The best part about writing a blog is that it’s a time capsule for your life. A narcissistic time capsule, yes, but something that marks your growth and change nonetheless. Actually, I still think that Jay has the best tagline for a blog because it sums it up so very well: “Blogging is just masturbating without the mess.”

January

We rang in the new year with the 44th President of the United States. I also began referring to myself as “Obama Black” instead of “mixed” or “mulatto” because I have often argued that I will not be “black” just for the sake of convenience on my part or on the part of anyone else who wants to use me. It was a cold, cold day in Washington but a bright, happy day in my heart.

February

During the Love Month when I was singularly sad that Valentine’s Day would come and go without a special someone with which to share it. Instead, I dedicated it to myself and learned to love things about myself. A short recap: I love that I’m nice. That’s it. NICE. It’s nice to be nice. It’s totally underrated. See that smile? It’s the smile of a NICE PERSON.

March

It may seem silly to some people, but I did something very brave and cut off a ton of my hair. Then, I started doing something so tragically hipster: I bought an iPhone and started taking pictures of my new, short hair.

April

I turned 456 months old. That’s 38 in people years. It was more fun to give that in months just to watch people do the mental math. My friend, Tracy, made me some new pretty earrings for my birthday that I could wear with my new short hair. I love all my pretty, dangly earrings. 

May

As if it’s not fun enough to turn 38, my eldest child Mallory turned 23 and I wrote a post to honor her since she’s known me longer (and better) than just about anybody else in my life. Go ahead. Do your mental math again. I’ll wait. I’m totally used to this.

June

My only living grandparent has always been my Gramma Maggie. She passed away in June. 

July

After returning home from an emotionally-charged BlogHer (for me, not everyone) I was feeling very sad about working in a poverty-stricken school and got really sick of these blowhards who think everything is owed to them. A little smackdown ensued and I still don’t feel bad for calling them out on their bad behavior. 

August

Due to that big mouth of mine in July I got a call from NPR to do not one but two radio interviews with them. As an aside, that led to people here in Springfield contacting me and saying, “OMG, you’re like national. Who are you?”

September

My other daughter, Maddie, came to spend her first birthday with us. I placed her for adoption as an infant in an open adoption (see, Karen, how I say placed and not gave away?) and then she contacted me and is a part of our family in the most unique way. This is our new family picture with all four of my kids which we took the first time Maddie visited. Dare I say, the first time she came home? Yes. I do.

October

This is the month where I put my money where my mouth was. Or, if you will, I put my mouth-that-knows-how-to-ask-for-donations where my purse is. Wait. That didn’t make sense. Basically, I got a purse drive organized for the girls at my school and it still touches me today to know of the amazing kindness of the internet. It’s a beautiful thing to recognize how many friends I have out there who want to make a difference. 

November

Once again, I joined Mrs. Kennedy and her quest to post writing every day of the month for NaBloPoMo. My own favorite thing I did during November was write a bucket list of things I really want in life. I think this holds me accountable as we usher in the New Year and I plan on coming back to it as it fits into the things I get done. 

December

My friend Janie and I reconnected. Apparently, we also eat suckers together. Blow Pops rock.

Have a safe New Year’s Eve and a satisfying 2010. It’s been fun sharing this with you and you make it all worth it. You’re all pretty fantastic and I think you have the best smile. Really. You do. Is that from all the flossing you do, because wow, you really do have some awesome chompers there. I really do love you guys.

I’ve worked in the education industry for a while now and I’ve not yet failed to get passionate about the learning of my students nor have I failed to get passionate about my own children. When my children started school I wanted them to learn to hold a pencil correctly and then move onto things like following directions and figuring out what the r-controlled vowels are and how to identify them. They had a lot to discover during those formative learning years. Some of my children picked this up earlier than others, but in the end I wanted all my kids to learn to be responsible for their learning. As much as all of my offspring want to be responsible, it’s a difficult thing to teach when they’re in their teen years. It’s a lesson that gets re-taught all the time.

As much as I want my children to reach the standards and hit the high marks, I still have to keep teaching. Things don’t work out easily when I’m doing this. In fact, sometimes it’s as hard for me to teach my own children things that I’ve taught someone else’s kid to do easily within the classroom confines. And when those things don’t work I have to examine what it is I’m doing in order to see where the breakdown is. More often than not, it’s not their fault for not learning, but mine for failing to instruct them in a way that makes sense to their brains.

