Hello December!!!

How is it December 1st already?  This year just flew by!

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.  I know I did and I certainly had a good Black Friday, aka spending too much money on clothes!

Last week one of my best friends had her baby boy.  I finally got to meet him this past weekend (he had to stay in the NICU for a week), and he is so adorable.  Here is a picture of him she sent all of us!

He is certainly one happy baby!

I look forward to seeing everyone Wednesday for dinner and our last class meeting!  It's been one crazy semester, but we all made it!

The Party is OVER...

and a complete success!

So this past week has been absolutely crazy!!!  My dad was still in the hospital with the doctors trying to find out what was wrong with him.  It seems he got a hospital born infection that they have no idea where it is in his body so he is on 6 weeks of IV antibiotics.  He was finally able to come home on Wednesday, which is why I had to miss class because I had to pick him up, but I'm loving all the great tool times on the archive!  These are certainly tools I can use in the classroom, or just in my life in general.  Thanks everyone for the great tools and for all the prayers for my dad!

The party was a great success!  Everyone told me it was a great time and that I totally outdid myself (which I know I did...especially since I have been actively planning this party for 2.5 years!!!).  I have a few pictures now, and my old college roommate took a ton of pictures because she's a photographer.  When she gets those to me, I'll make sure I share them.  I hope it should be soon because I really want to see them.  I totally didn't take any because I was so busy the whole night playing hostess with the mostess, but some friends have sent me a few!

Here are the centerpieces that were around on tables:

Here is the birthday boy looking mad that we were singing happy birthday to him.  He hates that kind of thing.  You can see the special shirt I got made for him.  It says Cheers and Beers to my 30 years!  And you can see my beer bottle cupcake cake:

And the last picture I have is of myself and 2 of my friends with my awesome beer six pack collage behind us that fell off the wall :-(.  You can kind of see the earrings and necklace my friend on the left made for us out of beer bottle caps!

So that's all I have for now.  Like I said, when I get the others I will make sure they get put up here because there was a lot of stuff that I made and did for this party that I want to show off! 

The Last Part of the Contract!

So this week I finished up my last bits of my personal contract, and essentially finishing up my remaining duties for 5001 (minus the last few blog posts of comments left for the semester)!!  I taught the undergrads how to use Smartboards and how to effectively use clickers in the classroom.  I had a good time with those students.  It's great to see how far they have come since I first met them, and I think they really enjoyed my lesson to them.  I hope they can use everything in the future!

Sad news, my dad was re-admitted to the hospital (on his birthday of all days!) because of a fever and what they are calling muscle spasms.  We now know he has a hospital born infection and they are treating with the IV antibiotics.  He was supposed to be released tomorrow, but that may be changing if they can't get his fevers under control.  I know a lot of you have been asking for an update, so here it is!  Please keep him in your prayers....he is miserable at the hospital and really wants to be home!

Other than that...it has been full blown party planning and prepping in my house.  My husband's birthday is Saturday and we've got like 60 people coming to the party!  Now I have to figure out how much food to make :-/  Here is a look at some more things I've made for the party....don't worry, my old college roommate is going to be taking pictures so I will share some with all of you!  I really hope everything comes together!!!!

Getting Closer

We have survived the first full week of November and it wasn't too bad!  It was a relatively easy week due to the teacher's convention, which I wish I had gone, and the lack of class.  I used the time to get some IDD work done, as well as work on some more crafts for my husband's 30th (2 weeks away...only half of the people have RSVP'ed, and I have a lot more to do!).  I finished making my own version of these beer bottle candles I saw on Etsy and I love them.  I think since I have extra wax leftover, they may be gifts for people, especially my friends who really like beer!

I also finished making a towel that has a beer mug on it.  Here it is:

I think it came out pretty nice!  Ok, I'm off to go do some work!  Until next week!

Hello November!

Well the week is over, and boy was it a long one!  It started with my dad's surgery, which went really well and he was actually discharged today.  He is home and resting and is much more comfortable than he was in the hospital.  We are all glad everything went well and thankful for all the prayers!

The week ended with subbing, halloween at our friends' house after we went through 2.5 bags of candy for trick-or-treaters, watching the U.S. vs. New Zealand rugby match with my husband's rugby team, and finished with bringing my dad home.

This week we also got to meet Steve Rao who made me realize that I could program apps, especially since I've programmed other things in the past.  It was also nice to learn about code.org and their hour of code.  It really is something I know a lot of people would have loved when they were younger.  I showed it to my husband, and he spent an hour on the website just looking through everything.

Well...I'm glad this long week is over, that everything worked out well, and that I got to have a little fun in the process.  Here we go into November (when did that happen!?!) and towards the end of the semester (which will be here before we all know it!).

This was my easy week!

Welp, this was my easy week.  I was finally caught up or right where I needed to be for all of my classes!  And I got this week's IDD assignment write the first time around, woohoo!  Dana and I presented our IT History, which we seemed to get a lot of good feedback, and we introduced people to some new web 2.0 tools and I hope they enjoy using them as much as we did!

I created my PLN after discussed exactly what it was...and I got use Symbaloo to do it.  Forgot how great Symbaloo is.  It's been about a year since I have used it and it's crazy how many more important sites and great resources I have now that a year has gone by.  It's all those unconferences and pinteresting I do!

This weekend and leading into next week will be busy busy!  One of my best friends in getting married, and I'm in it!  We have the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner tonight and tomorrow is the wedding!  Wedding 5 of 6 attended this year is about to happen and it's wedding 3 or 3 I am in!  Whew, this was a busy year!

Monday my dad goes in for open heart surgery, so I'll be in Philly till Wednesday for him.  Keep him in your prayers!

Well I'm off to get some stuff done before tonight!  Hope you all have a great weekend and I'm excited about our guest speaker on Wednesday!

Finally getting a grasp on things!

So this week I finally felt like I was getting ahead of myself and able to catch my breath for the first time this whole semester...and it was just in time too!  This weekend was homecoming at UD and it was an awesome time to see some of my friends from college who I haven't seen in a year.  It was a lot of fun too!

With us having off this week, that meant that we had our IDD meeting, which again, eased my mine a bit and made me realize that we're moving to the easier part of the class (and the more straight forward part too).  I'm happy about this and happy to be getting to the more creative part of making the program!

When I was on Pinterest, I happened to see a pin from Richard Byrne that was about using an interactive program for the Constitution, which I think is really cool.  It would also be really useful in the US 1 classes I've been subbing in because they are all on this topic now.  It helps take topics today and explain them using the Constitution.  Pretty cool to me!