Family Friday: Things I've learned this week

1. Who needs a vacuum when you have two dogs?

2. Coconut milk and carrots (and some other yummy things, like ginger and curry) make for a REALLY good (and filling) soup combo.

3. I want to take ASL again.  You can thank Switched at Birth for that.  But, no, really.  I do.  I need to find a community class for that, Spanish, and Japanese. :)

4. Putting together a teaching portfolio that is professional-looking, concise, but still shows off all the best parts of me is SO hard.  But the process is good for me.

5. One of the hardest, but most important, jobs of a teacher/leader is setting the tone or mood of the class.  Paul's learning that right now in his merge-two-classes-into-one training class, and it's a good reminder for me, too.

6. Even when you haven't spoken with someone for a REALLY long time, if they cared about you before, they care about you now.  It's really a peaceful thing to remember all the people in the world who love you, even when you haven't really thought about each other in a while.  Love doesn't die unless you let it.

7. Everyone has that number that, to them, means so-many-I-can't-even-think-about-counting-it-right-now.  Like, when my to-do list is so long I want to cry, I say "80 million," because my dear friend Clair said that all the time when we lived together and that just sort of stuck.  But, for Caida, that number is 55.  That is a BIG number to her!  She says it all the time when she's trying to guess a huge number.  And if she wants to go bigger, she just tacks something on to the end of that afterwards...like "55-17!"  Hahaha...kids are funny.  What's YOUR number?

8. Drinking tons of water means you have to go to the toilet all. the. time.  I don't know how any of you pregnant women make it!  Hahaha.

9. My hubby is a sexy pirate man.  ;)  Stay tuned for awesome pics in a few weeks for his birthday!  We're still getting the costumes together, but it's been SO fun.

10. I have 80 million ideas for projects right now that I want to do...thank you, Pinterest...and even MORE things I want to make for a future classroom just so I don't have to do all of it last minute someday.  But I should probably focus on the projects I'm already in the middle of first, right? ...

11. I have a temper.  This is something I've learned in the last two years, actually, not just this week.  But it still surprises me every time I lose it, because I never really did that before.  I found this amazing idea on Pinterest as an alternative to time-out, and thought I'd share it with all of you readers (whoever you are?)...it's for kids, but I TOTALLY need one myself.  In every color.  And a few for my future classroom.  And I'm gonna make one for any and every babysitting kit ever, too.

12. Steve Jobs was actually a pretty cool guy.  I always equate him to Bill Gates in my mind, who I don't particularly care for, but Mr. Jobs was really different than I expected him to be and he said some pretty awesomely deep things.

13. Paul and I have decided we're going to have soup and bread and watch Conference talks as our FHE from now on.  Keep the tradition of Brother I's institute class alive AND actually look forward to a low-key FHE every week?  Yes!

14. People can be awful.  They can be wonderful, of course, too.  But they can also be awful.  I hate being taken advantage of or feeling so vulnerable just because there are people out there who do mean things to people they don't even know.

15. They make Scrabble Cheezits.  Yeah.  Wrap your head around that!