Summer has Arrived - The Meek Moose Gets Current

Like one of those corporate guys who answers his phone with "Go!" We're just going to dive right in. Pretend I haven't been away for months.  Roll with it, Kittens.
3, 2, 1 ... Blast OFF!

LISTENING

My youngest is four.  He is the exact definition of a boy:

Click to go to Little People and Me shop

He is armed with my horse riding boot and a SpiderMan balloon from the Dollar Store.  I don't believe the balloon stands a chance.  But I'm thankful he is not thinking it would be funny to hit me with the boot.

My apologies to the state of Florida.  His Grandmother informed him that saying words like f*ck, sh*t, or damn "Make God really sad!".  So now he has for some reason adopted "Florida" as his go to curse word.  We are assuming that, like us, God is having soda go up his nose each time the boy rages since my mother hasn't said anything about it.

But look out, Gulf of Mexico!  You may be next.

LOVING

The horseback riding lessons began as a birthday gift for my daughter.

But then she went on vacation to Disney World, the lucky duck, and I took her lesson for the week.

I look like a natural, no?

Eventually- the horse named Tom and I worked out a deal where he grumpily allowed me to ride him as long I tried to not take too many pictures.  He's not much of a Diva.  He's older, completely happy with going last in line, and is very much in tune with his "inner mosey".  Which is fine.  I don't really have any fantasies about galloping through the fields of barley or anything.

I hope to go once a week for the rest of the summer.  I'm not sure what I will be able to manage when school starts again- but I will hold off thinking about that for now.  

Riding is very peaceful.  They are majestic animals with beautiful eyes and soft snuffly noses. It is immensely relaxing to brush his coat and comb his mane and pat him gently on the neck.

THINKING

I disrupted my peaceful bliss by reading all three Hunger Games books over the weekend on my Kindle.  I'm blaming Flamingo Fabulous.  We watched the second movie on our beach vacation together and she was saying how the books were better than the movies. (Aren't they always?  Why did I have to think I needed to know for myself?)

I was fine until the end of the third book.  It was disappointing with Finnick of course, but I was ruined for life in the last chapters with Prim.  And just when I was almost over it- they brought in the damn cat, limping home after more than a week's journey in the wilderness. "FLORIDA!!!!!!" I scream from the rooftops. "Gulf of Mexico!"

I cried for a good hour.  I hate those books.  I refuse to watch the third and fourth movie.

Now I need something happy to read. Help me  dear people!

WANTING

BECAUSE...

NEEDING

My daughter took a video of me the other day, and I had to come to come to terms with it.  I've gone spherical.

And I don't want to be.

But I don't want to be a stick either.  I do not want to ever give up bread.  I just want to fit into pretty clothes and not look like I'm about to explode out of them.

So, I'm looking at trying to change my eating habits, and possibly exercise.  I say possibly because I'm not a fan of sweating.  But I found some funny work out posters that appeal to my sense of humor, so I think I will give it a go.

Click to link to tons of other workout posters

This site used to have lots of superhero themed ones- but then DC Comics got a bit hot and bothered and told them to take it all down. But whatever.  I will still pretend it is the WonderWoman workout- so take that DC comics!  

But yeah, I don't see myself being able to do any of those things in the middle there...

ALL STAR

Let's think this through- I spent the weekend reading three books I didn't have to read.  and I just made my bed for the sake of being able to write the sentence that I made my bed.  And my plans after this post is to very probably play Sims4 indefinitely because I am at that level of slug.

I should be getting my mind wrapped around switching grade levels next year.  And getting some materials made for teaching about the brain that I'm absolutely fascinated over.  But I can't seem to get myself out of the let-me-sleep-until-noon funk.

*HeavySigh* Meh.

Be sure to head over to Farley's blog to post your own Currently, and read up on some other fabulous things teachers who are not in a funk are doing.

Peace out, Kittens!

Ladies with Class Blog Hop ~ $40 TpT gift certificate up for grabs!

The collaborative blog Ladies With Class are hosting a meet and greet blog hop!  Come check out everybody and get some great freebies and a chance to win $40 for TpT!

 Thanks Mrs. Hug-a-Bug for the great job on our graphics!

I get excited about Spring because I am way into nature lessons with my kids.  I get to play around with frogs and butterflies, and hatch chicks and garden!

