Well, Christmas break was great, and certainly not long enough. Jared was amazing. He made Christmas day wonderful. He got me so many wonderful gifts, but the biggest surprise of all (literally and figuratively) was the digital piano he got me.

It plays and looks like an upright piano, but basically plugs in and is electric and all that. It’s so neat. I am quite rusty and am warming up again. It was such a big present… I felt so undeserving of the gift, but I have been trying to make use of it as much as possible!

Then the week of New Years, Jared’s family came down to stay with us and see Austin, kind of like what my family did for thanksgiving. It was a fun time to have them here, Sunday-Friday. We stayed at home a bit more, but still showed them a little around the town and our various work places. Naturally, Stevie worked his Iggy magic and they all loved him too, especially Jared’s dad. 🙂 We had a good time with them here, and we were sorry to see them go.

Since then, I’ve just been dealing with my headaches and school and grading. I took today off actually for a doctor’s appointment and I was hoping to get into some other stuff too, but I’ll just do some extra grading instead. Blech. Having the grading periods in six six week periods is really hard, instead of four 9 week periods. I like the 9 weeks better, personally. It doesn’t seem as rushed.

On the upside, tomorrow I am going to bring my camera to the school and take some pictures of my classroom with some of the projects the kids did for characterization- I think you will all be so impressed with my 7th graders!!!!!

In my junior high French class, I had the most wonderful teacher, Mademoiselle Wilson (I think her name is Lisa Zilch now). She is one of the reasons I wanted to be a teacher; she was probably one of my most favorite teachers in the entire world. During Christmas time, to show how the holiday is mostly traditionally celebrated in France, we would do parties and bring traditional food like quiche, crepes, and Buche de Noels (Yule Log cakes).

My mother has been purging the house of most of my stuff now and sending it to me, and sent me a French Christmas packet with the recipe a couple of months ago. I was wondering what to do with it until the other day, some of Jared’s work friends decided to put together a potluck for tomorrow night. I decided to be adventurous and here’s how it went down:

First you make the cake part. It’s a sponge cake baked in a jelly roll pan really flat. Then you roll it in a towel to cool, then unroll it, frost it, then roll it up again:

Then I set to work on the Meringue Mushrooms. Apparently, they are traditional. And since I’m all about doing a traditional French recipe from scratch, I made the candy mushrooms (NOT REAL MUSHROOMS!!!):

While those baked for 40 minutes, I cuddled with Stevie, who felt very neglected, and then frosted the cake part of the “log.”:

Looking pretty log-y! However I was getting pretty tired, so I cheated and just did normal frosting- it still tasted pretty good when I licked my fingers at the end ;):

Then, the mushrooms were out of the oven, so I put the pieces together, dusted the tops with cocoa (it looked pretty!), and stuck them to the cake. Then I dusted the cake with a thin layer of “snow” (powdered sugar):

Voila! There you have it. I wish I had something pretty and green to garnish it with… but this will have to do for now. Not too bad for a first try… hopefully the people at the party will enjoy it!

Har-har.

Two posts in two days! It’s only because I am not feeling well. 🙂 Jared was teasing me yesterday because I had already read so much. He called his mom to chat and told her that I was on my fourth book and had read over a thousand pages and I had only been on break 2 days, and I started to deny it. Then I thought about it and realized that I really couldn’t. lol… I have been doing some binge-comfort reading!

Anyways, Jared and I decided that we would try to budget gifts this year and be more thoughtful and craft-y. I think being crafty is a gene that I didn’t inherit, so I really have to try extra hard to get this sort of thing right, but in the end, I think they sort of look pretty good. These are cookies in a jar!

Then I found cute fabric and ribbons and scissors and tada:

Not too bad, eh? Hopefully they end up tasting pretty good. 🙂 All the dry ingredients for your cookies!

Time is flying by. The first part of the year seemed to creep by, when I wasn’t sure what I was doing and I was just so overwhelmed with all my responsibilities. But from Thanksgiving to now has just flown by and I barely had time to get everything done! I’m just crossing my fingers that everyone gets their Christmas cards in time.

Things at the school are changing dramatically. A couple of key people are leaving after the break (including the 7th grade counselor and the 8th grade assistant principal who set in place most of the structured rules), and I think it will slowly change the dynamics of the school drastically. I’m not sure what to expect. There are a lot of problems and a lot of people are feeling really unhappy and unsettled right now, so it will be interesting to see how things play out.

