Little Round Spaghetti in a Can

I have no idea why my children, and now my grandchildren have always loved little round spaghetti in a can. Being of Italian heritage, I come from the school of thought that says that real spaghetti sauce is started by 7AM at the latest, cooked all day, and served at dinner steaming hot with homemade rolls, salad and lots of cheese. I still make my own sauce, though I don't start it 7Am. Though, come to think of it, sometimes I do. I use canned puree, though, and add spices, meat, etc., but that's only because I leave for work around 7AM.

My mother doesn't even make her own sauce any more, even though I assure her that Grandma would be rolling over in her grave if she knew.

Anyway, my grandson, Andrew, who was staying with me today, brought a can of spaghetti to me that he found in the cupboard, and when I correctly deduced that he wanted them for lunch, proceeded to finish off pretty much an entire can, sharing some with his little sister. I think they taste disgusting. I tried some, just to see if they were cool enough. Yuk!

Ready for Christmas?

No, I am not even close to being ready for Christmas. We don't have our tree up, we have no decorations out. I have made some cookies, and I have done some shopping, but I can't say I'm ready, in spite of the fact that I've been hearing Christmas music since Halloween. I did send out some cards, I actually made the ones I sent.

It's Been a While

It's been a while since I've been on. The school year has been busy, things are crazy at home (in a good way), and I just haven't had a lot of time.

Our trip down to see my two daughters was wonderful, my school kids are doing well, the construction on our backroom is progressing nicely (slowly, but nicely), and all is well with the world.

Here's a picture of all the grandkids with the three girls and me. I'm holding Andrew, Kristin is holding Cory, Adrianne is sitting next to Tyler, Kerri is holding Baylee, and Gemma is in the front.

What Are You in For?

I was in my classroom the other day at lunchtime, and there were a number of 3rd, 4th and 5th graders outside. One of them had apparently either misbehaved or neglected to turn in an assignment, because he (I assume it was a he) must have been sitting against the wall. As a friend ran by, he looked down and asked the child, "What are you in for?"

The Yogurt Incident

I took Andrew and Baylee to Walmart with me this morning to pick up a few things. My main reason for going out was more to keep the house quiet so their mom could sleep for a few hours, and it seemed like a good idea to combine that with shopping.


One of the things I had in mind to buy was yogurt, as I know Andrew is very fond of it, and we didn't have any in the house. I had found a coupon for $1.00 off two packages of rainbow flavored ( I know, rainbow isn't a flavor), so I thought that was the perfect plan. I put both packages in the bottom of the cart so he wouldn't be able to play with them (he was in the cart, his sister was in the front), and that worked well until I stopped to talk to a friend for a moment. Stopping the cart is a no-no, as it causes the natives to be restless, so I picked him up and put him on the floor. He spotted the yogurt right away, and of course he wanted some. My response was, "No.", his response was to SCREECH! Which he did, all the way to the checkout counter. When I put the packages on the counter for checkout, he grabbed one of them, dropped it (of course), and one of the containers splattered on the floor. All this time, he is, naturally, screeching, and since his sister copies pretty much everything he does, she, too, had started to cry.

Most of the other customers were looking at me sympathetically, though one or two were obviously annoyed by my little grandson's antics. It's OK, I'm alright with that. Had I been his mother, I would have been mortified, as I always was when it really did happen when Andrew's mother and his aunts behaved in that manner (as of course they did). Now, though, I know that there are worse things in the world than a child having a tantrum over something as trivial as yogurt. Life goes on, and all will be well.

I needed a new second package (after all, I had a coupon), so the kindly checkout lady asked another employee to go back and get me one. All the time we waited, Andrew continued to screech, Baylee continued to commiserate with him, and people continued to give me sympathetic looks. Finally the young lady returned with the yogurt, and we left the store. Amazingly, as soon as we got outside, the crying stopped, and when we got home, the first thing we did was open a container of yogurt and have a snack.

Fire Trucks

We went to the fire hall tonight for the Fire Safety program. In school yesterday, we had a presentation, a short movie about how to get out of your house, and a visit from some of the firemen in their gear. I told my fourth graders that if they went to their local hall and got a signature from a fireman, after explaining their escape plan, they would get an extra 100 for their science grade. Several of my students came, I introduced them to my husband, he listened to their escape plans, and then signed their sheets. I was happy to see them.