This lesson became clear to me back in the late 90’s when I was looping with my students from 6^th to 8^th grade. I had the same students for three years in a row and got to know them well. I got to know their learning styles and ways to motivate them to reach higher standards than I originally thought possible. The biggest lesson for me during that time was this: Kids will do what you think they think they can do. I did a study skills unit with my students at the beginning of the school year because I wanted to train them early about how the processes and procedures that I came to appreciate as a system in my classroom. After giving them a learning styles quiz, I put them into the groups of learners they most fit: auditory, reading/writing, kinesthetic/tactile, and visual. As part of this unit, I had them do an activity that would help me, the teacher, learn about how they learn. Basically, we were engaging in metacognition. We had to know what we know before we could really KNOW anything. One group in particular struck me as hilarious. The task was to create a visual aid for me that would be posted in the classroom as a reminder of how my students learn so that I would remember to engage all learners and not just one subset.

I’m not very type A at all. Organization isn’t my strength. Flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants is how I liked to operate as a teacher and many a lesson was scrapped because it wasn’t going according to plan and once I recognized that I began to see my teaching as a way to connect with students and meet them where they’re at instead of forcing them to always learn something because that’s the way I like it. I already knew the material. My task was to get them to know it.

So this group, this microcosm of the student set in the classroom, was filled with type A students. When I asked them what they didn’t like about my teaching it always revolved around something creative and off the cuff I had created. If we were in straight rows with our desks, they were happy. If I wanted to do something wild like making our desks into the shape of a butterfly then they would be so frustrated with me. As they began their project I observed the system they created in their group. The end project wasn’t what I was really interested in (though it would hang on my wall later) but rather the science of how their brains work to come up with the end product. Before they could even start to form the way their poster would look they took all 24 of the markers and all 24 of the crayons out of the boxes and lined them up. ACCORDING TO COLOR. First, they would lay down a purple marker, then a purple crayon. Next, a blue marker and then a blue crayon. Watching them was fascinating. They had to have ORDER before LEARNING. They couldn’t even form sentences until things were in place. After that, they elected a person to act as facilitator for their group. They wanted that one person to be the one who got out of their seat if they had to get more paper or if they had to ask me a question. Sure, they could have raised their hand, but then they’d have to wait for me to come over to them and they didn’t like that idea (and I was such a tra-la-laaaa kind of teacher that I let them get out of their seats and come to me. Shocking, I know!).

Of course, the group that was most like me was a beautiful mess. They had their crap all over the place and still functioned. They laughed, had fun, took ideas as they came, and added to them as they saw fit. Oh, this didn’t fit on the poster we’re making? No problem! We’ll just tape an addendum to it on the bottom of the page. Oh, there are no categories or lists here? FINE. We’ll just put bubbles and stars around the words on the paper and draw lines connecting them! Honestly, they reminded me of how wild my brain works most times. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a neat workspace or relish in organization sometimes. I do. I just don’t like being the one that has to make it neat and organized in the first place. I can learn amongst the chaos. I practically thrive there.

This is where I learn. Writing is how I figure things out. This writing space is where I can leave my mess and sometimes find solace that others know this mess, like this mess, learn in this mess. I hadn’t set out to write about the time I taught my 6th graders how they learn. What I wanted to write about was a response a teacher gave me about one of my own children recently.My child wasn’t doing well in her class and she offered the most pathetic response a teacher can give.  She said, “Every child has the right to fail” and I disagreed so vehemently with her that I had to do deep breathing exercises on the phone with her for the longest 23 minutes of my life. There was a brief moment during that phone call where I had a fantasy in my head which included bludgeoning and things that live only in the mind of Quentin Tarantino. But I don’t think I got through to her at all. I see re-teaching in my future where she’s concerned. It sounds pretentious, I know, but I hope that through whatever efforts are afforded to me I can teach her the lesson I learned as a teacher: Kids will do what you think they think they can do. 

Unfortunately, the only thing she’s taught my child thus far is that she doesn’t think he can do anything.

One of the traditions with my children for Christmas is to get everyone a new pair of pajamas that they may open on Christmas Eve. The ruse used to be that everyone would “choose” one gift and we would make it the one they would WANT to open but then one year someone chose wrong and ended up with a fire truck when every other kid got lousy pajamas so I am very specific about it now. This year, Mallory felt compelled to purchase them because she found footie pajamas while she was out shopping one day. Footie pajamas is not the correct term, but it doesn’t matter. It fits.

I have to take more pictures of Mallory wearing her footie pajamas where you can actually SEE her feet. They’re kind of awesome. Well, not just her regular feet because those are pretty average, but the feet on these pajamas have monkeys on them and now I’m wondering why I published this before you were able to see the MONKEY FEET. Except that she’s really really cute.

It’s all that being out of practice as a blogger. Who cares? Mom-101 listed me as one of the top 50 Mommybloggers who didn’t make the Babble list and who also probably have secret stashes of Twix candy bars behind the cleaning products under the kitchen sink and also have grown children who wear footie pajamas with monkeys on their feet. 

Pretty sure it’s the latter.

