A Letter to This Year's Senior Class

The virus has taken a lot of things this year:  lives, breath, incomes, time with family and friends, you name it.  One of the things that I have seen very sharply is what it has done to the end of my students' senior year.  It's been rough, I'm not going to lie, and my heart breaks for this year's seniors.

It s just the ones I have in class, either, it is all of them.  This year, seniors all around the country will not fully get all of their lasts:  last time I walk the halls with my friends, last math class, last time I slam my locker shut, last prom.  They will get some closure and some form of graduation, even in the hardest hit areas of the nation, I'm sure, but it just won't be the same.

Our daughter is a junior this year, and her class is also dealing with not getting any of their firsts:  first day as the seniors in the days just after graduation; first time the seniors and juniors come together to hand that over in a beautiful ceremony we do each year called Rose and Candle; first college visits.  They won't get to do any of that any time soon, either.

It's just been really rough for everyone involved.

But, to put this in perspective, we are all still living and breathing.  We are safe and secure with our families.  We can see moving forward, and that is an enormous blessing.

I've been thinking about all of this a lot lately, because this particular senior class is one that I have been around since they were babies at St. Mary's Elementary, where The Peanut went to school from kindergarten all the way through, just across the breezeway from the high school where I currently teach.  We truly are a family at St. Mary's and Notre Dame, and these kids all feel like they are my own.  I have watched these students grow from little kids to young adults, seen them wear their heart on their sleeve, laugh about the little things, cry over the big things, and lift each other up year after year as we have faced some really tough issues or happy times at school.

They are amazing kids, each and every one of them.

Today, I sent them all a letter.  But because it went out to school e-mail addresses, and I'm honestly not certain how many of them are still checking their school e-mail because...teenagers...I decided to post it here as well.  Just in case.

Here is my letter to this year's senior class, but it essentially contains what I discuss every year with my seniors in class just before they leave me for graduation.  Love these kids!

_____________________________

Dear Notre Dame Class of 2020:

Each year, no seniors leave my classes without a chat about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Not just your own happiness or mine, but what your actions mean for the happiness of the world around you. Unfortunately, this year the virus has gotten in the way, so I have to impart my words of wisdom to all of you at once, and I beg your forgiveness for the impersonal nature of a mass e-mail instead of the usual heartfelt, individual discussions.

It is what it is, right?

I miss seeing your faces and smiles, hearing your stories, crying with you over the things that hurt, and celebrating your little victories along the way. So let this letter serve as cheers for your successes and prayers over your challenges.

These are things that have been important lessons I have learned — some the hard way — over the course of my life. That sounds very geezer in tone, but you’ll see what I mean as you go further down the pathway of life.

1. At the end of the day, at the very end of your life, what you have left is your integrity and your soul. Guard them closely and choose wisely in how you act and what you do.

2. No one can make you do something you know in your heart to be wrong. No one can make you do something mean or dangerous or unkind or hurtful. The only person who can make that happen is you. So when you have to choose, choose to be wise. Choose to be kind. Choose to do the right thing.

3. People will not always remember the good things that you do, but they will remember that one horrible, mean thing that made them feel afraid or sad. What people will remember about you most is how you made them feel. Choose to be kind.

4. Be the change you wish to see in the world. Gandhi was right — when you see a problem, you can come up with a great solution to it, but it is the work that you do to fix it that solves the problem. Choose to do the work.

5. 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. You may see someone being lazy or not caring while you work really hard — choose to do the work anyway. Because when you are doing the work to help yourself, to help others, to take pride in a job done well, you are choosing to show that you are a high quality person that people can depend on to do things right. That has enormous value.

6. Do your very best in everything that you do. Take pride in your work and in working hard at it. Do everything you can at 110% — go the extra mile and put in the extra effort each and every time. Very few people ever live their lives this way. They muddle through, cut corners and only do things halfway. If you strive to always do your best, it will put you way ahead. It will also give you a sense of pride in what you have accomplished.

7. Be true to who you are at your core. Be proud of who you are, but also maintain some humility. No one is better than you. But you are no better than anyone else, either. Be gracious and humble, and treat everyone like your equal, because that is the right thing to do. That Tim McGraw song about staying humble and kind gets it absolutely right.

8. You never fail until you stop trying. There will be hurdles in front of you your whole life — this virus is a big one. Most of life is picking yourself up when you stumble or fall, and finding a way to keep moving forward. Sometimes it will be in a different direction than you think, but always keep moving forward, keep working and trying, and you will find a way to make any situation — even a bad one — into a success.

