Some little boy desided to play peekaboo with my skirt today. Another kid was telling on the little boy for playing with his shoelaces. I don’t care if he plays with his shoes as long as he’s not looking up my skirt. What is the deal with me and my skirts!

You know what makes my heart happy? My old camper from 2 years ago that added me to her buddy list after camp. I had no clue who she was 2 years ago 2 weeks after camp when she imed me. Since then I’ve realized who she is, actually I knew who she was once I asked one of my co counselors about her. Now she’s iming me for advice. Her mom told her she can’t tell people how old she is but I’m thinking she’s probably in the 5th grade maybe 6th at this point. I never dreamed that I’d still have connections with a camper but when someone at such an influential age needs good Christian advice, I could never turn her away. I just love it! And she has been asking about my class, and believe it or not, she’s giving me some advice. She knows what kids like and you’d think I do too but I guess sometimes it’s good to have a fresh opinion. Its just really sweet that she looks up to me and is asking for my advice. I’m always the first one to tell people that I do not give good advice. I can listen all day long, but when it comes to the advice I’ll send you on to Dr. Phil. Anyways, she makes my heart happy!!!

You know what else makes my heart happy? One of my students. She is absolutely adorable. She started making paper airplanes today during center time and as much as I don’t want paper airplanes flying around the room to create even more chaos than there already is (yes I do have classroom management skills), it sure was hard to tell that sweet little girl to put them away when she was so excited to see them fly all over the place. You’d love her too. I hope I have sweet precious nonbratty kids one day.

Something else that makes my heart happy…i’m am no longer taking summer school. I wasn’t looking forward to it and now it conflicts with other stuff so I’m out. Now what am I gonna do with my summer? I get so bored and lonely here by myself and all my friends, well most of them, work during the day. I dont need to spend all my money shopping so I can’t do that. What ever will I do? Actually I’ve got people I can go visit. So I’ll be taking a trip to Little Rock, Austin, San Antonio, maybe I should go to Houston and maybe New Mexico too. That could be fun, maybe expensive, but fun to see great friends!

I think I’ve learned my lesson. The next time the weather man says it’s gonna be a windy day, that’s my hint to not wear a skirt. He said it was windy Sunday and I didn’t listen, I wore the skirt anyways and almost gave the whole singles department a peep show. Well today, I decided to wear a skirt anyways despite the windy weather. Yeah bad idea…the parents got an eyefull as i dismissed the kids. It’s a good thing my skirt happened to be two layers. I think only the first layer was blown away by the wind. Definitely something to laugh about and the parents decided to laugh too. Somewhat embarrassing!

Is there a full moon tonight? My kids were almost out of control! It didn’t help that there was a new person in my room all day to observe my teaching. I don’t know why they sent her to my room….i’m no expert teacher. I like to think I know what I’m doing but things always seem to be a little crazier when there is another adult body in the room no matter what the reason. I’m hoping tomorrow will be better. I think we are at 40 days left of school…i think thats what we counted today

I must say that my workout today was wonderful. I left school early, well not early but earlier that we are supposed to leave(thanks to being teacher of the week:)) and had to run some errands and actually finished up sooner than I thought I would so I went on to work out quite a bit earlier than the kick boxing class was supposed to start. So i got a head start burning those calories!!! And I was contemplating whether to go at all…i’m glad I went

This is a short interview with Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life and pastor of Saddleback Church in California, and very much worth reading.

People ask me, ”What is the purpose of life?” And I respond:

Happy moments, PRAISE GOD.
Difficult moments, SEEK GOD.
Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD.
Painful moments, TRUST GOD.
Every moment, THANK GOD.
_______________________________________________

This email that one of my best friends sent me couldn’t have come at a better time. I read it and things just kinda sunk in. I’m not here for my glory…i’m here for His. I’m not here to fulfill my needs which I so often try to do. I’m here to serve the Lord. I was made by God for God. That’s a hard concept to understand sometimes. Why is that? As humans we are all selfish whether we admit it or not. We are constantly worrying about ourselves and how people view us. But our focus needs to be taken off of us and being selfish to loving God and growing as Christians in His image. I’ll admit that there have been many times in my life that I’ve planned out my life the way I want it. Yes, there are lots of things that I want to happen but of course there are always those unknowns. But my purpose here on Earth is not to fulfill that list of mine and make every dream of mine come true. My purpose is to live for God in His image. Grow to be more like Him. Like I said, we are all selfish by human nature but instead of focusing on what other people think about us, impressing certain people, and our possessions, our focus needs to be on God’s purpose for our life. Just like Rick Warren said, “The goal is to grow in character, in Christ likeness.” We are preparing for our lifetime of eternity.

Ok, it seems as though i’m leaving another deep post here. I guess I’ve got lots going through my head.