Adrianne brought Andrew and Baylee too; as expected, Andrew loved the trucks, though at first he was somewhat intimidated by them. They are, after all, VERY large. By the end of the evening though, he was sitting happily in the seat of the biggest truck, steering away.

An October Day

It was a beautiful October day, and I decided to walk to work this morning. I love fall days, Western New York days are absolutely the best! I left too late to see the Middle School students walking to school, because I waited until it was light out to leave, so it was a solitary walk for the most part. I had just downloaded the song "Alone" by Heart, so was able to listen to that as I enjoyed the crisp leaves and the slight chill in the air.

Unfortunately, it was raining when it was time to go home, so I called home for a ride.

A Trip in the Making

My youngest daughter and I are planning a trip to Maryland and New Jersey to see her sisters, their families, and some friends. Since this year we have Monday and Tuesday off for Veteran's Day, it seems like the right time to travel. Hopefully she will fix up her work schedule to get off the days she will needs, and we will motor on down with Andrew and Baylee in tow.

Baylee is Mobile

Baylee isn't walking yet, but she sure can get where she wants to get, using her own little brand of crawl. A couple of weeks ago, she started with what I call her "baby crab crawl", that is a little sideways shuffle. About a week later, she was using the "right knee, left" foot method, which is quite a speedy little mode of transport. One morning, when she woke up at 5:00 AM, I made her a bottle, laid her on the floor on a blanket, and went into the kitchen to make coffee. Moments later, I turned around, and nearly tripped over a grinning little girl, who seemed to be saying, "See, Grandma, here I am, ready to be with you."

Andrew's Cars

The other night, Andrew stayed home with grandpa, while his mom, sister and I went to do some shopping. He amused himself by playing with his cars. He took each one out of the bucket, and using a system known only to himself, carefully placed them on the TV tray.

School Kids

I like my class this year. I know I say that every year, but I really do, even the ones who may turn out to be difficult.

There are 18 of them, originally my list contained 19, but one moved away before school even started, and nobody new moved in. Well, that's not true. There was a new one, but he got put into one of the other rooms, and one of that teacher's students got moved into a different room. This means of course, that I get anybody new who moves into the district during the year, but I love having 18 students.

Another neat thing is that there are 11 girls and 7 boys, for the first time in a number of years, the ratio is reversed. While girls are chattier (and cattier), boys are louder and more active, so things are a little calmer. That is a nice switch.

Anyway, we are starting to settle in. Fourth grade is a big transition. We don't do much hand-holding or coddling, and the students expect us to. We are very big on routines and responsibility, and that is hard for them to get used to, especially after a summer of doing almost nothing academic. Each day gets a little easier, though, and before we know it, time will have marched on.

Almost Back to School

Well! It is almost time to go back to school, or for me, work! The children don't come until September 3rd, but the teachers (that would be me) need to report on September 2nd. In addition, we have to go to the high school tomorrow for Staff Development Day. It's weird going one day the week before school starts, but that is the way our district operates. We listen to wlecome back speeches and then have building level and grade level meetings.

The real back to school work however, has already been taking place, as we have been in our classrooms over the last week or two, getting things set up. Grouping the desks, placing the books on the desks, putting up bulletin boards, sorting out the copies, writing plans, thinking, thinking, thinking, about how to present the same information in an exciting and interesting way.

I love the anticipation of a new year!

Baylee Loves Horses

Baylee loved the horses at the Cattaraugus County Fair. She giggled and talked to them. Her mom took these pictures of me holding her.

More Church Stuff

At the church we go to, which is an Episcopal church, the sermon was given by a Deacon, as the pastor is on vacation. While I am very fond of the regular pastor's sermons, as well as the sermons given by the other regular Deacon, I was interested in how someone who is not really "ordained" views scripture, and am so am always curious to hear what they have to say. The sermon revolved around the Gospel of Matthew, and essentially talked about how Jesus hung around with the "riffraff" instead of the higher ups in the community. While this clearly displeased the higher ups, it was right up Jesus' alley.

My basic view of Christianity involves the idea that we should find ways to spend our time that would please God. This would translate into living our lives in a way as close to treating others the way we would like to be treated as possible.

