Last night, Mackenzie’s preschool had an open house. There were finger foods and the kids sang three songs. Mackenzie actually sang this year! Unfortunately, my video camera battery was dead, so no video today.
Mackenzie singing
Mackenzie with two friends: Rosie and Ryan
Mackenzie and her teacher Mrs. Beverly
Something did take place last night, that makes me want to rant, but I’ll create a new post for that.
Today was Christmas Cookie Day at Tristan’s kindergarten. Kimberlie and I, along with other parents helped about 120 kindergarteners make cookies. Just imagine the biggest possible mess and multiply it by 100. Kimberlie was covered in flour and had to return home and change before going to work. I was a little more careful, since I had the fancy camera and all.
Enjoy the pictures.
Mackenzie went on her first field trip yesterday to see Santa at “The Fish Store”, better known as Bass Pro Shops. Due to a light day at work, I was able to flex my lunch break around and meet them there. Of course, I took the law school’s 50D with me. When folks see you show up with a camera like that, you end up becoming the offical photographer. I did photos of all of the children individually with Santa and class photos with Santa . . . all on a lunch break!
I created a photoshop template of a 5 x 7 Christmas card and included for each child their individual print, class print, and school name, teacher name, and date. I also did 8 x 10 class prints for the teachers. Sam’s printed them for about 40 cents each and I just donated them to the preschool. In hindsight, I should have printed photo packages to sell to parents at next week’s Christmas Open House. Preschool parents will pay anything for Christmas photos. Oh well, I’ll get them next year!
Below are a few of Mackenzie:
Stay tuned . . . Tristan’s kindergarten class is making Christmas cookies tomorrow and the D50 will be there to capture the action!
Each Wednesday, Tristan brings home a folder from school. It contains things like school work, behavior charts, PTA notices, notes from school, etc. This past Wednesday, the folder included a request to “Help Light Someone’s Christmas”. Basically, it’s the same concept as the Salvation Army’s angel tree: you sign up to purchase a gift for a specific amount and send the gift to the school.
Now we typically help various organizations, from giving in church to volunteering in various things, to sending canned goods to feed people who apparently only eat at Thanksgiving, to making donations, etc. Even with all of that, we have never received joy from giving. In fact, we hate giving. It’s like a chore. We do it though for various reasons — whether political or religious or otherwise. But because I love Heard Elementary School, I wanted to sign up immediately.
Kimberlie tried to throttle me back. We’re already room parents for Tristan’s class. We donate classroom supplies and send paper money and sell wrapping paper and buy BBQ tickets and support the PTA, so I understood her concern. But being room parents, we’ve met all of Tristan’s classmates. If there is someone in Tristan’s class, school, or our community who needs a token gift to improve their holiday season, I want to help. I filled out the form and committed to purchasing a gift at the $15.00 level and returned the form.
The next day, Kimberlie was picking up the kids from day care when Tristan handed her a paper light bulb. It said “Jacket for a 6 year old girl, size 6/7″. Her eyes teared up. We don’t live in a wealthy community, but it is the suburbs and I never imagined that someone nearby might not even have a jacket. We thought we were going to be purchasing a token gift for a child who might not have as many toys on Christmas morning as our kids, but instead, we were purchasing a necessity that in our household would never be considered a gift. And so we were off — to find the perfect jacket!
Being the bargain-hunter than I am, we ended up with a $40.00 Old Navy jacket. All of their outerwear was 50% off plus I used a 30% Stuff-n-Save discount to end up spending $14.00. It could possibly end up being the nicest garment the unknown little girl owns. Tristan’s birthday is coming up later this week and we actually enjoyed shopping for this unknown child more than we enjoyed shopping for our own child. The jacket has already warmed our hearts — for the first time since I can remember, we feel good about giving.
Let’s hope the little girl can stay warm until Christmas!
Bibb County residents voted this morning on a continuation of the ESPLOST. I know that the ESPLOST will pass and in reality I could care less, but here is why I voted no:
Today was Mackenzie’s first day of 3K. There is nothing much to report, except for the fact that she didn’t cry when we dropped her off!
This morning, we dropped Tristan off at kindergarten for the first time at my old elementary school. My first grade teacher (from 24 years ago) is still there and was manning the crosswalk. My third grade teacher was preparing her classroom and my old assistant principal (who is now principal) was helping in the car pool area. It seems like time has frozen at Heard Elementary School. Tristan’s classroom is my old sixth grade math classroom. It was very surreal. I have so many memories of that place — I did spend six years of my life there and then visited often (my mother later worked there).
Enjoy the pictures below. I especially love how they “serve” crayons in the baked-potato bowls from Wendy’s. You just have to love public schools.
So I looked at the calendar yesterday . . . and it’s August? 2009? Where does the time go?
Instead of apologizing for not posting in the last week or so, I’ll just tell you what I’m up to now:
Tuesday we are headed to Six Flags. We only go when we have free tickets because it sort of sucks. We scored two free tickets off of mycokerewards.com and bought a $15 ticket for Tristan off of a twitter special. Mackenzie has been taught that being two at Six Flags and WDW saves Daddy lots of money and I think she’s OK with that.
Thursday my boy starts kindergarten. 25 years ago, that was ME starting kindergarten, but the blur between then and now called life happened so here we are. He’s going to the same elementary school that I went to and believe it or not, there are a lot of teachers still there . . . including my 1st and 3rd grade teacher and the principal!
Work is hell. School starting back is enough, but over then summer there has been over $1,000,000 worth of construction in our building and the technology that comes with that isn’t just going to happen by itself. On top of that we are suppose to have a new website (first time in 5 years) by September and our web developer conveniently quit in June. That leaves me working literally 7 days a week, sometimes around the clock. This weekend was spent getting familiar with Drupal, our chosen (but not my me) CMS.
My half-marathon training plan is on. That’s all I’m going to say about that.
I’ve been sick pretty much all week, but I don’t have a choice except to keep going. I went 120 hours without drinking coke, which was a major feat for me!
Also, classes start back for me in a few weeks for that stupid graduate program I put myself into. This semester I dropped everything but one class so that I can deal with all of the above. I’ll be taking a class that deals with artificial intelligence in game programming (fuzzy logic, probability, and a few other things I could spell out here to make myself sound smarter).
So obviously, I’m still working on “getting all of my ducks in a row”. (That’s Rachel’s phrase.) And when I do . . . this blog will be BACK!
When you see this many posts on my blog, that means I’m procrastinating. I have a huge project due tonight at midnight and I’m avoiding doing it. Its a database design project. The design is done, but the report that I have to submit is not. I would rather watch paint dry.
My Latest Run
