Barack Obama is a Lollipop and the Korean Dictator

We finished our Biography projects in 2nd grade. After we finished our research, I made everyone complete a timeline made from a sentence strip and also draw a portrait. We don't get enough arts in the classroom so any time I can justify adding art it I do. I will post my favorite portraits below with a brief comment. I would also like to state that I did give them guidelines like; they can't be lollipop heads, you need to fill the space, try to add a few objects in that relate to their job, they need a nose, etc.

Amelia Earhart. Actually a very good drawing if Amelia had made it to old age.
My favorite parts are the planes in the background.

She drew Marie Curie as a princess and then I told her that even though Marie Curie found Radium she was not a princess in any country. The girl was mad because she wanted to draw a pretty dress...apparently she was so mad she only gave Marie Curie three fingers. I know that Curie eventually died of exposure to radioactive substances but I didn't know she that affected by it.

This is my favorite! I love the flag in the background. Classic!

I have failed, this girl thought Rosa Parks was Asian.

Martin Luther King Jr. has ears all the better to hear you with and a kickin' mustache.

Kim Jon-Il. NO! Steve Jobs! I swear to you, a teacher came in and said,
"Why does the North Korean dictator have a iPhone and a computer?"

Barack Obama is a lollipop head. The leader of the free world my friends.

Another Steve Jobs, I kind of wish he had a turtle neck on...that would have been epic.

Don't worry Microsoft fans, we also have Bill Gates.
He is famous for computers and piles and piles of money.

Best picture ever. No comment needed.

Apparently George Washington is an orange dinosaur...I am mad that this kid still couldn't spell his name after a month of writing it. How many more times can I yell at someone for not trying their best.

When I asked why he colored him so dark he said that "He was outside a lot so he was probably very tan." Good thinking kid. I am impressed.

This kid couldn't find peach so he used yellow.
Jury is still out on why his neck is blue and his hair is green.

This kid wanted to write about the "person who invented books". Johannes Gutenberg isn't exactly an American hero but close...kind of. I did not know that the inventor of the movable type printing press also wore a poop hat.

I love that she added monkeys in the background. It doesn't matter that Jane Goodall studied apes...I appreciate her effort and execution.


We just started writing personal narratives. So far the most promising one is about a kid who played Bingo on the rez with his grandma. I am just glad not to be writing biographies!

Ms. A., An American Hero

A panoramic of where I live my life.

We just started a research unit on famous people. We are researching people and then writing biographical essays before Christmas. On the first day, we brainstormed some famous people who would be good to write about. We decided that they had to be famous for something that was unique, they couldn't be celebrities, and they had to help people in some way. We came up with a great list; Marie Curie, Michelle Obama, Ghandi, Ben Franklin, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Seuss. The Who's Who of famous people. (They were a little confused about how Barack Obama could be the president and George Washington was also the president...I guess when you're 7 there is not a big difference between the far away past and the recent past).

Then one of my little friends said, "Ms. A." and all the kids started to agree that I was indeed a famous person worth writing a biography report about. I apparently did not do a good enough job explaining exactly what the qualifications were for this report. I told them that they could not do a project on me even though I am famous at school, I am not a celebrity, and I help people learn. I was flattered....I wonder if they knew parent teacher conferences were coming up this week...hmm.

Well since the first semester is done and it is closing in on the 50th day of school next week I thought now would be a great time to post the pictures that are from the beginning of school.

There's the area that gets piled higher and deeper throughout the semester.

The classic kidney bean table, Lakeshore calendar, and pocket chart...staples of 2nd grade.

The front of the room. It looks different now...50 days later and more things going on.

The word wall is full now. I love our little library.

Some of my favorites so far this year.

The "Up"grade

As some of you may know, I used to live in the basement which I lovingly called the dungeon. I liked it down there. It was cool in the summer, warm in the winter and only occasionally flooded. When C-Dizzle moved to pursue bigger and better adventures at higher elevations I also decided I should try a higher elevation (higher by about 10 feet). I moved upstairs! However, I unlike C-Dizzle do not like the color purple and especially don't like the color lavender for a bedroom, I decided to re-paint it. Here are a few of the before and after pictures.

The Empty Lavender Room

A Pepper Tree Print and a funny little box that I found on Etsy.

A ridiculously tall bamboo and the early morning sunlight

A letterpress drawer. I'm not entirely sure what I should put in the little bottles. We will see what kind of inspiration strikes.

A headboard that I made from shelves.

