Miss M

My husband earned major points in my best friend’s eyes recently. He was there when she needed a male friend’s point of view and to reassure her that she was making the right choices, AND…when my rabbit passed away, he was immediately behind the idea of me getting a new rabbit. Here he is…

After discussion with the kids, his name is going to be Poe. My last black mini rex was named Chaucer:

Seemed right to give my second one an author’s name as well. Poe just seemed to fit. Poe is going in for a vet appointment on Saturday and then he’ll be winging his way to me some time next week. This weekend I’ll be building a new cage for him and re-bunny-proofing the house. In addition to that, I’ll be doing artwork for all the wonderful people who made it possible for him to come home to me. I’m looking forward to the weekend! How about you?

Yesterday I had to put my darling Elf to sleep. She was six years old. She had uterine cancer. Please spay your rabbits if you don’t plan to breed them.

My eyes are red. My face is puffy. I break out into tears every time I pass her cage. I have a miserable headache. There is a hole in my heart. She meant so much to me.

We just watched Marley & Me as a family. It was a sweet movie. I know it will be hard on the kids when our Kirby passes on. If you haven’t seen the movie, I recommend it. I’ll have to buy the book now.

so…until I can post, let me leave you with this:

I went over to a friend’s house the other day. I was dropping off my daughter to spend the night with her daughter.

The friend insisted on showing me around her garden. She wanted me to see all of her flowers she had planted. Not many of them were blooming, yet. I likened it in my mind to showing someone with no interest in baking, many beautiful cakes. You can appreciate how lovely they are and the work that went into putting them together. You can enjoy the smell, and in a cake’s case…the taste. However, if you have no interest and no experience in baking, you just can’t get into the conversation in the same way as someone who does.

This is how I felt. I just don’t have any interest in growing things. I feel guilty about that sometimes. My grandmothers and mother are very green-thumbed people. My sister and her husband glow about their landscaping every time I visit.

But me? I just don’t have it. I’m as black-thumbed as they come. I forget them. I don’t care enough about them to keep them alive. I don’t find joy in working the earth.

Oddly enough, it made me think of my daughter. A few years ago, when I taught a group of adults better ways to teach readers and writers workshop, they gave me a plant at the end of the course with a thank you note for being such a wonderful teacher. It made me cry. When I took it home, my daughter adopted the plant. She kept it watered, faithfully. We kept a bottle of water next to the plant so that it could be watered whenever the soil was dry. We kept that plant alive for 4 years.

The other week, the plant keeled over. I showed my daughter, and told her she should probably water it.

Her answer?

She shrugged her shoulders and told me, “It’s lived long enough.”

And so…I’m sure she’s mine.

I’m so excited! My sister is coming up to my school on Monday to do a workshop with all of the third grade students. She teaches blind students and this is a workshop designed to help the students be more understanding of children with disabilities.

Students will have the opportunity to visit many different stations around the library, assisted by the teachers. They include the following (although I may have forgotten some of them):

• Braille Center…she brings a few Braille typing machines, some books in Braille and a sheet for each student to decode that is written in Braille.
• A center that partners the students up to have one lead another who is blindfolded up to the office to choose a piece of candy (by touch) out of a bowl of candy.
• A center that has bottles of different scents that the students try to identify. It’s things like lemon, vanilla, chocolate, etc.
• A center that is a listening station, where all of the students have to identify different sounds just by listening. These are sounds such as a telephone, water running, someone walking, etc.
• A center that has verbal instructions of patterns and things to draw. One student describes how to draw the pattern. Everyone else tries to draw it without looking at the picture.
• A center where you are blindfolded and trying to put together puzzles (the wooden ones that you fit a shape into a hole) and play some tactile board games.
• The last one that I remember was a center that had a bag with different shapes in it. You drew 3 cards that had shapes on them, and you tried to reach in the bag and pull out the correct shape without looking at it to match the shapes on your cards.

My students had a great time with it last year! I can’t wait to see it in action, again!