greek yogurt

I want to like greek yogurt.. I really do. I have tried all different kinds of flavors- honey, vanilla, and chocolate- they are all gross to me. I know it is healthy.. but do people actually like the taste of it?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!

Compassion

I mentioned this in my blog yesterday, but as my roommate Susie was walking her dog yesterday she found these kittens in someone's driveway. She knocked on the man's door and asked him if he knew that there were kittens in his driveway. These are not weened away from their mama kittens, these are week and a half old babies whose eyes just opened. The man said they had wandered up a few days before and he had been giving them milk. We knew this was a total lie because they wouldn't have shown up without their mama because they could barely walk. Also they would not have survived without her for more than a few hours outside especially in the heat. It sickens me that someone would just leave these babies who don't have any chance of independent survival outside- where you could hear them crying blocks away.. I don't know how that man could sit in his house listening to them cry outside.

Susie works for the humane society so we will be able to foster the bottle babies or find a foster, and the kittens will get everything they need as far as vet services and other supplies, so I am very blessed to have that connection!







Bane was bathing them for us- that's why that one's head is wet.

I didn't realize it until recently, but one of my spiritual gifts is compassion. I have always had a heart for animals, but this spiritual gift comes through to humans too :-) The reason I didn't realize that this was one of my spiritual gifts until recently was just because I didn't realize other people weren't as compassionate as me.. if that makes sense. I am in the perfect line of work for this gift because I have to use it everyday working with the students that I do. I work with students who have learning disabilities or need additional support in the classroom like clarification, accountability, and organization.  I love my students, and I want to nurture them as much as I can and help them succeed. I am excited to see what God has in store for me as he helps me gain skills and experience in this gift!

first day of school

Today was the first day of school! This is my second year teaching at Northlake Christian, and I love it because that is the school I went to from 1st-12th. Here is a picture of me on my first day of first grade.

First day of 11th grade and 2nd grade for Bailey

First day of junior year in college. We thought it would be funny to take posed first day of school pictures with our backpacks on like we did when we were kids.

Today went very smoothly- I have 15 students (10th-12th). Since I am a support class, we didn't have

much to do since they had just started their classes so we played banana grams and caught up from the summer.

While I was in NC this summer I bought some dry erase boards to keep under their desks so we could do practice problems on them without wasting paper. I also have supply boxes under the students' desks. I only have 2-3 kids at a time. Today 2 of my boys were sitting and I walked out of the room and I hear "Oh cool!!" and they have the dry erase boards out and their expo markers coloring away. These are my 12th graders. I love the little things :-)

Another thing I have in my room is a homework sticker chart. Yes I teach 10-12th graders.. but the sticker chart gets very competitive!

See my sign posted? It says "Please take responsibility for the energy you bring into this space"

To top off this exhausting day, Susie found 5 kittens. They are about 10 days old abandoned on someones driveway. So we have wake up in the middle of the night to feed bottle baby kittens. I will post pictures when I get them up again!

My thoughts on The Help

Before I get started on this blog I wanted to let ya'll know that I fixed whatever was wrong with the comment feature, and anyone should be able to comment now regardless if you have a google account or not.


This summer I read the best book I have ever read, The Help. I couldn't put it down and finished it in a few days.

The caption from NPR on the cover of the book says, "This could be one of the most important pieces of fiction since To Kill a Mockingbird... If you read only one book.. let this be it."

I couldn't agree with that statement more! Growing up in the Deep South, I feel like I did not fully understand the major issues that went on in our history 50 years ago. Things have come so far, but still not far enough. There were issues this past year because a Mississippi public high school still had separate black and white proms. In the town my family lives in in Mississippi they have an Azalea Court every year which is kind of like homecoming, but the people are nominated by the garden club. There is still a separate black and white Azalea Court. They justify this in both cases by saying.. everyone likes it because that way more black and white girls get to be on the court.. more black and white girls get the chance to be prom queen. Children are brought up believing that is right to have separation. I saw something on the news a few weeks ago about the new face of the Gerber baby. They said that by 2066 the majority of MIDDLE CLASS American children will be of mixed race. Not necessarily all black or all hispanic, but they will have such a mixture that they won't be identified as one specific race- they will just be Americans.

I think this book is so important to read because it gives both perspectives. I think that as a white person in the south, we were brought up to believe that these black women wanted to be maids. They didn't mind the divide. I am not saying that everyone in the south thinks this way, but it is important to educate ourselves and our children about how much we didn't know, how wrong our ancestors were for thinking this (even though they didn't know it at the time), and we need to learn what still needs to be done.

I found this plaque at the flea market in Raleigh, NC this summer.

This is very hard to read in this picture, but inside the rectangle it says "coloreds to the rear". This is painted (still) on a building in downtown McComb, MS- leftover from before the Civil Rights Movement.

