SInce I last posted . . .

Here are new things going on here . . .

. . . the Christmas tree is down! We're mowing right through those goals! Now, 20 pounds off by next weekend! LOL! We took it down Sunday night, mainly because we had our pastor over for dinner last night. Sometimes I think company is my biggest motivator. We have to have people over for me to get anything done.

. . . we have a new treadmill! The tread part of our last one had been slowly starting to fray, and in October it finally tore. That made it easy not to exercise, LOL. We do have a recumbent bike, so I was not without exercise options, but . . . somehow I was a lot less consistent. No more excuses, however--we have the new one all set up, courtesy of Bob! It is funny--it is still near the bottom of the line, but it is so much nicer than our old one! My most favorite feature is the built-in fan. Ahhh. I'm really liking it.

. . . Grace has been sick! I think she actually WAS sick last Wednesday night--she vomited twice and was running a fever. She has taken a long time to really get all the way better, though, and she still keeps throwing up at weird times. She has been throwing up once at night, somewhere between 1:30 and 6:30. There's no rhyme or reason to this, and she's fine the rest of the day, even after I've started her back eating solid food (she wasn't interested at all in it Friday or even much on Saturday). It's a mystery . . .

. . . I'm done teaching reptiles! This week, one of the boys, Eric, brought in his pet corn snake. That was actually really interesting. We all got to touch and hold the snake. "Spot" is about 3 ft. long, and Eric's had him for 3 years. He keeps him in an aquarium and feeds him frozen mice once a week that he heats up in the microwave. Yum! Spot was really kind of cute though, I must say. Then we talked about different tricks various reptiles have for defense and camoflage, and finally we watched a video that pretty much summarized what we've talked about these last 2 weeks. I remember watching videos in class, however, so I made up a sheet of multiple choice questions for them to hear the answers to as they were watching. That helped keep their attention. This week, it was the 4th graders that were more easily distracted, but that was mainly because everyone wanted to share some story of a reptile contact they, or someone close (or even not so close) to them had experienced at some point. I guess everyone has had some memorable reptile experience. I trotted out my old thriller, where my mom threw rocks at a habu (a venomous Asian snake) from our back porch in Okinawa until she had killed it. They were all very impressed.

Well, that's all that's new around here! How about for you?