Hey, had you heard that gardening helps with depression because of the nutrients in the soil actually act as an anti-depressant?  Way cool!  My students are city kids, and not many have had a gardening opportunity- so they have a lot of fun with me this time of year.

I've been out looking for frog spawn lately, but haven't found any.  I don't want to order it from somewhere on-line, but I think I might be forced to.  Sheesh.  And I'm hoping that this year I'm able to do butterflies without a catastrophe like I had a couple of years ago.  I have already picked out the chicken eggs I'm going to attempt to hatch and have decided not to have them until a bit later in May so that I don't have a Memorial Day hatch date like last year.

This weekend I'm at a science retreat at a State Park in Virginia.  We're going to be doing all sorts of activities from Project Wet.  I can't wait to bring back what I've learned to my classroom and get my kids out to the pond preserve behind our school!

To celebrate Spring- I'm offering one of my first clip art packs as a freebie this weekend. (It's usually $4)  Click the pic to go to my store and get a set!  If you download and leave feedback- that would be awesome!

I've also decided to put all of my spring themed art and teacher resources on sale for 20% off, grab yourself a deal this weekend!

And last but not least, I'm giving away  winner's choice from my store to THREE lucky winners. Enter using the rafflecopter below.

But don't forget to hop ALL the way to Ladies with Class to try your luck at winning a $40 TpT gift certificate from all of us! Enjoy the hop and get yourself some great freebies!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Next stop? 

lopezlandlearners.blogspot.com/2015/03/march-into-spring-win-40-tpt-gift-card.html

Read-Alouds and Digital Citizenship - Virginia is for Book Lovers Blog Hop

I'm always excited to join my VA blogger buds for a blog hop.  This time we're embracing our love of reading! Each of us will be sharing a book and resource that we LOVE to use in the classroom for this very special hop. Even more THRILLING, is that you'll find a book giveaway on each page of the hop, with a super huge giveaway at the end over at Mrs. O Knows.

Mom and Dad always read to my sister and I growing up; picture books, chapter books, fairy tales, comics in the paper, the Bible, everything.  Traci was two years older and started reading independently before me, so then she ended up modeling it for me as well.  Mom took us to the library a lot.  I know for years I always checked out Colleen Moore's Fairy Tale Dollhouse book.  Never even read it until I was 32, but I adored the pictures and made up my own thoughts and stories to go along with what I saw.

I grew up in Alaska.  and I know there were book stores, because I can remember always visiting "The Book Cache".  But I think I bought a great many books at the grocery store. They had books at in the checkout lanes as impulse sales. Get a pack of green Hubba Bubba and a book.  Good times. When we went to the store, often we were told before we even made it through the doors that we were not buying anything not on the list.  But get to the check out counter and ask for a book, and Mom and Dad never said no.  Traci and I ended up with countless Archie Digests and fantasy chapter books this way.

My first year teaching fourth grade, I started building up a class library.  I only filled one four shelf bookcase that year.  By my ninth year, I'd graduated to needing six book cases and I was up to 50 labeled baskets.  A bit out of control, perhaps, but I love it!

I like to vary my read-alouds between picture books and chapter books for variety.  Shocking that I'm a little ADD, I know. When I first started teaching second grade seven years ago, I was a bit worried about having to give up my chapter books.  But it turns out- chose the right one, and there's nothing to worry about!

The Shredderman Series by Wendelin Van Draanen turns out to be perfect for second graders for a couple of reasons.  One, there is the occasional cartoon picture.  And they come often enough to keep the kids antsy to see it.  Two, the main character is in fifth grade- so the maturity level is not too far out of their frame of perspective. Three, the issues of bullying, good kid standing up against tyranny, and wishing to be a superhero are all applicable to the seven/eight year old mind.  Plus, as an added bonus, as you read it aloud, you get to say "butt".  This thrills the second grader to no end.

My students beg me for this book every year.  And they even check it out from the library, and beg me to continue reading the rest of the series.  Interest engagement alone makes this book worth it.

However, in the past few years, society norms have changed enough to make this book interesting for kids and teachers in a new way.  Published in 2004, anti-bully campaigns in schools were already in full force- but cyber bullying was not quite getting the attention yet that it does today.  For this reason, I like to read Shredderman to my second graders with the lens of thinking about the choices Nolan makes to end the physical and emotional bullying at school through his website.  It's a great way to talk about digital citizenship, and whether or not Nolan should have made other choices when working against Bubba.  It's also a great book to read with kids to talk about the choices the adults make in regards to the bullying both at school and over the web.