9. Above all, be a Golden Rule person: do unto others at all times. If you wouldn’t want someone to say it to you, then don’t say it. If you wouldn’t want someone to treat you that way, then don’t do it. Do for others as you would wish someone would do for you. It’s a very simple thing, but it has a profoundly good impact on the world around you, on your family, your friends, and your soul. Doing good makes the world a better place, so choose to follow the Golden Rule.

Some of you are leaving for college or other schooling, some are headed out to work after you read this letter, and some aren’t quite sure what you’ll be doing but you are working on it. I am very proud of each and every one of you — you are awesome kids with great hearts who are about to go out into the world and do fantastic things. I can’t wait to see what you do with your gifts and talents going forward — it is going to be amazing!

Good luck in everything you do. Know that you have family and friends — always — back at Notre Dame High School, and that we are all cheering you on as you move forward. Wishing you many blessings, and as much laughter and joy as you can hold, and sending love and prayers your way today and in all the days that follow. Keep reading and keep reading history!

All my very best,
Mrs. Christy Smith

Pushing Through

My bones are creaking this morning, from too many days in a row of getting up and down ladders and hefting books and heavy boxes and crawling around on my hands and knees picking up random detritus, all in an effort to get the school library ready for academic prime time.  It was a mess, and now it is much better, but my body is much worse for the wear this year.

After the last year and a half of breast cancer treatment, my muscle tone is shot and my body has, unfortunately, gotten used to a much lower level of activity.  My usual ability to push through is still there intellectually:  the spirit is definitely willing, but the body is way, way too weak for what my mind thinks that I can do.

Irritating.

The good news is that I could still get things done, and my room looks wonderful and is almost ready for students.  I still have some shelves to clean and books to reorganize, but overall it is looking really good at the moment.

Today will be a partial rest day.  There is laundry to do and kitchen cleaning to catch up on, although Mr. ReddHedd helped tremendously yesterday by doing dishes and a lot of laundry while The Peanut and I were at school working on my room.  The day to day doesn't stop while extra stuff gets piled on, but this year we have managed to muddle through it without too much impact at home.

We've begun making more healthy food choices in earnest, and I can feel it making a difference in me, even with the achy knees this morning.  So that's a good thing.  I have eaten more veggies this week than I have in a long while, and it has made a difference in mental sharpness, even though it hasn't shown up on the scales just yet.  Can't expect an overnight miracle, but I am happy with the direction we're going at the moment.

As in most things in life, the key appears to be pushing through whatever barrier decides to throw itself into your path on any given day. 

More Fun With Library Signage

After several requests, it became clear to me that there was interest in more of the library signs I put together yesterday.  Above is the one with Katniss from The Hunger Games.  The rest of the signs will follow.

I like to mix these up over the course of the school year, so there is something fresh every couple of weeks as they come in to class and to check out a new book. 

For each of the ones featured here, if you click on the picture, it should take you to a larger size that you could print off for your own classroom.

As I make more of these for my library, I'll try to share them for other teachers to be able to use them as well.  Am trying to come up with signs that will work for a broad range of ages -- from preK-3 to 6th graders -- and will also catch their interest in reading. 

I would like to come up with more literary-related ideas as well, so if you have a book character you'd like to suggest, I'll see if I can put something fun together in terms of a reading promotion sign.

Having Fun With Library Signs

This morning, I've had some serious fun playing around with new ideas for library signs.  Every year, I like to add a little new spice to the mix, to keep things fun and fresh for the kids.

So far, I've created the one above with Anna and Elsa from Frozen, a minion going bananas for books from Despicable Me, a photo of Katniss being hungry for books from Hunger Games, and a "kneel, puny human, some of the best books are on the lower shelves!" Loki sign from the Thor and Avengers movies.  (Thank you, Pinterest!)

There will be more to come, I'm certain, but that's enough for one day.

My plan is to do more with children's book characters, when I can think of something pithy to make a pun or elicit a giggle.  Anything to interest the kids in reading more, right?

In any case, if you click on the sign above, you can get a full sized sign to print out for your own school library. 

Any ideas for future signs?  Please do share in the comments!  I promise I'll try to share what I make as I get new ones done.

Refocusing

Sometimes, you get a photograph you weren't expecting.  This was one of those times.  I thought I'd just be getting a regular landscape shot when, instead, what came back through the lens was something closer to one of those vintage postcard paintings of the Grand Canyon.

