Remember this?

Hey all,

This is Ali.  We just wanted to let everyone know that we are officially planning on treeing September 11-12.  Kerry will be getting off work at noon on Friday, and then going hard at it for the rest of Friday and Saturday.  Everyone's invited!

I survived the first week of school!!! Hooray!!  I was expecting it to be kind of crazy like last year when I didn't know what was going on, and then I have younger students this year, so I was also expecting a lot of behavior from that.  However, the great news is that it went super smooth!  The new kiddos definitely have personality, but they are not going to be very challenging behaviorally (the one student with hour-long tantrums hasn't come at all.  I only feel a little guilty hoping that he's moved).  The mix of kids seems to be a little calmer than last year, and all of the kids seem genuinely sweet.  

The stressful part of the week has been that the teacher of the older class decided to stay home to be a mom (good for her!), so there is a new teacher this year.  She is a really great person, but only has experience with much more severe and younger students.  Both the aides and the students are having a hard time adjusting as she figures out that a lot of the things she thinks will be great are way too "babyish" (what the kids have actually been saying).  So I feel a little caught in it because she asks my advice on a lot of things, and then the aides vent to me.  I hate feeling in the middle of things!  I just hope that things start going better for her.

We hosted the traditional pie nite at our house last night, and it was a blast!  Fortunately, the amount of pie that everyone eats has shrunk down to a more healthy amount over the past few years (except for Kerry, he showed everyone up yesterday by going for seconds on everything).  

Hope everything is going well!

Love, 

Kerry and Ali