A rifle cabinet from the basement and a old candy box.
A fish packing box and an art project that I made myself.

A close up of the tree art. 5x7 canvases with acrylic.

A few of my favorite trees.

I love this little box.

A Poor Decision, A Turtle, and an Almost Disaster

Sometimes when kids have hair-brained ideas like; "I want to get rid of my little brother.", "I think aliens are living in my attic", "It smells like nachos and earwax in here". I usually say something non-committal like, "You're parents have the final say" or "If that's what you think" sometimes a well placed, "We'll see..." is sufficient to get them off my back.

A girl, we will call her Candace for her high pitched voice and histrionics (Shout out to Phineas and Ferb), asked if she could bring her pet turtle into school. On Monday I said, "We'll see...". On Tuesday I said, "I don't think that is a good idea..." On Wednesday I said, "I'm pretty sure we won't have time for show and tell, you're not in kindergarten anymore..." On Thursday I said, "You will have to talk to your parents because I don't think they would want you to bring it in." Apparently her wheedling caused her parents to do what most parent would do in that situation...cave like a house of cards in a hurricane.

This morning she showed up with a baby turtle about the size of an oreo in an open cottage cheese container. His name is Cookie coincidentally enough. She brought him in and then the 10 minutes of calming and refocusing to breakfast started. I corralled the turtle onto a shelf and the children to their desks to eat the cured turkey roll-up and fruit juice. I knew it would be annoying...I didn't realize that she would ask me every 90 seconds if "Now is when I get to show the class my turtle." After about 30 minutes I was going to say something that was neither helpful or kind (the two ways we gauge our words in my class). I let her do a little blip about it and then had a Q and A session. I repeatedly warned the kids that they could look with their eyes and not with their fingers and gave an impromptu soap-box lecture about the fragility of amphibians and reptiles and how they gauge the planet's health which is why we cannot put our grimy little 7-year old fingers in the turtle water...not to mention salmonella. Only one kid got their digits in the turtle poo water.

After the cottage cheese container had been carefully taken to each row on the carpet, I took the container back and as I put it back on the shelf I noticed that it's eyes were closed and and it wasn't moving even a little bit. I tried to not go into natural overreaction mode...like I sometimes do. I decided that it probably was going to die anyway and that it wasn't a visit to my room that killed it.

After about an hour, I took another look in hopes that it had perked up/resurrected. Still no movement, still no open eyes, still dirty turtle poo water, still uneaten turtle pellet, still a dead turtle. I decided now was the time to start softening the blow of a death in the classroom...I started with something innocuous like, "So how long have you had this turtle?" then went to"Are you really attached to it?" then I threw in "Raising turtles is really hard, some don't make it out of turtlehood." I didn't want her to blame herself for its death so I added "Some turtles die for no reason at all, it doesn't mean that they wanted to die but it was just their time to go to the happy turtle pond in the sky." I'm not sure these were direct quotes but I started rambling in more and more desperate ways in hopes that she wouldn't blame me for killing her beloved pet.

When it was time to switch classes for the afternoon, I took a deep breath. Got the cottage cheese container off the shelf. Took another deep breath and prepared myself for the dreaded question that I knew was coming which would sound something like, "Hey, Ms. A, why isn't my turtle moving?"

I looked down and in a glorious moment I made eye contact with that tiny little reptile. This turtle that I had been mourning all day had been revived! It was alive! I was not the turtle kiss of death!

After a day of fretting about this stupid turtle I have found my backbone and the next time a kid asks me about bringing their pet, I will firmly say ,"No."

You Live. You Learn. You grow a pair and stand up to a 7 year old.

An Abundance of Tomatoes

So many tomatoes! About 7 pounds of them.

When I got back from my extend travels through the Midwest the garden was a mess. Most of the plants were past their prime. There will be another post about the rejuvenation of the garden. There were several tomato plants that were in the last stages of life/the first stages of death so I picked the salvageable tomatoes from them and decided to try my luck at making tomato sauce. The hardest part of this whole process was preparing the tomatoes. First you have to wash them, then blanche them, then chill them, then peel them, then dice them. All of this I did with a huge cut on my thumb so it burned like nobodies business.

The washing.

The boiling.

The chilling.

More chilling.

I didn't take any pictures during the peeling or dicing stages as my hands were covered in tomato innards and there was no photo assistant (Catherine) to help me document the event. Then the easy part started...the making of the spaghetti sauce. I mostly based my sauce off a Cooks.com recipe but added a lot of other great things so here is a lot closer to the "recipe" that I used.