Love that nature is just so beautiful when you are looking at it with the right attitude.

Life is like that as well, isn't it?  Sometimes when you look at your own day to day through a different angle, it suddenly looks a whole lot better.  Trying to keep a positive outlook can be tough, especially under adverse circumstances or in the midst of a busy run-around time.  But it is important to try to do that for your own sake, as well as the folks around you.

At least that's what I'll be telling myself this week and next as the back to school season gears up at our house.

Predictably, things have gotten busy:  the library clean-up and reorganization has begun in earnest, in advance of an open house next week; lesson planning has also begun; and we're in the middle of a home re-organization as well, as I work toward where I want things to be before the start of school.
All of the vacation photos certainly bring back that feeling of calm relaxation that we had along the journey.  May have to put them up all over the house to keep that going.  It's time to refocus a bit, but not lose the importance of balance.

That's an awfully tough thing to manage sometimes, isn't it?

Teaching History Through The National Parks

As a year-end, wrap-up social studies unit, my class is about to embark on an exploration of America's National Park system. 

My plan is to use this to talk about the expansion westward before and after the Civil War, a bit of Native American history, immigration, the Industrial Revolution and the environmental movement that grew in response to it.  It is a LOT of ground to cover for an end of the year discussion, so I'm trying to wrap it in the cloak of something really interesting for the kids by using the National Parks as my bait on the history and geography hooks.

After scouring the internet, I have found some lesson plans and materials available online through the Library of Congress, PBS and the Ken Burns' National Parks documentary series, and on the National Geographic website as well.

Most of the material, however, is not quite what I wanted.  So I'm having to cobble together an entire unit plan, pulling all the disparate pieces together into a more coherent whole, and adding my own material to them as I go along. 

Why, oh why, do I get these ideas and then do this to myself every single time? 

It's a gift and a curse, I suppose, but I do think the kids will learn a lot about American geography and history and even get to see a bit of beautiful scenery and wildlife (on film and in photos, at least) in the process. 

A Moment of Gratitude

Just a note to say thank you to everyone who has used the Amazon search link in the right-hand column to order anything.

Your generosity in orders, over the course of this past year, has enabled me to get several mythology books for the unit that I have been teaching to my 5th and 6th grade library students.  It has also helped me to get some materials for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for my current 5th grade class.  AND 4 new books to read for fun for the library collection as well.

So thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

Please consider using the Amazon link on this blog for future purchases.  It really does make a difference for my classroom!

Pottering Around

Toward the end of the school year, the kids get a little restless:  the weather warms, the sunshine beckons, and keeping a classroom full of pre-adolescents engaged can be rough on the best of days.  This year, after so much snow and ice and arctic blasts of deadly frigid air and cabin fever, that is proving to be true already.

They simply want to be outside in the fresh air.

Frankly, I can't blame them, because I feel the same way.  This winter has been brutal, and we are all longing for some flowers and leaves and fun.

So, in anticipation of this summer break antsy pantsy-ness only growing as the calendar moves forward, I am planning a bit of fun for the end of school that will, I hope, keep everyone engaged while we attempt to still learn a little something.  If nothing else, I'll have some fun with it, but I do hope the kids do as well.

We had planned on having a Harry Potter party for The Peanut this year for her 11th birthday.   While we were at Universal on vacation, we picked up some fun items to use for invitations that you can only get in Hogsmeade, and had planned a surprise way to deliver the invitations by "owl post."  (Bless you, people on Pinterest, for your genius ideas!)

Rather than let all my pins and internal planning go to waste, I've decided to use it for the amusement of my class instead.  Will be posting some ideas as I firm them up, but I wanted to throw out to the crowd the fact that I'm looking for some great, educational ways to use the Harry Potter theme in the classroom over a two week stretch.

Figuring the last two weeks of the year will be a lost cause, am trying to come up with a way to make that not be the case.  Perhaps it is naive of me to think this can be accomplished, but you can't blame a girl for trying, can you?

Any thoughts on ways to do actual lesson planning in a Harry Potter context?

Am thinking about setting this up so that they have "wizarding" classes each day instead of our regular ones.  But I haven't quite figured out how to morph our regular classes into the wizarding ones just yet.  Things I have contemplated thus far:

Math, Math, Math, Math, Math

Excuse me while I fill my brain up with mathematics.

Lesson planning takes a lot of time.  Don't ever let anyone tell you that teachers aren't hard workers, because I can tell you with absolute certainty that there is never a time when you are not working, thinking, or thinking about what other work you need to do.

