It's me...Mrs. Burch.

And we're all back in school. The summer DID fly by, as it tends to do, but we're all officially and happily installed back into our "early-to-bed..." routine which feels great.
(except for me, obviously. midnight isn't terribly early)

My five kids are attending five different schools this year.

Yeah....good luck to us.
Bret ventured into the land of lockers and gym clothes at the middle school, Tate's joining 20 or so of his fellow smarty-pants kids in a G/T magnet class at a different school, Whitney is my buddy out in Kimberly, and Abby's living it up in Kindergarten locally. Kyle starts preschool next week and has no idea, really. I hope he's alright going along with that plan.

Whitney had a birthday!

The great number EIGHT, and was glad to finally get that coveted oreo cake and use the letter candles she picked out several months ago.

We celebrated her big day and the official end of the summer with a big screen movie on the back of the house under the stars with a bunch of friends.

After her pyro-brother almost burned the house down trying to fill and light the tiki torches, we enjoyed the movie, the company, the popcorn, the great weather and the chaos.

Summer, we'll see ya in another 9 months.

We've got some fact families to catch up on.

It's good to be Mrs. Burch again. I'm teaching K-5 Music and Computers full-time in Kimberly this year. This kind of came up out of nowhere, but I'm really excited to be there, and love it. We really feel like (while a significant sacrifice in many ways) it is a huge blessing, and is working out how it's supposed to be.
Gotta love faith.

My classrooms have been fun decorating projects. The computer lab is decked out in giant keyboards and CDs hanging from the ceiling.

I went with polka-dots in there. Why? Well, pretty much because I had NOTHING two days before school started and then found some circular placemats and they seemed to help de-drab the orange burlap-ish wall that I had to work with in the front of the room.

My theme suddenly morphed into
"D.O.T.S - Discovering Our Technological Surroundings."

Love it. I've got dots candy, dot numbers on the computers, dot stickers for management, "dots of rules," and "dots of fun things" planned. It ended up working out to be really fun!

I share the music room with another teacher and it's {AH!} way fun. I get to be Mr. Rowader! More on that later. I'm so tired. After I lost Tate this afternoon and got in a car accident on the way home !?!?! (all is well, not serious - except for the bashing in of the other lady's car that I did with my front bumper when I tried to change lanes while she was hanging out in my blind spot) then with soccer practice and "missing school supplies" shopping, when we finally got home at 8 I realized we should have started sooner.

p.s. Guess how many out of 150-ish kids that came through my class today thought that a MONITOR was actually a COMPUTER.

About 149.