I read this book in the first month of school prior to introducing my kids to their digital portfolios and while I also teach them about writing appropriate response comments in our other website uses.  It allows for discussion on building a classroom community, establishing group norms, and also discussing citizenship in both the digital world and the real one.

My simple freebie includes a Digital Citizenship poster, and a book discussion form to talk about Nolan's choices.  This will be a forever freebie offered at my store.  Click the picture to go get your download!

Fill out the Rafflecopter below for your chance to win your own Paperback copy of Shredderman: Secret Identity by Wendelin Van Draanen.  I'm willing to mail it anywhere, so no worries if you're overseas! :)

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Make sure you hop through all nineteen of us, and don't forget the Amazing Mega-Giveaway at the end of the hop at Rachel's Mrs. O Knows page.  There you can try to win ALL NINETEEN of the books in one go.  Each one of us will individually mail you our book.  Just imagine getting nineteen different packages at your door, each box with an amazing read-aloud for your kids!

Click below to keep on hopping to Jen at An Adventure in Literacy!

Behind the Logo ~ The Meek Moose Pretends She's Watching VH1

Question:  Does VH1 even exist anymore?

Moving forward...

So, I was playing around on Instagram today.  Like a lot of days.  But with great diligence this morning because I was supposed to be
-updating my resume
-writing a business proposal
-cleaning my room
-making math card games
-creating lesson plans worthy of being peeked at during informal observations
-and NOT EATING bread
when it just so happened that I commented on another gal's picture about an art project she was doing with her students that I love that art pack too and it was on my wish list.

It's this art pack:

Click to check this Pop Art Miracle out!

I'm actually pretty sure I have Jenny's entire store on my wishlist...let me check... yes, yes I do.

Anyway, I made this comment and then ended up chatting with Jenny through email which was unexpected and very cool.  I have to say that one thing I like about blogging, and meeting teachers through FB, Twitter, Instagram, and TpT is that it starts to feel like I know lots of celebrities.  Knowing celebrities pleases my deep seated vanity.  Yes. Yes it does.

Turns out- Jenny is hosting a linky where you explain the story behind your logo.  And she asked if I was interested in linking up since I have this curious moose fetish going on.  And let's all admit it- moose are cool.  Deadly nasty mean beasts- but cool.  We also know I love to talk nonsense about myself.  And I think we all took note of how I'm supposed to be cleaning my room.  Again.  And I'm not.  So here we go.

Word wise- I'm from Alaska, I like moose, and my last name is Meek.  So it probably began as a simple fondness for alliteration.  The Meek Moose.

I had not always planned on being a teacher.  My college degree is in Writing.  I was going to be the next great American author.  I graduated from college, had a brief desire to be an intern at Jim Henson's Muppets that I never followed up on because I didn't want to commute by the LIRR every day to the city, and then ended up working retail at a toy store and then a gift basket shop because you can't make money just wanting to be an author.

My experience at the toy store was great!  It was one of those old buildings with nooks and crannies and had been open 100 years.  My favorite thing was if they would send me next door to the storage building to find something- because that place was LOADED with memorabilia.  I love toys, in case you didn't know.  So I'm 22 and I ended up thinking then that I would like to have my own toy store.  I remember at first I wanted to call it Farley&Fiona.  But then it evolved into The Meek Moose.

Idea tabled when I went back to school to get a teaching license. You don't really make a good living working part-time retail.

Teaching teaching teaching...years go by....teaching fifth grade...not a good fit for me.  Started to dream up other professional endeavor ideas.  And then I was 30.  Ah, 30.  I thought all my dreams would come true at 30.  I decided I was going to leave teaching and open a children's bookstore.  I wanted it to have lots of natural light, and wooden floors and shelves, and a stage with red curtains for poetry night.  And we'd serve snacks like cake pops and fancy lemonade.  I'd even decided that I was going to go with a mix of clean linen and cherry blossom for the general "smell" of the store.

When The Meek Moose dreams, she dives into the details.  But only the ones that have nothing to do with what you actually have to know to run a business. Because I'm cool like that.  I had my sister draw me up a logo of a moose that was feeling meekish.  And then a guy I knew at a T-shirt screening place digitized the image and cleaned up the lines of the pencil drawing.