This week's challenge:  moving from multiplication and division into decimals, fractions, and parenthetical equations, and more.

Having a School of Rock moment this morning.




Jack Black rocks my world in this scene.  More of him in movies, please.  Watch and have a giggle on me.

Library Lesson Plan: Kevin Henkes And Chrysanthemum

Today has been a big project on Kevin Henkes wonderful book, Chrysanthemum. I have wanted to do a library unit on this book for a while because it is such a wonderful read

It also presents a lot of opportunities for in class discussions for younger and older kids alike, opening a number of intriguing avenues for kids to stop and really think:  about actions and consequences, about their own feelings and those of other people as well, about the incredibly clever use of language that Kevin Henkes incorporates in this book in terms of description and action, and all sorts of other interesting bits and pieces.

For my younger students, I found a wonderfully put together discussion packet on story elements and construction that we'll use.  You can download it for free at Teachers Pay Teachers, and print it off to use for your own classes, too.  (Don't you love the word "free"?)

I am also working on a poster-sized drawing of Chrysanthemum, which I will use to talk about Henkes' wonderfully descriptive language and about good and bad behaviors and choices of the various characters in the book.

An example of something similarly done can be found at Pencils, Glue and Tying Shoes -- loved this poster, and am doing a similar one for my classroom.  But I'll be using some post-it notes that I found that are already die-cut in the shape of flowers to show "good" versus "bad" words from the story, in some form or another (still working on just how I will do this).

But for my older students, I wanted a discussion that was more in depth.  Since I couldn't find exactly what I wanted anywhere online, I created my own little lesson bits and pieces.  Thought they might be a useful jumping off point for others out there as well.

Monsters University Rules

The movie is certainly a hoot for the younger set, but I'm talking about actual rules and regs.

After a couple of years of vacant stares and blank faces at a straight up discussion of rules for the school library, I've taken some liberties with stills from Monsters University and crafted a slide presentation on my school mini iPad themed to pix from the movie.  The Librarian in the film was just too fun.

Today is the debut of the newly presented rules.  We'll see if they are more enjoyable to discuss this way.

Part of me is looking forward to the giggles from the kids, and part of me is wondering if the fun of this will ruin the whole "rules" portion of the rules discussion due to said giggling.

Guess we'll see...it's always a fine line between finding a way to teach in an entertaining way and just entertaining without actually teaching, isn't it?

Library Reading Promotion: Adorable Westie "Hot Reads" Sign

Putting our adorable westie to work for my library, this is my latest reading promotion idea.  If nothing else, it will get the kids to ooh and ahh at the adorableness of the westie and perhaps take a peek at the books on either side of the sign.

Here's hoping!

Am planning on placing a couple of books out each week -- one for early readers, one for older ones -- on book stands that will showcase the books for the kids, along with the adorable pooch sign above.  As much as possible, I want to use books that I have read, so if the kids have questions I will be able to talk from my own reading experience.

I do genuinely try to make an effort to read as many books as possible in our library so that I honestly can speak from my own reading experience with the students.  I find that an authentic, personal recommendation always works better than an "I've heard it is good" variety, especially with the older kids who like to talk about the book as they are reading and find it annoying to have to catch me up.

By switching the recommended books out weekly or bi-weekly (depending on how much time I have to throw together book talks on the fly as the school year gets rolling), I am really hoping it will allow for a bit more interest from the kids about the books that are highlighted.  Because it will allow me a short book talk about the books with my classes as well, we can also discuss information about genres, authors, series, and all sorts of other assorted goodies along the way.

I got the sign idea from the wonderful Igniting a Passion for Reading: Successful Strategies for Building Lifetime Readers by Steven Layne.  There are so many great ideas for reading promotion in this book, and I find myself referring back to it often for another spark of inspiration in a classroom activity or to try to help a reluctant reader find some enthusiasm.

Thought this might be a fun idea for others to use, too.

Pondering Chrysanthemum

Kevin Henkes, one of my favorite children's book authors, wrote a wonderful tale about a little mouse named Chrysanthemum that I absolutely love.  In the book, there are great examples of teasing which open up an entire avenue of discussion with kids about how they feel when they get teased or bullied, and what behavior is and is not acceptable and why.

