I AM A THIRD GRADE TEACHER

Oh holy night I have a job. I am a third grade teacher at a K - 8 charter school; Renaissance Academy. This has been the craziest week of my life! I was offered the job a week ago (on Friday) and started working this Monday. I had a weekend to prepare the classroom and figure out what on earth I would be teaching. In general it has been one of the toughest things I have ever done. I pretty much balled my eyes out on the drive home my first day. Did I mention it is an hour away? Yeah so I drop Scott off at school at like 6:30 in the morning. Anyway, it is wonderful. It gets a little better each day. I really do love teaching. The staff members are awesome and everyone is so supportive and helpful. The school is really nice (it's only two years old and just finished new additions as well). It's great being a part of a charter school! They charter in the "extra" that most public schools don't have. There are teachers specifically for PE, art, music, and foreign languages. That's right- they start teaching Chinese or Spanish to the Kindergartners! So needless to say, I have been swamped and still do have tons of work ahead of me. However, I was DYING to update the blog! So, parting words; life goes on. The Lord will take care of you. Worrying is silly and a waste of time. Everything works itself out in the end.

PS:
Check out my school's website: Renaissance Academy
Pictures of the school and my classroom to come soon...This is a picture of me at our celebratory dinner at PF Changs. I LOVE CHINESE!
You can tell how scatterbrained I am with all these random side thoughts... But yesterday I had quite the adventure. I was driving home from school on the freeway and then I hear this weird flapping sound. Right about that time a ton of oncoming traffic was coming into my lane. So, I did what any sensible person would do; change lanes to the left. I sped up to do just that but then the flappity flap sound got really bad. So I quickly reversed my action, just about hit a car or two, and swerved into the shoulder. Then what to my wondering eyes should appear: burned rubber, smoke and a completely blow front tire, my dear. I had been driving 75mph on the rim. YIKES. Thankfully, I hadn't even been parked there five minutes, when a guy stopped to help me. He put on my spare in no time. (And turned out he was an auto mechanic teacher!) The crappiest part of it all was that we had to spend $450 on a new set of tire. Ugh.

A New Start

View outside our front door

Mapleton, Utah. Home sweet home. For the most part. It's been an interesting adjustment- obviously much different than Rexburg! We love being in a bigger city though, with so many more options for food and entertainment. Our apartment is a good 20 - 30 minute drive from campus and all the action, depending on the severity of the snow and time of day. But anyway, here are some moving shots and picts of the new place...

Not wanting to drive anymore after the Christmas adventure

A little scared, not knowing what's to come

Not anywhere near as bad as it was to start

BYU is VERY different from BYU - Idaho. (I would never go to school here!) The people are no where near as friendly and there are definitely some bad cases of road rage. For goodness sakes, I obviously don't know where I'm going all that well, but I had like three people honk at me in the space of two minutes. Geez, take a chill pill. Scott has a few classes that he is looking forward to, although there will definitely all be a lot of busy work. He has a couple great teachers as well. One of them was actually a producer for the film, "Together Again for the First Time," (mentioned in an earlier post.)

I have spent the week applying and interviewing for various jobs. A few receptionist positions, and a few teaching positions. Hopefully I'll find out soon if anything is going to work. Sometimes I wish I was still in school, it was just be a lot easier. Being graduated is weird, and scary and arg I just need a job!

Christmas Break

We had an amazingly crazy, yet fun Christmas break with our families. We spent time with my family in Olympia first, and because of the snow storms we were stuck inside the house. This was great because it forced me to just have some nice relaxation time. We read, played games and watched some cheesy made for TV Christmas movies. The one that topped the cake was Christmas in Wonderland on ABC family. A must see! Not even kidding. You will laugh your pants off at the random horribleness of it. Oh, and I should probably mention that Scott neglected to bring his boots, hence the garbage sacks...

Olympia

During a break in the storms we managed to get to Spokane to spend Christmas with Scott's family. We had a wonderful time here as well. We even got to stay a few extra days because there was no way to fly out when we planned to. (They are literally buried in snow.) In the end, we had to completely change our travel arrangements. We ended up taking a flight to Boise, then renting a car to Rexburg. The drive should have been 4 hours long, however, halfway there DOT decides to close the only road that will take you right into Pocatello. Super. So we had to turn around and drive all the way down into Utah, then back up again until we finally got on Highway 15. Did I mention the whole way we experienced blizzard-like conditions? Needless to say, the drive ended up being about 10 hours long. Good grief.

Spokane

Back in good ol' Rexburg, we finally started to pack up our apartment. We had only two days to do this but thankfully, with the help of a couple friends it wasn't too bad. Auf Wiedersehen Rexburg!