The Busy Life of a Single Mom

We’ve reached the point on Dancing with the Stars where I’m sad to see each contest go - where I hold my breath and close my eyes during that final announcement. Last night Mario and Karina Smirnoff were eliminated, and I hated it. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to go. I didn’t want ANYONE to go actually, but I had decided that I was more ready for Marissa to go than anyone else. While I haven’t been a big Mario fan overall, I was really impressed with his dances Monday night. I think he had accomplished what I think is the goal of the show - to take a rough, no dancing celebrity and turn them into a polished ballroom dancer. Mario has gotten better each week, and I really thought he had found his “inner dancer” Monday night.

So who’s left? Christian De la Fuente, Jason Taylor, Kristi Yamaguchi, and Marissa Jaret Winokur.  I can’t wait for next week. This is a great set of dancers and the remainder of the season should be an outstanding show. 

I have been contemplating a short summer vacation for June or July with the family and another with my best friend.  For the vacation with my best friend, we’ve decided to just start watching airfare and when a low cost carrier runs a great deal, we’ll buy the tickets up quickly and then look for the hotel. However, this puts us in a situation of how will we get around once we get there? So now we’re thinking maybe we need to rent a car. After all even if we can get a shuttle from an airport to a hotel, we will want to do a little sightseeing wherever we end up. 

I’ve never rented a car so I’m now trying to do some research about car rentals. Advantage Rent A Car is one website I’ve checked out.  It seems to have lots of choices and some great prices. If you are looking for some specials, they have an entire page dedicated to their current specials here. I noticed several models of cars that I’ve wanted to drive and see if I would want to own. I’m thinking that renting it for a couple days woudl be a great way to test drive them.

I’m still on the lookout for car rental companies and researching what I need to know to make smart decisions, but Advantage Rent A Car is one that I’ve bookmarked, and I would encourage you to check them out too.

Over the last few weeks life has been busy and I’ve neglected to write some of my weekly updates on Dancing with the Stars. I’ve kept small notes and drafts, but not put any of these posts together into something I thought was good enough to publish.  So today I’ve pulled out those drafts, and I present to you some brief Dancing with the Stars highlights:

TV Guide’s Sexiest Stars - Julianne Hough, one of the professionals on Dancing with the Stars, has been named as one of TV Guide’s Sexiest Stars. And when interviewed, she comments that she loves sweets. Obviously with all the exercise from dancing, she’s able to burn all of those calories away.

And Julianne is not the only Hough making the news. Dancing with the Stars Romance? Shannon Elizabeth and Derek Hough (Julianne’s brother) are still making headlines about a possible romance between the two. According to E! Online on April 28, the two have been spotted together in Las Vegas and were spotted together in a Los Angeles mall together recently. According to the National Ledger, the couple have made their relationship more open since they were voted off Dancing with the Stars.

Received an order today and thought that I should share one of my favorite shopping vendors when it comes to custom printed items - VistaPrint. I’ve made countless orders from them, and I am satisfied after every order. They offer a wide variety of products from your basic business cards and stationary to promotional items like magnets, tshirts, and hats. I have used the tshirts and hats for gifts. I’ve used the postcards for Christmas cards and birthday party invitations. Becka has her own business cards with her contact info and myspace address on them that she loves. I have a professional set and a personal set that I carry around too.  My latest purchase was a calendar that I was able to customize with our family pictures on each month - and the best part was that hte first one I ordered was free. Yes, you heard me right. Even though VistaPrint offers great prices on their products, if you watch their website regularly, they are almost always running some of their products for free (you pay shipping and handling). This gives you the chance to try out things. This is what I did on the calendar. I had a great offer for a free desktop calendar.  I was so impressed with the quality and fast shipping that I have now ordered  a set to give to the grandparents in our lives as “thinking of you” gifts this month.  VistaPrint has great customer service too. One time several years ago, they did mess up one of my orders, and I had replacement cards super fast.  Not very creative? The idea of designing your own product scare you? No worries because while VistaPrint will let you be a custom designer and design your products from scratch, they also offer tons of templates for all of their products to get you started. So if you’ve never used VistaPrint, I recommend you check them out today.

Yea!  My last student has finished their last test!  Thank goodness. I’m so tired of watching kids take tests, and I’m so glad that it’s over.  This has been a very long week. Now I’m actually getting to interact with my kids and I’ve lucked up and ended up with a small group of good girls.  They are happy just to be able to visit after 4 straight days of testing, and I’m happy to babysit them and catch up on some of my online life.  :)  So hello friends. What are your weekend plans?

I’m going to my sister’s tomorrow for my niece’s 4th birthday party. Cameron is really excited to go see her cousin, and I’m happy to just have some downtime. Now that this week is over, I’ve got to figure out what to do for my mothers and grandmother’s for Mother’s Day. Any suggestions.