Anyhow, get a divorce, real estate market bottoms out, house tied up in it- blah. The Meek Moose gets shelved.  But I kept my Meek Moose logo picture in a journal and would look at it from time to time.

Then, 2012, I'm 36 and looking for some teaching inspiration one spring when I discover teacher blogs.  So I think- hey- I could do that.  Seemed like a natural choice to pull out my lovely Meek Moose art and go for it.  so I did.  A year later, my sister decided to join me in a TpT endeavor.

Now Traci, she's a costume designer / freelance mascot builder in New Zealand.  And I'm sure she'll chime in after I post this and tell me how I've not used the correct job title to describe what she does. But her company name is Meek and Wild Creations.  So I asked her to put a sweater on the moose with her MW so we were combined.

When I go my blog design updated by Barbara Leyne Designs in September, she gave my blog moose a face lift with a hipster feel that I LOVE.  And even gave me a chicken!  Love you, Barbara!

As far as my glamour shot - this was a picture taken of me when I was 32.  I was teaching a drama club at a Military School and I was waiting outside the Chapel for our Summer Parent Performance to begin.  A man asked to take my picture.  His wife was one of the administration as I remember, and he had taken my picture once before when I was at dinner with the cadets maybe a year earlier.

Generally, I don't like my picture taken.  I'm guilty of taking fifty shots before I find one that I consider OK.  She brought me the picture the next week.  I liked it.  Sometimes it's nice to think that I haven't aged much since then.  But I guess it's ok that I have. Time presses ever forward.

32

39

So- that's the story of the logo.  I'm from Alaska, I love moose, my last name is Meek, and it would be awesome if I one day become a princess.

If you would also like to avoid cleaning your room- consider telling the story of your logo and linking up with Jenny at Art with Jenny K.

I guess I have to go clean my room now...

An InLinkz Link-up

The Meek Moose Wants to Be an Engineer

I became part of a collaborative blog, Ladies With Class, and it launched this week.  I've been thinking that it was a rather silly thing for me to do, as I blog so sporadically during the school year anyway- but then again, since I may only blog on the collaborative gig once a month- it's not a shabby deal.

My first post on the collaborative blog is up. Engineering and Coding are two of my favorite things. I've shared lots of video clips of my kids in action, on the computer, with Marble Run, and creating Domino Rallies. Hope you like it and feel inspired to add it into your day as well!

There are also two other posts, one on Motivational Tools by Yara at Sea of Knowledge; and another on Writing Biographies in Second Grade by Tara at Looney's Literacy.  Please check out all three!

What if? ~ The Meek Moose Waxes Philosophical About Windows.

Watch this move:

*click copy and paste *

"One, I need to blog. I have almost completely stopped keeping up with it, and this makes me sad. Two, I need to actually MAKE the math games I'm realizing I need in my classroom. Three, and maybe this should actually go first- I need motivation to do the two other things. But I don't. I just keep reading Backyard Chicken magazines and staring at the advert that says I can make 36,000 a year growing herbs on a quarter acre. And I'm on three acres. So really, I could be making half a million. If I liked the outdoors. Or could keep a plant alive..."

There.  See that?  I started a ramble to some FB friends and now I'm stealing my own ramble to have a blog ramble out of guilt.  Level of Lazy: BOSS

And now- staring at this picture- I hadn't even noticed someone was selling clothes for chickens.  Dang.  I could make clothes for chickens...

I also a need to flush out my brain.  I have no one to talk to at the moment except a three year old.  And frankly, if I have to discuss "linecraft" (at a certain point the speech impediment will no longer be cute) or how it is not okay to kill villagers because "they were looking at me" (cue creepy music and slowly back away.  DO NOT LOOK AWAY, just slowly back out of the room), I may die.  Possibly quite literally. Because if he isn't playing a game I cannot understand, he's setting traps on the stairs just like in "Scooby Doo".  And I don't know about any of you, but when I used to watch Scooby Doo, I just remember Don Knotts, and Sonny&Cher, and The Harlem Globe Trotters, and Jinkies!!! I do not remember being taught how to set traps.

Did I tell you that he karate punched my ex-husband in the tenders the other morning?  Yes.  Yes he did. But for no reason whatsoever.  He was saying "Hi!".  Hi-yah!

