Weekend Recap & An Award!

I had a very busy weekend! On Friday after parent-teacher conferences were over, Shannon and I went out to dinner at Baang. We always have a great time when we go there and the food is soooooo good! We opted for this dinner instead of the huge holiday party our school throws every year once conferencing is over. It's always SO crowded and we just didn't want to deal with it this year.

On Saturday, Jeff and I had a wedding to attend that started at 11:15am! We had a very early start to get to Old Saybrook, CT which is over an hour away! The bride is pregnant, due in May, and that's why they got married right now. It was a pretty wedding and I think they did a nice job with the time they had to get this together, which was only 1.5 months. It was also really fun to see a lot of people from high school that I haven't seen in years! After a lengthy nap when we got home, Jeff and I watched "The Reader." It was OK. Kind of weird and I kind of lost interest about halfway through. Not my fav movie, but definitely not bad. Kate Winslet was great in it!

Jeff and I at our table. 

Jeff and I don't dance much (with the exception of our wedding where we danced all night long and you couldn't get us off the dance floor). This is one of the few times we danced at this wedding!

Today I lesson planned, cleaned our house, wrapped a few Christmas presents, and ordered this book for Jeff. He asked me for it as a Christmas gift the other day, and I'm taking it as a good sign that he's getting ready for us to have a child in the somewhat near future! I'm so excited he wants this and ordered the book today! I am seeing the Dr. a week from tomorrow to talk about when to go off my BCP based on when I'd like to get pregnant, and what to do to get myself ready for pregnancy. We're not trying right this minute, but hopefully sometime relatively soon! I want to be a young mom and if I had it my way, I'd be pregnant right now! :P

Finally, Jules from Chic & Pink gave me an award! Thanks Jules! :)

I have to list 10 things that make me happy and 10 bloggers that make my day!

In no particular order, here is what makes me happy:

1. Jeff

2. My family

3. My friends

4. Seeing my students finally understand something

5. Seeing my students make progress

6. Shopping

7. Cheese fries

8. Our cat Peanut

9. The holiday season

10. Anything from Coach

A total cop-out, but I'm lazy... all of the blogs I read brighten my day, otherwise I wouldn't read them, so this award is for everyone!

Only 4.5 days of work till my 2 week winter break! I'm done with work Friday at noon and don't go back till January 4th! I can't wait!

Our First Married Christmas Tree!

We put up our tree tonight and invited my friend Shannon to join us! We had a nice dinner of Chinese take out, then put on the Christmas music and decorated the tree once Jeff put it up! It was so fun!

We really like the idea of sticking to 2 colors for lights and most of the ornaments. Since we both like blue, we did blue and white lights (we actually ran out of blue lights and need to go buy some more this weekend. You also can't see the blue in these pics and I don't know why) and a mix of silver and blue ornaments along with a few we've gotten as gifts through the past couple years.

Jeff looks thrilled to be putting our tree together!

Shannon and I being silly!

Jeff decorating.

I married this man.

Us in front of the tree. I look kind of chunky here and I apologize lol.

Our tree! Now it's time to look at some of the special ornaments! I can't wait to gather more through the years! Sorry for the crappy photo quality!

"Our First Christmas Jeff and Melissa 2009." A gift from my MIL last Christmas.

Our engagement ornament! Hard to read but it has our names and July 18, 2008 which is the date we got engaged!

Peanut already parked it under the tree and has knocked off a couple ornaments!

OUCH!

First, Happy December! My birthday is 22 days away and then I am 25, a quarter of a century! I cannot believe we're in the last month of 2009, this year absolutely flew by!

I have a bit of a rant, but before that, you need some background info.

Both of my brothers go to UCONN. Warren is a senior, Kurt is a sophomore. Last night Kurt was playing flag football with a bunch of friends and he broke his ring finger. Literally. He snapped it in half. Take a look at his X-ray, which he posted on Facebook:

Isn't that horrifying? It's right at the knuckle and the Dr. said he couldn't have had a worse finger break! The poor kid has it all splinted and needs surgery once he gets home for winter break (which for him starts on the 18th). I bet he also needs physical therapy (Jeff needed it for a jammed pinkie, so I imagine one would need it for a finger that broke this badly.) He will be spending the entire break in some sort of cast or something and I feel really sorry for him! I'm grateful that it's just a finger that he broke and not an arm or leg, but I can't imagine how painful this is for him! I broke my foot many years ago and it wasn't nearly as severe as this break and it hurt like hell!

Now for my rant... Warren has a car at UCONN. He was not playing in the game or anywhere near the group that was playing, so he had no idea that Kurt broke his finger until Kurt called him from the hospital later to come pick him up. Kurt had no car and even if he did, he couldn't drive with his finger in that state so he had to take an ambulance to the hospital! My question is: WHY DIDN'T ANY OF HIS FRIENDS WHO SAW HIM SNAP HIS FINGER IN HALF OFFER TO DRIVE HIM TO THE HOSPITAL AND STAY WITH HIM!!!!???? WTF is wrong with people!? Jeff thinks that Kurt should have asked someone to drive him, but I feel that even if he didn't ask, SOMEONE should have had the decency to offer to drive him and make sure he was OK! If I saw a friend do that, even if we weren't too close, I'd offer to drive them! I feel so bad that Kurt had to sit there by himself in the emergency room! I don't get people...

