That is what I said, she at church getting married! Sheesh.

A couple of weeks ago my very good friend Kristin and her bf got engaged! During fireworks!! How cool is that??

Anywho, she asked me to be her maid of honor and she asked Gracie to be her flower girl. How cool is that?? I'm excited to be a part of the wedding becuase it's truly cool to see Kristin's relationship grow with Kyle. And now they are getting married. Soon they will be having children too! I love it and am so excited for her. Grace is thrilled to be her flower girl. She can't wait to wear the pretty dress and has been an absolute angel to Kristin. Not that she is every naughty to Kristin but she's crawling up in her lap and gazing at her with puppy dog eyes. Kristin helped take care of Grace right after she was born so the fact that Grace is also going to be in the wedding is meaningful for me too!

It's going to be a classy wedding too. Her colors are ivory and black and they look muy beautiful. It should be a fun ceremony, reception, and revelry had by all.

I would love to hear from my readers what parts you have played in weddings. Bride and groom count too!

Duluth

We are off to Duluth this weekend for a little anniversary trip! I've never been to Duluth and I've lived in Minnesota since I was 15. Apparently if you have lived in Minnesota and you haven't gone to Duluth that is a crime. You can't imagine all the looks of horror I got when I would tell people that I've never been to Duluth. I'm a bad Minnesotan.



Ooh. Look at the rainbow!!

Bowling

Bowling update:

Today Grace bowled a 75! HOLY CARP! ( I really meant carp not crap. I like to say carp). She bowls better than me. Of course she does have the gutter rails up. I don't get THAT!

And the Oscar for best actress goes to. . .

This past week I signed Grace up for a theater traning class. It was super cool and she learned a lot about the stage. I have dabbled in community theater three times and I wanted to pass on the love of the stage to Grace.

It was a week long class based around the theme of Enchanted Forest. They learned all about stage right/left, sets, costumes, characters, lines, bowing (the cutest!) and various other things. They learned to warm up their imagination, voice and body. Apparently my child has little imagination so I need to work on that for the rest of the summer.

There were three scenes in their share-formance on Friday. Grace was in scene 3. She was a rose and her line was , "I can't swim!" She got a little shy when it was her scene but she did fine. There was some little starlets in the class too. They were hilarious because they were so animated.

I am so glad that I signed her up for this! She really liked it and was excited to go back every morning. It was pulling teeth to get her to stay in dance so this was a nice refreshing change!


Here are some stills of her live performance. She will be signing autographs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Your people can get in touch with her people to do lunch.


Here she is waiting for her cue to go on.

















Still Waiting!!!!!










Her big debut! The teacher is turning her around to remind her to speak to the audience.












She would like to thank the academy . . .

My Birthday

I have now officially turned 33. Susan and Kristin, pipe down with the age comments!!!!!!!

Here are some pics from my birthday. We went to Timberlodge Steakhouse. The food was great but the service was super crappy. After the dinner my dad came over to our house to eat ice cream cake. Then we lit off fireworks in the cul-de-sac. Not the illegal kind, mind you!

All in all it was nice. But the BEST part? The best part was opening Gracie's presents.

She got me a candle, a bunch of stickers (she's already used them all) and a HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL REVERSIBLE PILLOW CASE!!!!!!!!!! What more can a girl ask for? Oh and the pillow case is on her pillow on HER bed!!









Here I am eating a Paul Bunyon onion. Yummy!

Bowling

This summer I signed Gracie up for bowling every Wednesday morning. She is bowling with her old day care lady and her two children. The average age of all the children is probably about 5. Seriously it is the most fun thing in the world!

Seriously, growing up we got yelled at if we threw the ball to hard onto the lane. These kids bowling slam that puppy down and the employees don't even bat an eyelash. I'm thinking that those lanes are much tougher than my parents thought they were!

Often times the balls get stuck about halfway down the lane and the employees are out in the lanes retrieving all the balls.

Here are some pictures of the bowling. BTW: last week Grace got a 49. This week she got a 47.