In the year of our Lord 2009 I was reunited with an old friend. Janie and I spent our twenties going out dancing at clubs (we were total rave queens, maybe even rave ninjas) and then I kept on having babies and working and Janie ended up being our nanny. We loved saying the word “nanny” because she came to our house but we were, by no means, well off enough to have A Nanny. Janie even did the laundry and sometimes started dinner for us and I encouraged her to teach the children Spanish. More than anything, Janie became a friend to me and we weren’t employer-employee. It never felt like that. She became a friend to me in a new town where I didn’t know a lot of people. We started playing sand volleyball together, we lamented over relationships, and we shared clothes like sisters because she’s my one friend who is tall like me. We’ve even vowed to visit her native Puerto Rico someday but I fear we would never return from it and then somewhere, on the side of a milk carton, our faces would show that we were missing. Our tanned, happy faces.

This year, after about ten years of not seeing one another or speaking, we met once again. This is the part that gets fuzzy for me: I can’t remember for the life of me why we quit speaking. There was nothing that happened, no scandalous my-hubby-humped-the-nanny story line, no argument that lead to us to stop talking and calling each other. It just stopped. It’s a sad thing when that happens because once you pass a certain time limit then you begin to question, “Why hasn’t she called me?” and “Well, crap! Why haven’t I called her?” and then you just let it go and too much time passes. But I’ve learned that’s not true. There’s no such thing as “too much time” passing. If you get a chance, then take it. Janie and I took it again and I got to be her friend once again during a relationship, an engagement, and a wedding.

I haven’t given up on love yet. Honestly, I haven’t. But in the past two years it’s been hard to attend weddings and see happy couples just embarking on that journey. 2009 brought Janie back to me and let me be really happy for a couple. Her new husband is being deployed to Afghanistan next year and they invited me to his Going Away Party where he spontaneously sang to her. In the background there is my other new friend from this year, Patrick, who DJ’d her party and played the BEST salsa music to which Janie’s aunts taught us all to dance.

I only wish you could see more of her face here. For that matter, I wish everyone could see her heart.

Damnit. They’re so cute.

It’s nice to finally be really happy for some people in love again.

SUPER RE-TARDO

Growing up, we weren’t allowed to say the word “retard” or even “shut up”. Repressive Catholic parenting did that to me but we also never talked about sex and we all know where that lead. In any case, the other day I was at the store and these two brothers were fighting and arguing and punching each other in the side of the head and one of them called the other a “Super Retardo” and then the mom laughed and stopped scolding them and they pretended to wear capes and become some strange sort of super hero and then I laughed along with them and the mom gave me this warm smile that said, “Aren’t they cute? And don’t you kind of want to take them home with YOU instead so that I don’t have to wonder about what kind of missile range it would take to pick them off from afar?”

At least that’s how I interpreted it. In my own superheroiness (Jaysus! That’s not a word AT ALL and my English Lit. degree betrays me more and more!) this week I’ve made some observations:

1. I had to kill a mouse with my bare hands. By “bare hands” I mean wearing gloves and putting it in a plastic bag and slamming it on the ground to put it out of its misery. This was enough scarring to my soul that I went and put a ten dollar bill in a jar that I use for therapy.

2. The guy at the front desk at my work sounds just like Matthew McConaughey every time he answers the phone. It’s bizarre and wildly entertaining to call him to for ridiculous things like, “Did I leave my pen at your desk?” or “Are you Team Jacob or Team Edward or Team Shirtless?” You know who else does a mean impersonation of Matthew McConaughey? Matt Damon.  

3. My Christmas shopping was finished in two days. I’m online-shopper-ninja-like that way. But I did have to go to Target for some things and realized that I couldn’t pay my $300 bill because I hit my limit for debit that day so I left the store, went to the bank to get cash, and returned where I decided to park right in front of the store because, yes, sometimes I am that jerk and I had my limit with stupid people that day anyway. It’s possible and even probable that I stuck out my tongue at a few drivers when I did it, too. Yes. Totally probable. Also probable: excessive use of the eff word.

4. You know what doesn’t get old? Ross the Intern. Who is no longer Ross the Fat Intern, but Ross the Skinny Guy With His Own Show. Also? This doesn’t get old. It’s my favorite video of him. All day now I’ll be saying, “Pineapple! Pineapple! I’m not kidding!”

5. My Christmas present wrapping is the shit. No lie. So long as you don’t worry about how crooked the lines are underneath all that stuff. The more bows on a present the more I am trying to distract you from my wrapping skills. 

BONUS: There is a Christmas song on the radio that uses the words “baby momma” in it. If there were a Super Re-Tardo award I would bestow it on that idiot. CHRIST, PEOPLE. Ok, so admittedly, Joseph had a baby momma but it came after the birth of Jesus. You know why he weeps? He weeps for horrid Christmas songs that glorify the ghetto, folks.