Going Home!!

Today we finished up 2nd Partial exams and at the end of the day I packed up my classroom, shut off the lights, locked the door, and left the school for the last time in 2010. I am glad Christmas break is here because trust me, teachers need it more than the students do! Tomorrow I will be on a plane headed to the great United States of America and tomorrow night I will be enjoying the company of my two wonderful sisters and my adorable niece and nephew. To say I am excited to go see my family is an understatement. I cannot put into words how ecstatic I am! When I decided to sign the contract to come teach in Honduras, I thought I would be sacrificing the quality of life I had grown accustomed to in the states - I didn't realize that the only real thing I was sacrificing was the time I got to spend with family and friends. It will be great to have 2 weeks to be back with them again, catching up on all I have missed out on and de-stressing and relaxing from half a school year of teaching some of the most rambunctious kids I have ever met.

For some of you, I can say, "See you in a few days!" For the rest of you that live too far away for me to visit while I am home, I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and get a chance to be with friends and family this Christmas.

Can't wait to join you all in the U.S. tomorrow!!

"While you were out"....

I started out the week with a terrible cold, complete with fever and all, which I thought was pretty bad until I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I had food poisoning on top of that. Not fun. I was forced to skip school on Tuesday, go see the doctor, and then spent the rest of the day on the couch sleeping. Despite my lack of energy, I returned to school on Wednesday to teach a full day of classes.

As I walked into my classroom, the room was a complete disaster from my 101 students who come through my room in the course of a day and I quickly began tidying things up as I made my way to my desk. My desk was covered in Christmas decorations that were to be used for the annual Christmas door decorating competition and right in the center of all of this I saw an interesting decoration that I hadn't seen before so I assumed one of my students brought it in while I was out sick.

It wasn't until I was a foot away from my desk that I realized the giant "decoration" in the middle of the chaos was in fact not a Christmas ornament, but rather a 4 foot python, coiled up on my desk. I panicked. It took a brief second before I realized the snake was dead and there was a note next to the snake that said, "I win. Merry Christmas." in bright red letters. I immediately knew I had my friend Matt Goasdone to thank for this frightful friend I had awaiting me upon my return to school. It was an incredibly fantastic prank!

I cannot claim to be innocent in this because in all honesty, I was the one to start the prank war. I couldn't help it. On my way out of school one day, I found a dead frog that I picked up and put in Mr. Goasdone's coffee pot. This school year I have intermittently been placing dead geckos in his desk. The snake was the payback for all of this.

He was right when he wrote a note saying he wins, because honestly, how could I possibly top a python?