Do you guys agree with me or am I just being an overprotective big sister?

Thanksgiving and Our Holiday Card!

We had a great first Thanksgiving as a married couple! We spent the weekend at Jeff's grandfather's house, which is where his mom and sister also live. I didn't get to take too many pictures, but here's a few!

Jeff being a goon.

We played a lot of Rock Band!

We color coordinated our outfits. We do this a lot!

We went out to eat a few times (I need to start running on the treadmill again and get back on track with eating starting tomorrow until Christmas), went bowling with one of Jeff's cousins who won both games (I came in last both times which is a shock to no one) and went out to a bar with some of Jeff's family. I was the DD by choice that night, but I had a lot of fun hanging out and watching everyone else act silly! We left this afternoon and sat in some terrible traffic! Now I'm lesson planning, (cannot believe I have to work tomorrow) doing laundry, and getting everything unpacked and back in order! I love visiting family, but hate all the stuff I have to do once I get home!

We also got our holiday cards made at Costco! Jeff's mom has a membership and it was much cheaper to do it there than anywhere else. Since our wedding was the biggest event for us this year, we just had to use a wedding pic for the card! I can't get it to rotate correctly, but here it is!

I plan to have all the envelopes addressed, stuffed, and ready to go by the end of the week! We've never done a holiday card together before, but now that we're married, I'd love to do a photo card every year! What is everyone else doing for holiday cards?

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everyone has a very happy Thanksgiving! I get out of work at noon (technically 12:30 because I have bus send off duty on Wednesdays) and Jeff and I are heading to Long Island to spend the weekend with Jeff's mom and her side of the family as soon as he gets out of work (hopefully he gets out early so we can beat the horrendous traffic.) We have been so blessed this year and have so much to be thankful for!

Wedding Dress Rejects

Anyone who reads my blog knows what my wedding dress looked like! It was a huge theme of this blog for a long time! I thought it would be fun to show you the other 4 dresses I tried on and call my "wedding dress rejects!" I tried on 5 dresses total, the 4th one being the one I bought. I got my dress and the bridesmaid's dresses all in one night! I knew exactly what I wanted for my girls and a really good idea of what I wanted for me! The other dresses were beautiful on the David's Bridal website and in person, but just did not work for me. It's a good thing I got the dress that I did, because when I showed Jeff all of the other dresses, he HATED them! He said all I needed was a pretty white dress, and that's what I got! I'm really glad I kept it simple and I could tell that Jeff really loved my dress, and that was really important to me!

This is the first wedding gown I ever tried on! It's an Oleg Cassini and I thought it just made me look blah and kind of chubby. It gave me no shape at all!

This was the runner up dress. I thought it looked flattering on me and I liked it, but it was a lot of dress and in the end, just wasn't me! I also didn't like how I had 3 different length veils on! Too much!

I haaaaate the train on this one! The dress itself was very sparkly and heavily beaded, which I liked, but the beading was actually itchy on the neckline and the dress was way too heavy for a summer wedding! I would have been sweating all day! This one was also obviously too small seeing as I couldn't zip it totally, and I don't think it did anything for my shape!

This gown was my favorite from online pictures. On me... it looked like a sack! It just kind of hung there and I didn't like how the corset bow was coming out of my behind! I wasn't a huge fan of the lacy patch designs on the entire dress.

Finally, here's a ridiculous picture of me in the dress I DID pick! Can you tell that I was excited?

My mom picked this one when I was visiting her one day and we were looking at dresses on the David's Bridal website. She loved the bow and thought this dress was very "me." Turns out she was right and bows became an unintentional theme of our wedding! I guess in this case mom really did know best! :)

Keep in mind that this is all my opinion. If any of you got these dresses, I'm sure they looked gorgeous on you. I just didn't like them on ME!

I invite all of you other newlywed ladies to share your "wedding dress rejects" too!

My Classroom

I thought I'd show you guys where I spend the majority of my time each week... my classroom! My school has 4 different buildings full of classrooms. I am in the newest building, which is 5 years old. Teachers can switch classrooms and/or buildings year to year, but I've been lucky enough to stay in the same building! I had this same classroom 2 years ago and I love it! I hope they keep me in this room next year too! The room is HUGE which is nice since I have big classes, but I also get huge study halls as a result and that's not so fun! One of my favorite parts of this room is the fact that it has 2 doors. It's the only room in the building that has that! I'm not big on tons of posters and cutesy stuff for middle schoolers. This is pretty common for upper school (what we call middle school) teachers where I work. 

Some of the desks, the back bulletin boards, and my desk.

The front of my room. A small bulletin board, my ActivBoard which is my favorite thing ever, and a small white board where I write the date, day, HW assignments, and the class agenda for the day. I have to change the agenda every period depending on the class!

Lots of shelves and nothing to put in them!

The counter where I keep all the HW and classwork for the day as well as my phone and ActivBoard plug-ins for my computer.

A close-up of my desk!

The counter behind my desk. I love that black tower thing I got for all my kids' folders of work! My goal this year was to be more organized with this and I definitely am so far!

My room looks so nice at the beginning of the day! Here's how it looks by the end...

I need to get my students to remember to push in their chairs!