It’s finally happening…I’m beginning to let my guard down. Those who know me well know that sometimes it can take me a while to be comfortable around people. I typically put up this guard and its almost like I shut people out. It’s not because I don’t want them to get to know me. I think it’s more like I need to find out more about them before I let them find out more about me. But that’s not an easy task for me. I tend to get to know people at first by observing them…observing their interactions with other people. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they interact with other people that they already know. So I just tend to sit back and watch until I feel comfortable enough to jump in. Well I’m finally at that “jumping in” point. I’ve sat back, I’ve watched and now I’m at the “i’m ready to let you know a little more about who i am and my personality” phase. I’m slowly beginning to let my guard down around people in my Bible Fellowship class. I hate that it takes me so long to let that guard down. And I have no idea why I can’t make myself let it down sooner. I’m horrible at small talk and getting to know people that way…maybe that’s why I just observe and listen. Maybe that’s also why I also have that strange fear of the phone that no one else I know seems to have. (it’s getting better though, ha!) That awkward silence is something I dread. It’s just so…well, awkward. But how am I ever gonna get to know new people unless I “jump in?” I love the way that there are some people in the class that haven’t waited for me to “jump in,” and they’ve really tried to get to know me and who I really am. Those kinda people and the people that stick around for a while are the ones who get to know me. They know my real personality. Those are the people that probably wondered the first few times they met me if I was ever gonna talk. Well now some of them are discovering the real Krista…the one that does happen to talk and have opinions and say random things. As you can tell I’ve had lots of time to think. I think I’ve had way too much time to think lately. I need to be with people. I cannot be by myself! It’s driving me to frustration, annoyance, boredom, insanity (ok, well not really insanity). As much as I love my time to myself sometimes, I can’t really take it too much. Being by myself makes me think and when girls think, they analyze, and when they analyze they overanalyze and it goes on and on and…girls know what I’m talking about. I could probably go on forever.

I leave you with this one final story. We were playing Catchphrase (another one of my alltime favorite games) at the Thrive game night and I don’t even know what the word was. Well a guy had the little round thing and was trying to describe the word that appeared. His description is as follows: “Girls use these to fix their cubicles.” Wow!!! Who knew that only girls had “cubicles”…lol

I haven’t had as much fun as I did last night in a long long time! Last week I was thinking about my college friends and how I hate that we don’t get to see each other enough. When we get together, which is usually like every 3 months or so or for birthdays, we always say we need to hang out more often. So I took it upon myself to plan game night for all of us. Who doesn’t like to play games? Yeah, everyone loves playing games no matter how non competitive you are. We had so much fun!!! We took so many pictures, and most of them were followed by the phrase, “oh great! I can put that on myspace.” Yeah I guess we are all myspace addicts, lol! I also got to meet sweet Mia last night too. Kaylan’s puppy is so cute and she loves to cuddle. She just let everyone pass her around and hold her…she was so good! There was some reminiscing too of old college times and reminders of the ever so popular “Makeover Story” video. Good times!!!

I think this may have been one of the worst days this school year. Wow! My kids were so bad!!! I had to get my aid to come in and watch them while I got out. Imagine this…Friday afternoon, 1:00, kids all over the room, some doing what they were supposed to be doing, others doing nothing that they were supposed to be doing, kids being so loud no matter how many times I used the ever so popular love and logic phrase, “oh that’s so sad.” They didn’t care if it was sad. They didn’t care if it made me sad. They wanted to play and by golly that’s just what they did. So my aid took care of the problem. And let me just say that Kenny Loggins was a life saver today. She popped in that CD and they were so quiet. It wasn’t just the CD, it was my aid too that had them quiet. I actually turned the “let’s listen to Kenny Loggins to calm us down” into a lesson. They had to write about what they imagined in their heads and I got some pretty creative things. I also got some apology letters too. Needless to say, I’m glad I don’t have to go back tomorrow.

I’m sure you’re aware that Spring began yesterday (or was it the day before?). Well whenever it started, it needs to feel like spring, or I think so anyways. But instead of warmer temperatures, short sleeves, and skirts, I’ve been bundled in my winter coat, with long pants, and of course long sleeves (as I would freeze my tail off without any of those). We were dismissing our students today and we started feeling something wet on our heads and faces. No, it wasn’t rain…it was sleet! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…only in texas! I need some predictability in the weather. I had to turn my heat back on too. I guess I should have believed the nice looking weather guy when he said that the last freeze was usually around march 20th. He was right.

Don’t you just love being reunited with old friends! Better yet, don’t you just love those reminders of old memories that seem like only yesterday. Oh how I wish I was in Little Rock or Austin right now with the people I love!!! There are some great friends right here too, it would be great to all be together though. How I wish we could just take a year off of work (and still be paid) and just travel the world all together reminicsing about the old days and making new memories that we could tell our grandkids one day, ha! Wouldn’t that be great!!!

Patience is something that has always come so easily for me and I have always thought of myself as a patient person. Every since I can remember, at school, camp, and anywhere else, I was always given the ‘patience’ award. I guess I wasn’t the only one that noticed my patience. Others obviously had too. When I told people I wanted to teach Kindergarten, they would answer back “I can definitely see you doing that.” But when I started my teaching career, I knew that it would be hard with 20+ five year olds in my care. So I started praying. I prayed for patience every morning. I didn’t just pray for patience in general, I prayed that the Lord would give me patience when dealing with my students and other coworkers and the stresses of teaching. Prayers were answered and I was tested. So this year has been one big test of my patience. I feel like I am being tested 100 times more than I was that first year and second year, not just with my students, but in life too. I pray to the Lord and day after day my human selfish nature wants my prayers answered almost immediately and things to be so easy and now I feel like God is saying, “Krista, just wait, be patient. You cried out for patience and I want to test you to see if you will follow me. I’m going to help you get through this. I would never give you anything too big that you cannot handle. I want you to look to me everyday Krista and run to me for guidance. I want you to let Me hold you in my arms and hold your hand and lead you. Trust Me Krista, My will is far better than what you want right now. ‘Those who wait on Me, will find new strength. They will fly high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.’ I promise you that if you grow close to Me now, this waiting will bring great things.” As hard as it is, I know that God’s will for me is so great and the things I want are so little compared to the great plans he’s got for me. So when I get frustrated and begin to get impatient, I’m going to start praying, looking to the Lord for His guidance and grow close to Him. What a great thing to hear and think about, “Those who wait on the Lord, will find new strength. They will fly high on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint.” Isaiah 40:31

Ok, that’s my one deep thoughts post for the year.