getting to see Babe Ruth, Yogi Bera and Lou Gehrig play? That was great, just great. Those were the days."
For my sisters and I, "the days" were summer days, now in Wisconsin and Michigan, cheering along with dad as we watched the Yankees on television. To this day I am convinced that that was the real reason we owned a TV. And we all grew up to be avid Yankee fans. Thanks dad! Oh, and GO YANKS!!

New Yellow Pencils

School started today in our neighborhood. For three years now C and I have NOT been there to greet our new students. Somehow, it still tugs at my heartstrings. We are glad we retired and we only need to read the newspaper headings about how students are performing in the Standardized Tests to remember why we retired, but the thought of new students, new expections and new pencils can make me melancholy. Todays new students will hope that their new teacher is cool (awesome), their expections will be for great friends and terrific learning experiences, and their pencils will be push pencils with scented lead! I have already bought mine. I don't by any means need new pencils, but I have them. I wish the best for the kids today and a tiny bit of me wishes I were going to be there at the door to greet them (with my new pencils).
P.S. Yes, kids still need pencils today but they also need a TON of other stuff. The marker boards in their classrooms require them to provide dozens of markers. Do you know how many crates of chalk you could buy with all those markers?