A long overdue update

Hi all. I have taken a brief Blogger hiatus, as student teaching and my last classes before graduating have kept me extremely busy.

I am student teaching now at Brier Creek Elementary in Raleigh. I am working with second graders, which is great because I have spent the last two years working with second and third graders. The children are wonderful, and the staff is wonderful as well. There is a lot of talent under that roof and I'm blessed to get to learn from some wonderful teachers there. I start teaching math today- at this point, I've only been observing. It's so hard to believe in only 7 weeks my master's degree will be completed, and I'll have no more classes to attend, no more homework, and I'll actually have some free time for a change.
That being said, I know I want to get my doctorate at some point, but I need a break first. I'm going to work a while before going back to get it.

I am learning there are many plusses to not being in class all the time. I love to cook, and I now get to do it almost every night. This, after a year and a half of sandwiches and convenience foods because I had to hurry to class. We've also started going on a monthly "date night."

Friday night, we headed up to Greensboro for a date night. We ate at Phoenix Asian Cuisine on New Garden Road, which is one of our favorite places to eat. We then followed that up with dessert at Krispy Kreme. We had a great time together, and I'm really thinking we're going to enjoy this new tradition of ours.

Saturday morning, we went to a little cafe here in town owned by Michael's friend, where we ate a wonderful breakfast. We then went to the Farmer's Market here in our town. This is something else we have started doing. We love fresh vegetables but have no place to plant a garden and veggies are so expensive at the store. We've started going to the farmer's market and picking up a few items to help support our local farms and to save some money. For just $20 this week, I bought cucumbers, four ears of corn, two squash, a pound of green beans, strawberry jam and a cantaloupe.

Saturday evening, my family came into town and we had a great time visiting with them. On Sunday, we started our week off right with two great sermons at our church.

Weekends like these- with plenty of quality time with my husband and family, make a long, tough week completely worth it.