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!!!!

Look around

So I've been MIA for awhile. I think there is a fairly good reason although my fellow bloggers may not. Please peruse my blog for a new page element.

First person to find it gets a big gold star!!

When you have some time. . .

Please feel free to browse this fantastic blog I found.

www.photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com


I like stuff like this. It's neat.

Pretty Fancy, huh?

I've been playing around and trying to figure out how to add pictures on my header like all the other cool blogs I've seen.

I googled something and totally stole this image off of one my results. Is that legal?

And if it is legal how do I get it centered?

I want a cute blog like everyone else and by golly I'll get there some day! I mean it's cute now and all but I want it MUY cute!

Best Mom Moment '04, '05.

I was thinking back to all the really dumb stuff I've done as a mom and I landed on the Best Mom moment of 2004 AND 2005.


Those were the years, people, that I locked my kid in the house on accident. Yep. TWO TIMES I LOCKED HER IN THE HOUSE! I would like to take you all back with me to those harrowing moments if you don't mind. ..



Picture it. . . Sicilly. . . 1944. . . Wait. . . sorry that was Sofia from Golden Girls. Maybe I will post about my love for The Golden Girls on some other day. I love love that show!! In fact my mom was just like Rose Nylen.



But I digress. Back to time 1 of locking G in the house.



It was June of 2004. Gracie was 3 months old. We had just come home from a nice weekend in Fargo celebrating my uncle having officially entered the priesthood.



Some friends were over and had a precocious 3 year old so I turned the little lock on the door knob so he wouldn't get into the garage. Ok the dumb part of that is the lock on the door knob doesn't even stop the knob from turning! I needed to do the dead bolt!!



So our friend left. My mom called and Grace was laying on the floor in her activity gym. I went in to the garage quickly to throw out some trash and I turned around to go back in the house and I tried the knob. And for some reason it wouldn't open. Of course I'm on the phone with my mom at this point and for any of you who knew my mom later in her life she was as much or even more neurotic than I am!



So I started screaming "ohmigosh I locked Gracie in the house and I don't have a key!!!" My mom went schizo on me and was screaming. I was so panicked that I didn't know what to do. I ended up running to the neighboors house across the street. I was hysterically crying and my neighboors are an elderly couple. I rang their bell and when they answered they started freaking out too. I asked them what I should do and they gave me the fabulous advice of calling 911. Um,. .. why hadn't I thought of that???????? I still had the phone in my hand and I called 911. I then called my father in law because Dan was supposed to be over at his house. When my fil answered I said, "Mike I just locked Grace in the house." My father in law the hero dropped everything and came over.

He got there right about the same time as the 911 people. They were trying to look for an entry into the house so they wouldn't have to break any doors or anything. But Mike (FIL) gets out his handy dandy credit card, turns to the cop and says, "This is the first time I've ever done this." Then proceeds to jimmy the lock open with his credit card!! What a man of action.

Thankfully nothing happened the 20 minutes or so Grace was locked in the house. She was crying loud but nothing too bad!

So you think I would have learned my lesson, eh? No it happened again about a year and a half later. I will save that for post #2.

What are your best mom moments??