Which brings me to why we left our church. When our new pastor came to town, after two years of interims, supply pastors and Sundays where we were on our own, some people took an instant dislike to her. Oddly, some of the people who took this instant dislike to her were members of the Pastor Nominating Committee, and thus had brought her here, so one wonders what was going on with that whole issue. Nevertheless, when these bigoted and small-minded people decided to get rid of her, they did so in a way that was most un-Chrisatianlike, holding meetings where they denigrated everything she said, questioning her ordination and beliefs, telling her and all of the rest of us that there was a way to worship and a way to pray, and basically behaving like the Sadducees, those guys who think they are right, and everyone else is wrong. There was a long and hotly contested period in the church when Presbytery came in to do their mollifying effort, but that actually only served to fully engulf the embers. My husband I talked this situation over, and decided that if our pastor was forced to leave, we too would leave the church. This was difficult, as we had spent many years there as a loving family, but it was clearly evident that the majority of the people had totally lost their minds. So, when the inevitable happened, we, too left.

We are very fond of Pastor Deb. In her, we found a kinship, a friendship, and a spiritual connection. Through her sermons, and in her personal life, we felt that what we were doing, as Christians, was the right way to live. To take scripture and to apply it to our modern lives, while not always easy, was made more evident. Her knowledge of the bible astonishes me, and her Christian spirit, while seriously tested, remained intact, in spite of all the agony she was forced to undergo. Jobless for months, she has finally found a church home in a town about 15 minutes away from the one in which we live. Interstingly enough, the church she is now at had a pastor that they were not too fond of. Their response to this situation was to suggest to him that he find another job, and that he would remain their pastor until he did so. That, I think is the Christian way to behave.

As for my husband and I, we no longer consider ourselves Presbyterians, though we have no particular affiliation just yet. We see our former church family of course, and while I ignore some of them (yes, I know Jesus wouldn't like that), many are still friendly to us in a superficial sort of way, and we back to them.

It is not an ideal religious world for us, but we have a great friend.

God, Seat Belts and Air Bags

The other day, my son-in-law, Everett, was in a car accident. He is OK, just bruised, thanks to God, seat belts, and air bags. What happened was, he was on his way to work around 5:30 AM, and a deer ran out of the field and bumped into his car. He swerved, hit a ditch, and flipped the car over at least 3 times. Our daughter, who is an emergency dispatcher in our county was on duty that morning, and because they have the scanner on to catch all emergency dispatches in the local adjoining counties, heard the call go out for an auto accident involving a rollover. Knowing that her husband took that route to work, and would be there at about that time, she called him on his cell phone. "I just wanted to make sure that wasn't you in the rollover accident", she said. "Well, it was," he said. "But I'm OK."

Adrianne, our daughter, called us around 5:45 because her dad was her relief that day. She asked him if he could come in a little early, and explained why. She was remarkably calm while exlaining that Everett was being taken to the hospital in our town, and she wanted to meet him there. Of course her dad flew into the shower and was at work 2 hours early in a remarkably short period of time - one of the perks of having your dad as your boss. The other perk of where she works is that their children stay at our house on those nights so they don't need to be awakened at the crack of dawn and driven to our house to be cared for until Mom gets out of work.

And he was OK. He was bruised, the car is most likely totalled, he was stiff and sore the rest of that day, and probably still is. He went to work the next day - using our daughter's car, and stranding her at home all day with 2 children under age two.

So, thanks first to God, for keeping an eye on Everett, on the seat belt he was wearing, and the side airbag that deployed and kept him from receiving a head injury.

A Rainy Day

We (my daughter, her two children and I) went to the toddler swim this morning at the high school pool. This a Tuesday and Thursday morning activity called "Toddler Swim" to introduce toddlers to the joys of swimming. It works, and is really a lot of fun. The children - Andrew 19 months and Baylee 6 months are getting used to the water, and even Baylee, who screamed the first two times we went, will willingly put her face in the water.

Our usual MO is to swim from 9 to 10, then come to our house for a snack. Baylee will take a short nap at this time, and then we go to the spray park to play. If it's too cool for the spray park (we live in Western New York, after all), we go to the school playground. Then we come back to the house for lunch, after which my daughter takes the babies home for afternoon naps.

Today, however, it is POURING, so not only is the spray park out of the question, the playground remains elusive as well. So... Andrew and I have been playing with blocks, Baylee is still sleeping, and Mom is lying on the couch, having fallen asleep while watching the rain. (Mom can be forgiven for this, as she is a midnight to 8 AM worker 3 nights a week).

