Alicia's year in Torreon, Mexico

My kids crack me up. This past week has been an interesting story. My kids have noticed that beanie babies have hearts that have a story, a name, and a birthday. My kids have learned all about responsibility. All of our beanie babies have lost their tags. The kids are sad because now we don't know all of the beanie babies names or birthdays. We only have 8 of the tags and they love to check them out randomly.

So on Monday it was Slippery the seals birthday. The kids wanted me to bring in cake so instead of that I brought them all a mini pez. :-). They were super excited!

Then today, Thursday was Sr. Squirrel's birthday. This was the first beanie baby that I brought to the classroom. I made the kids cupcakes last night and they were super excited. No one could belive that I made them myself. Today we sang happy brithday to him and I recorded it, I hope you can hear it. :-) Also today, one of my kids brought in a present for the beanie baby. THey brought some little plastic soccer balls, a mini rocking horse, and perfume so they don't sink. It cracked me up.

I'm sitting in the airport in Des Moines just waiting for my plane and to fly to Huston and then to Torreon! I am hoping that when we get home we will have heat and warm water, some of my friends (other teachers) who are down their already don't have any! It could be very chilly and by that I of course mean 50 degrees :-) I can't wait to not freeze with layers on! I am also very excited to get into my classroom and but together some of the things I'm bringing back and to just prepare for this second half of the year! Plus, I need to do all my grades before Thursday! Yikes :-). My principal told me the day before we were flying home that grades would be do the Thursday we're back for teaching.....oops. that could have been useful to have earlier :-). Oh well! I hope that you all have a wonderful week! I will try and be better at blogging this month :-)

I hope and pray that you all had a wonderful Christmas and a very happy New Year :-). That you are all doing well and aren't freezing in this winter! I hope that this year is full of many blessings for each one of you and that you are surrounded with love from those around you :-)

Thursday the 16th or 17th we had our teacher pasada at school. They catered in some amazing food from our favorite restaurant, however they didn't have vampiros our favorite food! We were told this would last for about 2 hours, but in the end it lasted for 4 hours! THe school hired a clown (i have no idea why....) to entertain us and he did some funny things, but generally speaking he was just obnoxious!
This party made me really sad! I noticed a couple of the cleaning ladies standing around and then didn't see them later on...Perla, one of the aids, and my friend came up to me and asked me to help get Stella some food (my cleaning lady...) Because there wasn't a chair for them they went back to work. No one noticed they were missing or did anything about it! And when we did tell a principal and the woman in charge of us, they just tried to make the ladies feel stupid. If there had been 3 teachers waiting around for chairs we would have gotten one immediately, but it just shows me really how much they are disrespected and belittled. It was really sad. I told my roommates at home that night and they felt really bad too.
Also that night we ended our secret santa and got to give them our "big gifts" which mine just got a coffee mug filled with choclate and these really cute 3-d snowflakes that my mom had sent me in a package :-) She was really excited about it which was wonderful!