Do I have anything at all to say about school?  Or education?  Probably too much, kittens.  This is the Winter of My Discontent.

Which really means, it might be an alright time to dream a little.

Last night I had this really vivid dream that I went back to my old elementary school in Alaska to take a tour and interview for a job.  The fact that I am FREEZING in my basement at this moment clarifies the issue of moving back to Alaska.  No.  No way.  HOWEVER!  I am haunted by the architectural design of my old elementary school. One wall in the classroom was huge windows as I remember.  With like, a counter shelf thing you could sit on.

Not just the one little window people today think is all you need for a classroom.  The whole back wall was windows.  I think.  And does it matter?  It's how I remember it.

The point, if there even is one- is this:  How guilty are you of ever saying "Well- if I had my own school!"?   Because I am feeling overly curious at this moment.  Teachers are pawns to bureaucrats who have never been in a classroom.  So naturally we think we know what's best.  Maybe we do. So what if we did? I'm going to go ahead and say I do.  I know what's best.  There.  Gauntlet thrown.

First thing, damn it- is I would have a school where LIGHT, you know, FROM THE SUN, was a key feature.  It's like folks go to build a school and spend the night before they make up the design reading about Troglodytes. How old is this research about how natural light is better than fluorescence? OLD.  OLD NEWS.  But then we hear the lame excuse that 

This is not my picture.  Click to link.

"Schools have limited funds, so fluorescent bulbs are cheaper."

This is my horse face.  And it links to nothing but awesomeness.

Really?  Replacing bulbs that make everyone sick and depressed is cheaper than making a bigger window?

Click to link.  I like this man's head...

"But what if it's dark?"  

Yes.  I love my nose.  I do.

I don't know about you, but I go to school during the DAY.

Cutest toad ever.

"Sometimes it gets cloudy."

I am seriously having an amazing lip gloss day.

Stop it. Cloudy. Be ashamed of yourself.  It gets cloudy?  If I am outside, during the DAY, and it's cloudy, I can still SEE.  And if it were so cloudy outside during the day that I could not see, obviously a volcano is erupting and the sky is full of ash and I am about to die.  It's okay to close school if that happens.  I can stop reading a book in the middle of a Vesuvius-like event and run for my life.  And if you can't figure that out, you deserve to be covered in lava. And I'm not apologizing for wishing lava on you.  Cloudy.  Come on!

This artist is sculpting him out of wood.  Amazing work.

"But we're in a building during a cloudy day so it's not as bright."

I can even make my face look uglier than this.  It's a gift.

MAKE BIG WINDOWS.  Did we not start with that?  The windows are going to be BIG, and there will be more of them.  You will think you are freaking outside even though you're on the inside.

Adorable.

"I think that would make the building cold."

Told ya.

...

Let's imagine for a minute that instead of buying cheap windows, with cracks in them like we're living in the 1800s, that we bought windows that were of superior quality and actually helped regulate temperature?  Or that we took the money we saved on fluorescent bulbs and paid for a quality heat source.  Orrrr that people put on a sweater when they got chilly?

"Yeah, ok.  But don''t you think it would be really loud if it rained?"

I'm going to put this on the on-line dating site as a profile pic.

Forget it.  I'm going to go listen to Justin Timberlake and crochet a sweater for my chickens.

Side note.  I took twenty pictures of myself just to get one I was willing to send as a text message to a guy who has lips like this:

He agreed that I was having a good lip gloss day. However, you all are the only people benefiting from any of this.  The Meek Moose has been put out to pasture.

Getting my Game On ~ The Meek Moose Rears Her Tired Head

As per usual,  I get really crappy at maintaining the blog during the school year. But it doesn't mean that I've been hiding under my covers- though some days I wish I were able to... blah.

So how did everyone's Thanksgiving break go? I ended up with an extra day, as we received about five inches of snow Wednesday morning.

Ain't it grand?  Don't get me wrong, I liked the extra day off.  It's just that this Alaskan girl can't get excited about snow.  Like- I've done that, ya know?  Kids beyond excited though.  So, yay, Winter!

Today, being the thirtieth of November, I am aware that I completely missed doing the November currently. And I will not dare to link up today, I will wait and do the December one when it comes out (in theory- you never know with me)  But I did go ahead and fill out November's just so you could see what I'd been up to in the last month:

click to go to Farley's post last month

Most of these don't need a lot of further explanation.  I will say that as far as the song goes, my favorite part is when Nicki Minaj is rapping B to the A to the N to the G to the "heyyyyyyy".  I can do that part super duper dorky, yo!