When I sit down to type this, I watch Andrew who, despite his young age, manages to keep himself amused with the blocks and the box of toys. He takes out a doll, cradles it lovingly, smiles at it and gives it a tender kiss. This is what he experiences and sees. His parents hold him and his sister lovingly, smile at them often, kiss them and tell them they love them.

This is what we need to do to all of our children.

A Day at Home?

I was looking forward to a day spent just puttering around the house, or at least part of a day, as we have a party to go to this afternoon. However, that changed when the fire whistle went off. My husband is the head dispatcher for the Control Center in our town, and even though it was his day off, when there is a structure fire, he goes down and helps the dispatcher on duty. I am part of what is called Squad 10, which takes drinks (not those kind of drinks) to the firemen at the scene of the fire. Today's drinks of choice, since it is 80 degrees in the shade, were water and gatorade, which were slugged down in huge capacities. Fires that occur at 2:00 AM in January require coffee and hot cocoa, but there was no need for that today. The local drugstore seemed surprised when some of us came in to get ice, water, and more gatorade, but willingly let us have them with our verbal promise to settle up with them later. As a matter of fact, when I stopped in to do just that, the two wonderful ladies on duty said not to worry, that it was being taken care of. Either the company would end up donating the supplies, or they would take care of it. I thanked them, and vow to find out if the company did indeed donate the supplies, as I certainly don't want them to have to pay anything.

All is relatively well. The home was damaged, but not destroyed, there were no injuries or entrapments, the EMTs on the scene took care of the firemen who became overheated, and the scene is cleaned up. There is a lot of work to do on the house, but soon, I suspect, there will be a community benefit, because that's the kind of town we live in.

So to the kind ladies at the drugstore, the firemen from our town and 5 or 6 nearby towns, the two dispatchers at the Control Center, and the squad 10 people, thank you.

Church Thoughts

I said that I would talk about the church a little bit, so here I go. We joined our church nearly 30 years ago, and absolutely loved it. The people there were like our family, and our three daughters always knew that they could go to anyone in the church at any time of the day or night, and they would be taken care of. That all changed a couple of years ago, when some people who had been just mildly annoying became unbearably so. All of a sudden, we were being told how to worship, how to think, how to feel, and how to pray by a very fundamentalist group of people (this was not a fundamentalist church). We were informed that God only hears prayers that are said out loud, and that the only way to pray is to ramble on and on - well, they didn't say that, but that is what they did. These decrees were not by the pastor; unfortunately, this group of people decided that the pastor was no longer welcome in our church, and took great steps to remove her.

When some of these things started happening, I was reminded of the Pharisees, people who said one thing, but behaved differently. As time went on though, I equated this behavior with the Sadducees, who really thought they were better than everyone else. It makes the Pharisees appear to be simply misguided folks.

Trucks

I never thought that it was a great thing that we live on the main street of a fairly small town, but my attitude has changed. Andrew, my 19 month old grandson LOVES, LOVES trucks. He can sit for hours on our front porch and watch them go by. Each one is a source of excitement, no less than the one before, and the best thing about them is the noise. The louder the better. Some of them even beep their horns when they see him!

New Church

My husband and I left the church that we had been attending for nearly 30 years because of some rather serious events that were occcurring. It has been a long, painful process for us, as the decision was a difficult one. After nearly a year, we are starting to feel less anxious.

We have been attending another church in our community for some months now, and are starting to feel comfortable there. We move slowly, and stay back a bit, because we are very gun-shy about what happened. The church we go to is a different denomination than our old church, which is not a problem, and there are some things that we are just starting to get used to, but it is going well. The minister is a very nice person, the people are friendly without being phony, and we have been accepted.

Some day I will write about the problems we faced.

How Do I Read Other's People's Blogs?

So just how do you read what's out there? Does anybody have that answer for me? I may have learned it at some time, but clearly, my short-term memory has bought the farm. How does anybody find my posts?

I'm Back

It's been a while since I have written, I got out of the habit. In today's paper, there was an article about blogging, indicating that it's not JUST for kids, but also for grandparents - and other people as well, I presume. Made me realize that I should get back on the horse.

Another school year down, and a good one it was. I always feel that the end of the year is somewhat bittersweet; I will miss the kids, and I don't mind the routines of a school day, but I am ready for some time off.

No big plans for the summer. A short trip to NYC with a friend, and taking care of the grandchildren. Sleeping in, lunch with friends, and then in August, it will back to looking for things to use in the classroom in the fall.