I tend to not be a big fan of sports until I know someone involved. I was never a real big football fan until I joined the marching band in high school. After watching a few games and cheering for my peers, I began to watch college and professional football too. A few years ago, I had not really paid softball much attention, but then when Cameron was 5, she wanted to play so I now watch for softball games when flipping through the channel line up on the TV.  This year Cameron started playing basketball, and yes, I found myself stopping and watching some college basketball games this season.  The school I started at this year also has tennis (the previous one didn’t) so I’ve been watching the students practice. They are very enthusiastic and enjoy it so I’ve been trying to follow their progress this year. So now I am beginning to look into tennis on television and see if I can also enjoy watching a few matches here and there on the television.

I think that to start with I’d rather watch the championship games - the best of the best.  While it would be ok to watch it on television, I’d love to land a set of Wimbledon debenture tickets. How awesome would it be to go to London and watch the champions match up against each other?  I’ve never been overseas so this makes it even more appealing. I’ve been looking at traveling somewhere outside of this country, and I’ve even looked into London. In researching tickets for Wimbledon, I found that they even have a queue for their fans and you can possibly receive free tickets.  Ever been to London? or Wimbledon?  Please share your experiences.

Ugh!  I hate days like today. They are so boring - and so NOT why I went into education. This week across the state of Texas we are doing standardized testing (the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, otherwise known as the TAKS) from the 3rd grade through the 11th grade. At the high school level, our tests started yesterday, and we have tests through Friday. Today I adminstered the 11th grade Math TAKS test.  It was sooo boring. There’s no interaction with our students because they are taking this important test (their graduation depends on this test), and we can do nothing else interesting (like read or blog) as we have to be “actively monitoring” our students. 

I won’t get on my TAKS soapbox and discuss the test itself, but just the long days of giving the tests. We started this test at 8 am this morning, and my last student did not finish until almost 3. For this entire time, I basically had to just stare at the nine poor teenagers in my room as I have to “actively monitor” and be sure they do not cheat. This makes for a very long day, and I think more exhaustive. I find it much more tiring to do this than to teach all day long. So I leave you today with just a couple brief blogs (and want you to know that this will probably be the norm for this week as I will be testing sophomores in Science and Social Studies for the next two days), but next week life goes back to normal, and I will continue with the Disney and Dancing with the Stars updates as well as some recipes we enjoy and such.

I found this quiz online and thought, “Hmm..I have been single for a long time now. Am I afraid of commitment?” so I clicked to see what this fun quiz had to say. It was a twenty question quiz that didn’t take but just a moment to take.  Are you ready for the results?

Well according to Bored Quiz, this was my result:
 
 

 
I’m not too sure what that means?!  But the quiz itself was kind of fun distraction from the many things I should be doing, and I like that you get the cute picture to post on your blog or social network (like myspace) page to show your results. In fact it was fun enough that I went back and took another. The second one I took was to determine how lucky I was. These questions were even more interesting than the previous quiz if you can believe it. It covered everything from school to gambling to my love life (oh my - we’re back to that again!). It even asked about my experiences with catching flights (wow! that may be one aspect where I have had pretty good luck). Apparently according to Bored Quiz, I am in fact much more lucky than I thought (which doesn’t help me figure out why I’m still single..hmm). Here’s my results from the “How Lucky Are You?” quiz. I’m thinking it’s time I need to go buy a lottery ticket.

Yes, I did have a good bit of fun playing around on this quiz site. I have seen people post the results of their quizzes in forum signatures and on their MySpace of Facebook pages, but never knew where they found them.  Now I have a clue. Bored Quiz is one place where you can take fun quizzes and post the results on your websites. It’s cute, and I’ll be checking back for more quizzes.
 

Do you ever just need to blow off steam? It doesn’t make you a bad mom to sometimes need to vent and express feelings that don’t sound very “Mommy-like.”  It happens. I have times when I just need to complain, even if they aren’t valid complaints and not how I really feel.  I feel confident that all mom’s have these moments, and now I have found a place we can all express these frustrations anonymously.  You don’t give your name or any identifying information - you simply scream and shout your feelings for others to read but without fear of judgement.  Need a place to vent? Need a place to just let it all out? Or maybe you need to read others gripes and complaints to just feel a little reality check out about your life? Check out TrueMomConfessions and be sure to come back and let me know what you thought.  (Will you have the guts to express yourself there?)

Today while visiting with some of my seniors, I thought about how different we are from many parts of the country. We are a long way from deer season, but my boys were already talking about the next season and the process they were already following to make sure the “big one” would be by their stands this year. We had down time today as the younger students were completing state standardized tests so I looked with them on the Internet for the “right supplies,” and we compared products and prices. It acutally ended being a worthwhile assignment as we made charts and really compared prices and products in depth and thus studied a wise decision making process. This is what I love about teaching (and what I wish I could do more of) - building on students interests and experiences to teach them real life skills.

I was fascinated to find that the kids decided on a “local” place as their best option for a Game Feeder - local meaning in Texas. I was impressed at their prices (remember I know little about hunting), and the students were impressed at the product. Texas Hunter apparently sells high quality products that impressed my hunters.

I love days like today - not that I really needed to know much about what you do in April to prepare for deer season or even the best place to buy hunting supplies, but because I really do think my students learned a little about about wise shopping (maybe a lesson that young males do not usually learn in high school from their English teacher).