Hooray for standardized tests!

(If you thought that was a serious headline, you're wrong.)

We're done with WASL. Thank god. Although, honestly, I've never seen kids work so hard. I'm starting to think I might actually be decent at this teaching thing, you know. Even if those kids failed miserably, it wasn't for lack of trying, because holy crap, did they ever try. I had kids who worked so hard checking and rechecking their work that it took them two hours to do the reading tests. And before this year I had never had kids voluntarily use manipulatives during the math test - I offered, they were there, but they chose not to use them. EVERY SINGLE KID asked to use them this time.

And we're done.

I swear that was the longest 6 days of my life.

On another note, Emma has officially started talking. She's making attempts at a ton of words and sounds now. She says bye and waves when someone walks away, so not only is she saying it, she's saying it in context. She's working hard at making at least the vowel sounds in a lot of words. She's also being extremely annoying when we're eating. If we don't immediately give her food when we're eating, or she's done eating what she's been given, she lets out this high-pitched "Ah-AH!" that severely limits our chances of ever making friends with other people in the room. She only does it around food - otherwise she's a dream baby. We're working on not acknowledging the noisemaking - hopefully she'll stop before we've alienated ourselves from everyone. :-)

I can garden! Well, not really, but I can dig crap up and transplant stuff. I bought two really pretty hydrangea bushes for the front bed, and I managed to dig up my two heather bushes and move them around to the backyard bed without killing them. I've been working really hard on the beds this week. I dug up almost everything in the backyard bed, not realizing that the alyssum plants that I thought were dead really weren't. So I bought more alyssum. In the back bed we have two lily bushes, two heather bushes now, and a border of alyssum all around. Plus this beautiful little tree that popped up two inches from the foundation of our house, which receives all the warmth from the dryer vent right above it. It was so pretty that I didn't have the heart to move it, and the fact that it isn't dead yet says a lot for the protection of that dryer vent. I don't know what the tree is, but it will probably become a permanent fixture in our yard once I figure out where to move it.

The front beds have been an experiment from the beginning. When we got here they had a ton of mossy groundcover, a bunch of hostas, some bulbs and a rhody and azalea bush. Since then I've ripped out a bunch of weeds and moss, a couple of hostas and a hydrangea (because we had to get at the plumbing, otherwise I never would have gotten rid of hydrangeas). We planted two japonicas, a Japanese maple, 8 lithodora groundcover, and 5 hydrangeas. We now have two Japanese maples in our front yard - one is more bushy and looks like a weeping willow in the bed next to the rhody, and the other is more tree-like and is our centerpiece at the front of our yard. I had Scott put a ring of cement stones around it and planted alyssum there the other day.

We hired Trugreen to come spray our lawn this week. I got tired of buying fertilizer and mosskill and such and waiting waiting waiting to actually apply it, because every time I wanted to, Scott would have some reason why we couldn't. We just seeded, it just rained, I need to mow, we need to seed first, blah blah blah, I finally took the reins from Scott and called in the cavalry. Besides, I'm sick of pulling up dandelions in the backyard, and I can guarantee that Scott never does that. He mows and weedwhacks. I weed and plant. We need someone else to kill the weeds, especially with my back the state it's in.

So that's about it. I'm going to go edge the lawn today - or at least get it started before people yell at me. I feel so good these days that I forget that I've got two disks that could pop if I overdo it. On a good note, though - I've lost 22 pounds. I haven't talked much about my weightloss here because it's kind of a sensitive issue with me (always has been) but I think I'm getting to a point where I can talk about it more comfortably. So watch for a weightloss journal post coming soon.

Have a great weekend!