4 cloves garlic
2 lg. onion, chopped
4 tbsp. oil
6 lb. tomatoes
24 oz of tomato paste
2 tbsp. sugar
6ish tsp. instant beef bouillon granules
4 tsp. oregano
2ish tsp. salt
15 fresh basil leaves chopped
1/2 tsp. pepper
2-4ish tsp of Italian seasoning
1 small jar of fire roasted peppers chopped up (throw watery stuff from the jar in there too)
lots and lots of dashes of crushed red pepper flakes

Peel and mince garlic. In large saucepan cook garlic and diced onion in hot oil until tender. Put quartered tomatoes and juice into pot. Add all other ingredients. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, simmer on low for about 2 hours. I also harvested a lot of cherry and grape tomatoes from other plants and threw them in there whole. Enjoy!

Saucy and delicious!

So chunky and wonderful.

Smelling Is My Super Power

I am a super sniffer. I like to smell things. I like to smell everything, even things that smell disgusting. I like to smell my socks when I take them off, my scalp on the 2^nd no-shower-day, any type of food before I eat it, freezer burned ice-cubes, basically everything. At camp, I am the person who they call when there is a question between poop vs. chocolate, pee vs. water, or Cheez-it vs. Cheese Nip. The joke is that my olfactory sense are compensating for my hearing.

My favorite smells change, but today I am enamored with these:

-Water coming out of a hose

-Sunscreen on pool water skin

-Coffee beans in the Magic Bullet

-Nepthala soap scented clothes

-Fire roasted peppers

-Wet blacktop

-Overripe bananas

Geocaching in Wyboring

An intimidating team of serious geocachers

While I was in Wyboring visiting the family, my mom left my dad and I on our own. Both of us possess strong impulse control, ambitious drive to accomplish things, and an overwhelming responsibility to be mature….HA just kidding. We are both big kids who like to take naps and mess around with ideas and experiment that most adults would have little to no interest in. I always enjoy hanging out with the dad but this time was more fun than usual because we had some projects to work on...important stuff like walking with grandpa, trespassing to take pictures of the remains of a little town called Bosler, drinking Sonic vanilla diet cokes, watching YouTube videos of stuff blowing up, and finding geocaches.

If you live in America and don’t know what geocaching, you need to ask St. Google about that right now. Also if you don’t know what it is then you are probably not middle-aged, middle-incomed, and middle-of-the-countried. It’s very popular with the white, 40 something, in the Midwest. In a nutshell, it’s a treasure hunt using latitude and longitude coordinates and when you find the “cache” you write your name on a list and then log it on the computer. Super fun!

I knew that my mom and dad participated in this activity because they fit the demographic and apparently it’s popular with my mom’s group of friends. So as we were sitting with Grandpa at the botanical gardens I asked my dad about his recent success. My dad was explaining exactly how it worked and pulled out his GPS (cause that’s what everyone needs to bring with them on a walk). He entered the location of the swing in the rose garden and said, “I bet there’s one around here somewhere, probably right here where we are sitting”. We finished our walk and then went back to the house to nap (walking takes a lot out of ya).

Later on, we entered the swing’s location into the geocaching website and there were several caches within a mile…there was even one that said; “Location: Here”. THERE WAS ONE RIGHT WHERE WE HAD BEEN SITTING AND TALKING ABOUT IT! So of course we had to go on a treasure hunt for this cache immediately! We wrote down the location of a few others in the area and my nephew helped decode the clues.

We went back to the botanical gardens right at the swing and looked high and low. We found a baby bunny who was cute as the day is long. We found a lot of leaves that had fallen because of the hail. We found trash. We found a lot of stares from other people walking in the garden. We found a headache from ramming my head into a metal pole when I was crawling on the wall. Eventually we found the small cache in the crack between the retaining wall and the swing structure (SPOILER). We wrote our names, “The Salamander Duo” and the date. We then congratulated ourselves on our wit, our ingenuity, and our stick-with-it-ness. Quickly we jumped in the car and headed towards the next location. For the rest of the day we roved around the greater Cheyenne area looked for caches by statues, lakes, historical markers, antique fire trucks, and thickets of thistles. We had found 4/5, but had to give up by the lake because of lack of preparedness on our part. All in all a good day.

The dad with a cache...this one took a while

Our names on the log

More messing around in Wal-Mart

The code breaker for our team. Looking like he's ready for a safari.

Geocaching makes a person hungry. Taking a Dilly Bar break with the family.