I plan to do another post about Code.org this month in honor of The Hour of Code, so I'll just leave it at that for now.

Career direction.  Always a hot topic.  Stay in the classroom, become a specialist, change grade levels- you know, all the normal thoughts you start to have after parent teacher conferences when you have that mini-breakdown about the direction your life is headed.  Today I hope to pursue a career as a full time gamer playing Sims 4 24/7.  Because there's a life I can completely control....

I got a nasty cold just before my birthday.  Nasty enough, in fact, to put me in bed on my birthday, and obnoxiously near death for my entire birthday week.  I missed all of the planned celebrations.  All of which being two.  But for me, that is quite a full social calendar.  I recovered enough the following week to go out to eat with two of my best local girls and we had Mexican food and I wore the birthday sombrero.  I would not allow the staff to come out and clap and sing for me.  That would have been too much.  But I hammed it up for the camera enough to make a random man stop and take my picture.  What he plans to do with that photo- I don't want to know.

Apparently, this thing I am doing is called Duck lips.  I THOUGHT I was just puckering up for the camera.  Since my lips are so lovely. Ha.  But whatevs.  I was not intending duck lips.  I was intending to show off my true dorkiness in the middle picture though- as I'm sure that is much more like my normal face than the other two.  Either way, all three make fantastic profile pictures for my newest experiment and #epicfail of on-line dating.

I came to the obvious conclusion that one cannot marry an outrageously rich organic strawberry farmer, regardless of how ridiculously adorable one is, by sitting around doing nothing.  So I foolishly signed up for this virtual meat market gig.

Kittens...as socially awkward as I am...as out of practice as I am...as destined to be single for all eternity as I am.... on-line dating does little more than confirm for me the death of the English language in our culture.  And how irresitible I am to the AARP crowd.  Seriously- old men LOVE me.  I get winked at eighty times a day by 65+ guys wearing cowboy hats.  And they do not know the difference between womEN and womAN.  And I'm sorry if that sounds snobby, but this English major can't handle it.  #butI'mnotsorry  I will say that I recently received an ice breaker message from someone my age, however it began with "Sup" (no, really, it started with Sup) and ended with "Bitches stay back i have no room for drama" (and the i wasn't capitalized. And this line was preceeded by an announcement that he was passionate for all things science, including vaping and hikking.)  So, if you don't mind, I will be hiding under my bed from my phone for the next three decades...

To distract myself from this travesty, I shall throw myself into my work.

Did you know there was a TpT cyber sale tomorrow and Tuesday?  Of course you did.  Here's the ad that's been blasted across your eyeballs as of late:

click to go to my store

I have put the entire store on to the maximum discount for ya'll, and even added in something new- which my children have been LOVING.

Click to go to the product

The product description sums it up for you:

Cute owls and Superheroes?!?! Get outta town!

I have a lot of students this year struggling with sight words. The words on the Dolch lists comprise 80% of everything we read – if I can help my students master these words, then I can concentrate on multi-syllabic decoding, comprehension and other reading strategies. And so can you!

To play this sight word game, students draw a card from a face down pile and read the word aloud to the group. If correct, they keep the card If incorrect, the card goes back into the pile. Bonus cards drawn either entitle the player to draw more cards or lose cards. Bonus cards are not returned to the pile after being drawn. Player with the most cards at the end of the game is the winner.

I have all five sets of Dolch words in separate games, if you want to just zero in on one needy group of students.  I have two videos here for you to see my kids playing the Pre-Primer words game with me.  I only have a couple of kids with trouble on the pre-primer list, but my class is also 80% ESOL this year- so I added in a variation to the basic game where we practiced making up sentences to go along with the words.  You'll see that in the second video.  I've found this variation of the game to be excellent practice for oral language skills with my kids.

When the game is over, you can also have your kids write down the words that they "won" and create sentences using them if you'd like to add some extra accountability to the game.

And I reallllly need to work on my positive affirmations, as I say the same thing over and over in the videos.  Maybe I'm just nervous when I film.  Or just a huge dork. As always, there is at least one kid completely off task in the background.  Just keeping it real, yo!

Enjoy the sale, kittens!