It is a short story, filled with lovely little pictures, and a lot of meaning built into a very simple little storyline:  Chrysanthemum loves her name until the other kids start to tease her about it being different, and then she feels badly and hurt and ashamed, until her teacher tells her how wonderful it is to have a unique name...and then things get better.  It is the sort of short story that makes for a wonderful start to the year, if the kids all take it to heart, because you can then refer back to it when a student is acting badly in a "remember how that made Chrysanthemum feel" sort of way.

I have been thinking about using Chrysanthemum as my beginning of the year story for my classes for that reason. 

But how to use it effectively is the question, as a lead in for the classroom rules and as a larger discussion about making smarter choices in and out of school.

Conquering The Dust Bunnies?

Another day, another attempt at conquering the dust and decorating as long as my legs will hold out.  Chemo has sapped my will to be the Energizer bunny of room readiness:  I just can't go forward through the tired like I used to be able to do.

Am certain it will come back over time, but, wow!, is it inconvenient at the moment.

In better news, my room is actually beginning to look like a functioning library again.  Today, The Peanut will be helping me decorate and there will be much, much more dusting in my future.

With Open House looming tomorrow night, it is going to be an all out sprint today, I'm afraid.  Hope your day is a wonderful one!

Another Day, Another Slog

Lots of dusting, cleaning and straightening to do today and the whole of the week.  With, perhaps, a smattering of decorating if I can get time to spruce things up with a little more color.

School begins on Friday with an Open House.

If you need me, I'll be wiping down a dusty bookshelf or twelve...

Caught Between The Scylla And Charybdis

A little Sting is a good way to start the day...

Lots more library lesson plans to do today.  I have planning mostly done for the older kids for an extended unit on mythology, and completely done for the little ones who will be learning basics like ABC order and library procedures and behavior, in and around getting loads of fun story time reading from me.  (Did I mention that I have dug up a pretty pink sparkly crown to wear for story time?  Here's hoping it doesn't pop off my wig...)

Today's work will be to firm up the first nine weeks lesson plans for the kids in the middle.  Hopefully, by the end of today, I'll have the entire first nine weeks mapped out well and ready to go.

Sometime this week, I promise to take some pictures of how I have redone my lesson plan binders and to put up a whole slew of ideas for other folks to use if they need them. 

The way that I have done my planning this year allows me to easily move things around week to week if the kids need an extended lesson on a particular topic. 

Am trying to make certain that we cover a lot of ground so that all of my curriculum requirements are met.  But I am not willing to sacrifice comprehension for speed, so I've built in the ability to go over the same ground if I need to do so by using interchangeable notebook pages that I can move around as needed to reinforce areas where I see that the kids need that.

The awesome part of doing things this way is that I will have a complete set of lesson plans for the year by the end of this, which I can then tweak as I go in the years to come.  It is a lot of work at the front end, but that is going to pay off in the best way as I move forward.

So far, I am really loving this set-up.  Only time will tell in the teaching on how it works for the long haul, though.

Mythology Morning

Feeling pretty proud of myself this morning: woke up and put together a card matching game of mythological monsters from Greek myths, complete with illustrative pictures.  Have been working on lesson plans all week and trying to come up with fun ways to get my students excited about this mythology unit.

I also plan to put together a Jeopardy game using a cheapie shower curtain liner, some 3x5 cards and ziploc baggies.  But that may have to wait until after I have gotten my room ready for Open House next week.

Dusting, organizing and decorating my classroom have to take priority for the moment. 

It is the final sprint to the start of the school year.  It is going to be so great to see all the kids and get back into my normal routine after this summer of chemo.  I miss what used to be normal, and it is high time I reclaimed some of that equilibrium that I used to take for granted.

In the meantime, though, I'll be putting together some more ideas for teaching my 4th, 5th and 6th graders about mythology.  Thank you, Rick Riordan, for your brilliant Percy Jackson series.  

If I play my teaching cards right, I'm going to have a whole lot of kids reading it this year.  That would make me very happy indeed.

Radiation Begins Today

It begins.  Again.

Radiation treatments will start for me this morning and I have the temporary tattoo markers to show for it:  they use them as guides so the targeted beam hits the right spot every time.   Oh yeah, I'm a rebel, I have three tattoos.  (You have to squint to see them, but still...I want the street cred.  I think I've earned it at this point and then some.)

Looks like I will have a series of thirty-three treatments in total, five days a week, every single week for almost seven weeks until they are completed, with weekends off to heal a little.  Each treatment should last about twenty minutes.

Oh joy.