As for the kids, they are interesting. Somebody asked me the other week how I liked 7th grade. Honestly, I like it better than I thought was possible because most of the kids are extremely intelligent. About half the kids are amazingly mature for their age as well, which makes it tolerable. They surprise me with their insights and ability to rationalize and debate. It’s that other slightly smaller half of immature kids that makes it hard to cope. I do like all my students though, and try hard to find ways to compliment them and put them up during this difficult time in their life. Lets face it…. middle school/junior high is the armpit of society.

This past week had some downs with my health. I went to the doctor again on Monday, and we think we have some additional progress. With the medication however, it’s might make me a little sicker before it makes me better. blech. So when I took this particular addition to my meds, the side affects were some anxiety, 3 hours of sleep, and nausea for nearly 2 days straight. lol. I cut back on that particular dose and I think it’s a little better that way, but that definitely was an adventure to go to school to teach the kids feeling like that!

Anyways… I think I am going to relax and read a little like I am suppose to do on break before I let myself do more preparations for Christmas or grading for school!

The past week has been a lot of fun. I’m sorry that it has to end, but all good things have to end, as one of my favorite wise poets say.

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.”

I love Robert Frost. I actually taught this poem to my students a couple of weeks ago too, not in it’s deep glory or anything like that, but just in the way that they saw that you have to appreciate what you have when you get the moment, because things must move on. We have to move on and change; we can’t stay frozen in the moment and shouldn’t try to because that’s just not how nature works (or how God works, if you want to go there, too, but we stuck to trees in class :)). And while there were many times I was frustrated, there were many golden moments this week.

It was great because I had the whole week off from work, so I got to spend Monday doing last minute errands and getting things ready for my family to arrive, then finally relaxing. My parents and brother arrived Monday night. They immediately fell in love with Stevie. Let’s face it, who wouldn’t? He’s pretty dang cute! And despite what they think, he warmed up to them really fast, especially my dad. For some reason, Jacob thought it was a good idea to stare directly into the dog’s eyes and lean forward and talk loudly at him and then wondered why Stevie was scared. lol. He’s a funny kid.

It was a fun week. We had some great meals that I made (if I may say so myself!). I was so excited because Thanksgiving dinner went off SO well! I had a bit of help from my mom, and a bit more help from Jared, and both of them helped with cleaning up the dishes afterwards, which is the bane of my existence (well, cleaning in general). After we had recovered from our turkey induced coma, I decided we should play some games (which is something I never really do, but figured it was worth trying!) and pulled out Apples to Apples and Catch Phrase. It was absolutely hilarious. If you have never tried Apples to Apples, you really do need to. You have to at least try to pick cards that make sense, but it is fun if you do have one weirdo in a bigger group.

After playing a couple rounds of that, we switched to Catch Phrase, which is kind of weird with 5 people but can be done. After the first round, we decided to switch teams around, which required some moving. Jacob got up and said, “Well, Elisabeth, I will move, but my seat is hot.”

Bewildered silence. I looked at him, with that “What-the-heck-is-that-supposed-to-mean?” look on my face.

Then we all looked around at each other and suddenly started to laugh so hard we were crying. It was just so completely random. My dad offered his chair to me, which was a better switch for the team anyways, but started to laugh again so hard he fell onto the floor and that set us all off again laughing for another five minutes.

Good times.

We also went out and stuffed ourselves silly way too many times at some great places around town. Jared and I showed off our respective work locations, where we go to church, some of the local sights, shopping areas, etc. We went to San Antonio yesterday and saw the Alamo which was cool to get some Texas history. We also went to the San Antonio Temple, which is absolutely beautiful with stain glass windows. I was a little conflicted with that; it’s been a long time since I’ve gone to the temple and there’s been a couple of reasons for that other than the distance; mostly the desire hasn’t been there. But my ups and downs with religion is a whole different thing apart from this 🙂

They left at 4:50 AM this morning for the 7:00 AM flight to Utah this morning. Blech! I got up about 4:30 or so and just hung out with them until they left to say goodbye, and even Stevie made five minute appearance ;).

Of course the whole time wasn’t great. I have a terrible temper and mini tantrums and little things set me off quickly, but I tend to get over them as quickly as they annoyed me. For all of these reasons, it’s been a wonderful week. I am so glad I had this opportunity to spend time with my family and see them again.