And here it is...

I promised everyone that I would start a blog so I could keep people up-to-date on my new journey! I arrived last Wednesday exhausted from a long trip--it is not easy to make a 7 hour drive all by yourself in one day! It was quite a day, and I was happy it was behind me. I was welcomed into my uncle's house with arms wide open and excited to see me!! We went out to dinner at Red Robin and enjoyed a time of laughter together-I've always admired this family of their joy through the ups and downs. I settled in very quickly--it is so nice to be around family who are so laid back and noncritical! Not that I don't love my family, but it's been quite awhile since I've had positive feedback! My aunt helped me get settled in by going to different places with her and get set up in the house. I've got the clothes in my drawers, hung up, my own drawer in the bathroom and things finally organized in the room (well mostly). Yesterday was my first day of work...and what an amazing first day it was! It was mostly meetings (well a singular long meeting) of introduction to each other, policy and figuring things for the year. Then I went down to our main classroom with the teacher, Susan, to get familiarize with it and find out where things belong. We also did name tags for the kids in different areas. I came up with a great idea for other name tags--I typed out the children's names, and under it I used clip art to put the alphabet in Sign Language. We thought this would be fun for the children to use as they learn to write their name, they can learn how to finger spell their name as well! I am so excited! One of our little girls came by and we met her--she and her family just moved from Ohio and she wanted to show her grandparents who were visiting our classroom. There was nothing up on the wall, so it looked a little bleak. But she is an adorable little girl and was pretty excited to meet us. Today we took down old paper from the bulletin board and put new up and put the boarder back up. Well I did it, but I am the assistant so that is where my job starts. I got a tour of the building again, but it was a quick one as one had a home visit to get to. After that was done I finished the boarder, and Susan and I headed upstairs and got some supplies for our classroom, socialized a little bit and headed back downstairs. After opening up one of the things we got, we realized that something wasn't right with something we had, so we headed back upstairs to talk to Keri and we were able to get a class list. Sadly, when we were there one of our kids moms stopped by and dropped him from our program. I'm sad because we are now down to 8, but we have 4 boys and 4 girls, so it is pretty even. We had a little girl that came by yesterday come by again with her mom and aunt (who is also visiting), she wanted to show her aunt the class. Today it was a mess because we were moving furniture around and getting things rearranged, but we were able to show her a few more things and showed her some of her name tags and told her a few things that we were going to do. She was really excited to visit again. I had an interview today and it went pretty well. It was for an after school program at a Montessori school...during the school days itself the kids are so quiet...they sat and did their work like nothing I've ever seen before! The after school program is much more relaxed, it is more about play time than school time. The gal had 10 people to interview, and there were a lot of replies to the posting on craigslist. So I am hoping to hear back by the middle of next week--it would awesome to have either a 3 day or 5 day second job paying $11.25 an hour. I tried to go to the bank and deposit my money since I thought I could open the account with mail that had been typed. But it has to be in the form of a bill or something like that, so I dunno what I am going to do. This was a long introduction to the blog, so I'll end it now. Thank you to everyone for their wonderful prayers and happy thoughts for this new chapter in my life. Hopefully I will be able to keep this up-to-date very often. ~Stacey~