Eight Minutes

That's how long I have to write before I have to run upstairs and wake up Ryan to help him get ready for school. He's been off for a week for the Thanksgiving Holiday (we used to get 2 days when I went to school), so he's off schedule.

We spent a lot of the weekend putting up Christmas lights and our tree. I'm the painfully sentimental one in our family, but Fran is the one who loves to decorate for Christmas. My job is to take out our Christmas dishes, which we use for a month each year as a change of pace. Maybe it gives our other dishes a rest, too...We still use the same Blue Peony dishes that we got for our wedding (15 years ago)--we've only broken 2 or 3 pieces in all that time...

I put together new vaccuum cleaner yesterday. I'm not sure why we've gone through about four of them in the past 5 years, but we have. As I was putting it together, Kaitlyn, my daughter who will be three years old in January, walks up behind me and says "I think you're missing a piece, Daddy..." She really cracks us up all the time.

Two weeks ago I went and taught a science class to Ryan's second grade class. First of all, I don't know how these teachers do this every day--Hyper 7-year-olds who seem to just blurt out whatever comes to mind randomly. That night, Ryan came home--according to him I received excellent reviews from his classmates--he had a stack of homemade Thank You cards which were a real hoot. Some of them had drawings of "me"--unflatteringly accurate as might be expected from 2nd graders. My favorite line: "Please come back anytime and do something different".

Eight minutes are up. I haven't taken time to write anything worthwhile for a while now, so thanks for sticking with me, here...