It could be a whole lot worse, so I am grateful to be here and not in hospice.  Let me just say that up front.  But this has been an exhausting slog and it is not done yet.  How do parents of small children ever explain all of this to them as they go through treatment?

The staff at the UHC Cancer Center have been fantastic all the way through this.  Am so glad that they had great facilities near our house, so that I didn't have to go far away for treatment -- that would have been incredibly rough on The Peanut and she's been through enough this summer with me as it is.

But life goes on, even if our summer has whizzed by in nothing flat and not been all that relaxing.  For us, school begins again next week.

Where did the summer go, seriously??!!??

We still have school supplies to pick up and a few assorted school clothing items to snag, so somewhere today I will be taking The Peanut to shop if at all possible so we can avoid the weekend insanity of the back to school frenzy.  Somehow, in the next week or so, I also have to get my classroom ready for the kids to return.

Or, at least, as ready as I can under the circumstances.

Library Unit On Greek Mythology

The second Percy Jackson movie will open in theaters on August 7th, just before school begins this year.  For an elementary school librarian, this is an event that needs to be used well, because it presents a fantastic opportunity for capitalizing on the interest bandwagon among the 4th, 5th and 6th graders about Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series as well as the underlying mythology stories and characters that permeate the books.

Doesn't it just scream book promotion and myth teaching for the older kids?

Especially if you add in the upcoming winter Olympics, and its roots in Ancient Greece and competition for the favor of the gods.  That is some fascinating history in its own right.

Over the last couple of weeks (as my chemo brain has allowed), I have been planning a multi-week unit to discuss Greek and Roman mythology, as well as to introduce the students to some other myths from around the world.  Am trying to piece this together so that we read a myth together and then work on activities and worksheets to further deepen their understanding of the myth, as well as how it has been used over the years as a story to impact behavior or as a warning or whatever else might be an underlying theme.

What I am hoping to do is have the kids put together their own notebook as we go through this over the course of a few weeks.  Each myth would have its own section for crafts, worksheets, and a copy of a story summary for each one.  That way, at the end of the entire process, they would have their own book of mythology that they built themselves.

There is so much new vocabulary in a lot of these stories, words that we pull from the original Greek and Roman myths that are used every day -- that alone is worth teaching all of this, I think. 

In putting all of this together, I have found some wonderful resources:

-- Literature Pockets, Greek and Roman Myths, Grades 4-6: for the Medusa craft and the Apollo poem and sun wheel craft alone, this is so worth it.  But it also has some great vocabulary worksheets and story summaries that I'll be using as well.

--Greek Mythology Activities: Activities to Help Students Build Background Knowledge About Ancient Greece, Explore the Genre of Myths, and Learn Important Vocabulary: this has a fantastic alphabetical listing of all of the Greek gods, complete with illustrations and some wonderful game and activity ideas as well.

Let The Words Fall Out

Apologies to the couple of readers who e-mailed that they were worried about no posts last weekend. Meant to set up some posts before we left and then life got away from me entirely -- didn't mean to cause alarm, everything is just fine (or fine as it can be given that there are still residual chemo side effects, but at least I can taste my morning coffee again -- woo hoo!).

We got away for a desperately needed mini-vacay last weekend.  Nothing huge, but some seriously needed time to blow off the stink of chemo for a few days of living away from the Big C(ancer) treatment-o-rama.  It has been overwhelming, exhausting, and too much like boot camp in terms of breaking me down without the adjacent building me back up phase for too many weeks in a row, and I needed a break.  We all did.

You need to pause every once in a while and allow yourself to exhale.  Never in my whole life have those words been more true than right now.

Saddling up this morning for the next rung in the treatment ladder:  radiation oncology. 

Today I find out how many weeks of daily radiation I'll be dealing with and when it begins.  Have to figure out scheduling and how to juggle The Peanut's schedule along with mine for the weeks that I'll be doing this -- so many things to try to track all at once, with a brain that is so foggy it is incredibly charitable to call it a brain at all.

Spent some time this morning trying to figure out how to make our meals even more healthfully packed with fruits and veggies.  Variety, variety, variety, so we are eating a rainbow of healthy antioxidants and assorted bits of fiber and vitamins.  Planning some yummy baked chicken thighs for dinner this evening, along with a healthy salad and some veggies of some sort.

If I get time this afternoon, I'll post my chicken thigh recipe -- The Peanut gobbles it up and pronounces it "dee-lish" every time I make it.  That's a major victory, given how infrequently little miss picky pants will eat something new.