Last night I saw the movie version of The Help. It was so good. I still recommend reading the book because there are so many details in it and it paints each person's story a little more clearly. The movie is still amazing and they both made me double check my own mindset. It will be very exciting to see how far we have come in another fifty years!

as far back as I remember..

As far back as I remember I have been able to see time in my head. As a kid my mom said I had a crazy ability to understand time even as a toddler. I can pull up memories really far back because in my head the different years and my ages look different in my head. It is 3d abstract space. They aren't colored and I can't draw them, but they are there. It is kind of like how a juke box flips through to a particular record and then pulls it out and scrolls to the correct song. That is how my memories are, but by age.

When I think about time all of the months are in a line and I am standing in the summer time. It is hard to describe, except that if I think about December 31, it feels like I am falling off the edge of the earth. The weeks scroll inside the months vertically and the days scroll horizontally. I do not stand on a particular day, it just scrolls depending on the day. The current day is bigger than the others.

When I think about numbers they ascend vertically in horizontal rows of 10. Math always came easily because I could just jump around through the numbers in my head.

I am not sure how old I was when I told my mom about this.. maybe 11 or 12. I was pretty sure that not everyone thought this way, but I never thought anything of it. I have never needed a planner, and I am really good with time and dates. Recently, my mom told me she heard a guy talking about how he could see time in his head.. she couldn't remember what he said he had. This made me want to know what it was called. It boggles my mind why I never googled it before- I guess I had no idea that there was a name for it.

I have synesthesia. My primary type is time/space synesthesia and my secondary is number form synesthesia. Some people with synesthesia see letters and numbers as certain colors. Some attach personalities to days or numbers (I did this as a kid- I have stopped doing it, but I can remember not liking certain numbers or days of the week because of characteristics they had). The strangest form I have heard of is when people associate certain words with tastes. Crazy right?! There are almost one hundred identified types of synesthesia.

this is sort of how I see numbers- not in color but out in front of me

My years are not circular, but they are shaped and colored spaces that extend from far left (January) through far right (December) I think I stand in the summer all of the time because my birthday is in June and I think in school years rather than calendar years.

Synesthetes do all of this subconsciously. Most kids who have it don't realize that other people don't think this way until they are older. When scientists have studied it and done brain scans- multiple parts of the brain light up when certain things are talked about or stimuli shown.

This always happens

So today I was watching Celebrity Rehab.. minding my own business and I hear this strange noise outside. I pause the tv.. listen.. don't hear it.. put the show back on and  I hear it again. I go outside walk up and down the sidewalk.. still don't hear anything and then I hear it. It is super loud.. it sounds like a lost animal or a baby animal crying. I was looking for a dog.. then I hear it blaring. I look down and it is a baby squirrel with the mama squirrel looking on. I run inside to get a dish towel and a box and scoop it up. The tree over where I park my car is really really tall. This is the third baby we have found under it since spring- 2 blue birds out of the same nest the first time. There is no way that this baby will get back up to his nest.. so into the house we go. It is crying and bleeding from its nose a little. A teacher at the school I work at is my go to guy for my random wild life I find.. this is not my first. 2 years ago I rescued another baby blue bird. You can check out Blue Bell here on his website.

I call his daughter and arrange to bring the baby to school tomorrow morning.. if it makes it through the night. So here we are. "Jumper" is sleeping in his box- in my warm back room- the bleeding has stopped and his breathing is normal. I looked on a "what to feed a baby squirrel" website and it said they are normally dehydrated so they should be fed pedialyte first. I also didn't want to put it further into shock. So baby Jumper has had a little less than 1 mL of pedialyte and seems to be doing great.








I feel like wildlife knows that I am a compassionate person and sick, injured, and orphaned animals ALWAYS find me. My mom has always had compassion for animals and I learned a lot from her over the years- we always were bringing some random animal to the vet or nursing a baby back to help in a pet carrier.

Earlier this spring we found a baby bluebird in the same place- the man who maintains my property found it and rigged up a pully and a trashcan for the bird to be as close to its momma as it could so she could take care of it. It lived up there for 3-4 days and then one morning I saw it out on a limb an it looked like it was about to fall. I go out there to lower the trashcan since the bird was hopping around on the ground. The original bird was in the trashcan. It was another baby that had fallen! At this point there was nothing we could do- my neighbor came out and said how every year the mama blue bird teaches her babies to fly from her fence- so we all herd the 2 babies over as close to her yard as we could. I was late for work at that point and just prayed for the best. I came home that afternoon- there were no dead babies on my street and they were all fluttering around in her backyard by the fence. Success.

Let's all pray that Jumper makes it through the night!

the coolest thing

I love flash mobs. They have been popping up all over the world over the past few years- I love the looks on all of the unsuspecting people around. Here are a couple a lot of videos- these make me so happy!