Donny Osmond

I love Donny Osmond. I have loved him since April of 1995 when I first saw Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I love him because he is hot. I love him since he is a good looking guy and I love him because he is dedicated to his family and faith. Sigh.

I was just googling Donny again and I noticed that his birthdate is the same as my little bundle of loves due date. Keep your fingers crossed people. I could have a serious connection with Donny in about 6 months!!!!! A girl can dream can't she?

Luv Donny. A lot.

Synonyms for being pregnant

I challenge you, my loyal reader(s?) to come up with as many names as you can for being pregnant. I have a few up my sleeve but I'm wondering if the general public can come up with some more.

Here is the beginning of my list:

Preggo
PG
With Child
Knocked up (SO classy)
Bun in the oven
Pregnable
Producer
Went forth and multiplied


OK. . . so now I need to pay attention to my daughter and spend some time with her before nightly. Please feel free to add to the list!

I love my job!

I was just sitting back recently thinking about how much I love my job. For those of you who don't know this, I am a second grade teacher in an inner city school in St. Paul, Minnesota.

My classroom is made up of 75% ELL kids and 25% kids of color. Most years I am the only whitey! This year I had the privilige of being the Language Academy (LA) classroom. This means that I have the students who are newcomers to America clustered in my room.

These kids are expecially why I like my job. There are 5 (there were 4 but one of them moved to Cali) newcomers in my classroom. Two of them are from Myanmar (Burma) and speak KaRen. One is from Mexico, one is from China (she just got here in March), and my brand new new-comer is from Kenya (she's Somalian). They are especially exciting to work with because they pick up things so quickly.

Don't get me wrong. It's harder than heck to teach these kids. You have to start with the ABC's and the sounds the letters make. Sounds easy but then remember you have 20 other kids who are reading around grade level and need to be taught too. But it is a fun challenge and I love it.

I want to talk about my new girl from China. It took her some time to settle down when she got here. She was always over excited and thrusted her hands in people's faces requently. She found out I was scared of snakes and thought it would be funny to shove a picture book of snakes into my face DAILY!!! Not so much.

Her hand shoving was annoying and she actually scared me because I thought she might accidentally hit me. In fact (as horribly un-PC and wrong culture as this sounds) I nicknamed her The Grudge because she was so threatening. (I believe without a little personal humor teaching would kill a regular person so I take it upon myself to keep really improper things in my head to laugh at - - or just post them on my blog for the world to see!) It took about three weeks but I finally was able to model for her what we do in the classroom when we are excited and it ain't shoving our hands in people's faces!

So now we are at a nice happy place. She's picking up English, reading at a level 4 and able to speak in basic sentences. She's very bright so she had that going for her.

Funny thing about her though. . . she looks at EVERY single object in my classroom and if it's made in China will shout out, "Made in China!". This is funny and hard not to laugh at in the middle of teaching. But she is just so excited.

Oh and do you know HOW MANY things are made in China? I mean do you REALLY know how many things are made in China? Apparently everything in my classroom is made in China because she yells it out 5 different times a day!

Gotta love my job. Kids rock.

Ding Ding Ding. .. we have a winner!

As you can all see I am preggo. Susan got to my blog first and so gets the big fat gold star!

Congrats Susan!

We had an ultrasound today. The baby was a busy little girl/boy. I was happy because every time I go to an ultrasound it reminds me of our first baby and how we found out we lost him/her by having an ultrasound and seeing an unmoving baby. Shudder. That still makes me sad!

So there you have it. Now we are adding to our nice little family. Grace is thrilled and she swears it's a girl. Won't she be surprised if it's not. I really hope this time we can find out the gender. Our dearest Gracie wouldn't let us see her you know what to determine if it was a girl or a boy. Little stubborn cuss!!!

Thanks for all the congrats and support. It's not as overwhelming this time but I still am scared of losing it. Why oh why can't I just celebrate being pregnant without all the drama? Oh yeah, because I'm Lori Gerten!!!!