He has a tooth!

Today is November 10, which means Baby Ethan is now eight months old! Wow, time goes by quickly. A couple days ago I noticed that if you look in his mouth, you could see some little white teeth on bottom (still inside the gums). Then today I reached in and there is a tiny tooth poking through! This explains all his fussiness lately, and makes me feel bad. He kept waking up from naps early and screaming, and I didn't know what his problem was. I was frustrated, so I even let him cry himself back to sleep this afternoon (he only cried a few minutes). But still! The poor guy was in real pain, and I just let him cry. He's over it by now, if you can't tell from his picture below:

I will post tooth pictures once the tooth gets big enough to catch on camera.

The video below I took last week. He had been laughing even harder before the camera came out (of course).

If you are wondering how my teaching is going...it's a roller coaster. Planning lessons and correcting homework, quizzes and tests is like doing laundry. It is NEVER DONE!! And as for my students, they have good days and bad days. Sometimes they drive me up the wall and I can't wait for that bell to ring. But other times we have so much fun that the bell rings with out me even realizing that class is nearly over. I recently went to a Foreign Language conference, and got tons of ideas, so right now we are on the fun side again. Hooray!

I guess a good way to measure how well things are going would be to not ask me (since I'm too negative about myself), but rather ask others. For example, my students often tell me French is their favorite class (yay!), my administrators often tell me what an excellent job I do (yay!) and my mentor usually has only good things to say (yay!). Plus, they have put me on as Jing's mentor (the Chinese teacher who I share a room with), so that says something, right? A first year teacher mentoring another teacher? I was flattered.

Ha ha, do you like how I tricked you into reading about my teaching with pictures of my baby?

Yes, I have my moments!

pea in a pod

We had a fun fun Halloween season, and are sad it is over! We went to a corn maze/pumpkin patch with some friends and had a blast. Cassidy and Ethan got to ride the cow train. Cassidy's friend Emma was such a big girl and held Baby Ethan on the train.

They had a huge "sand box" filled with corn! Brilliant idea; Cassidy loved it! I thought about putting one in my back yard, but it smelled kind of funny. Plus, where do you find that much corn?

We all had fun making our pumpkins. I am anti-guck so I painted mine and so did Cass. Joel's pumpkin got a little hungry and ate Baby Ethan's pumpkin.

Cassidy was a cheerleader for Halloween and I thought she was SO cute! But she didn't think that was good enough. She insisted that she was a "cheerleader princess."

Baby Ethan was a pea in a pod!

After trick-or-treating to our neighborhood for a while, we went to a fun Halloween carnival by my sister's house.Showing off her cheerleader skills!"Forget trick-or-treating!

This is WAAAAY better!"

This has nothing to do with Halloween, but I thought baby Ethan looked so adorable in his little suit that I had to post it!

Happy day-after-Halloween, everybody!