"There's a spirit can ne'er be told....."

Yesterday we decided to make our annual trek to the country in search of bluebonnets. These wildflowers are our state flower and yet in the Houston area are very hard to find. So we decided to take our one free Saturday (without a soccer game!) and just go for a drive. We grabbed the camera, dressed the boys in shirts that would look good w/ the background we were looking for, and took off. We hit all out usual spots to no avail....seems like this year all we saw were Indian paintbrush and while they are pretty, it just doesn't look the same. So on we drove....we found ourselves up near College Station and decided to forget the bluebonnets and just go to A&M to show the boys where Daddy went to school. And it just so happened that we ended up seeing a decent patch right near the campus so we still got our pictures! Go figure!

Our first top on campus was at George Bush Presidential Library. What a beautiful place. Behind the library is a beautiful pond with a walking path and little benches all around. A very romantic setting! There's a footbridge that leads to a winding path back to where the President and Barabara will be buried. Already there is the stone for their daughter Robin who died at the very young age of 4. Even the Bushes know the heartache of saying goodbye to a child too soon.

From there we decided to go see the memorial for the 1999 Bonfire victims since it had just been erected last fall and we hadn't been back for a while. We got in all this traffic and realized we'd come on Parent's Weekend! Yikes!

The Bonfire Memorial was so moving. Not being an Aggie myself, I don't totally understand all the traditions involved, but I have attended Bonfire and it was something I'll never forget. I thought I had school spirit but the Aggies reign supreme in that department. The Memorial is right where Bonfire was always held, and there are 12 archways in a circle...each one facing the direction of the student's hometown. On the inside of each archway is a bronze plaque with the likeness of the student, their name and hometown, and poems, letters and quotes by or about them. What was amazing is that most of the families said their sons and daughters died doing what made them happy...preparing for the Big Game by building Bonfire, a tradition that had been going on for many many years.
I kept thinking to myself, what would I have done if I had been one of the moms recieving the call at 3 am that my son had died in this horrific accident? And as I was thinking that, I moved to another memorial to see a grieving family, touching the face of their lost loved one, with tears streaming. part of me wanted to go up to one of them and say I'm so sorry for your loss, and yet I didn't want to disturb their time of grief and remembrance. Even though it had been 5 years, it was obvious that their son was still greatly missed.

http://bonfire.tamu.edu/

I Fell in Love Again Last NIght......

You keep doing everything just right
You're the reason my heart keeps beating
And every morning it keeps repeating...
I fell in love again last night.....
(Forester Sisters, 1984)

Now, the next line says "when you kissed me," but in my case, we weren't even in the same room. In fact, E was outside and I was standing at the kitchen window. It was a PERFECT spring afternoon. It was one of the rare occasions when T didn't have soccer practice, and we had nowhere to go, so I told the boys they could go out and play for an hour before dinner.

E decided to go outside with them so I stood at the kitchen window and watched them play....K immediately went for his little car and T grabbed his soccer ball to show Daddy what he's learning in his private training sessions. It wasn't long before all 3 of them were laughing and playing and that's what caught my attention.....

There's something about seeing a man playing with his sons, even if it's just pushing the little ones on the swing or kicking the ball back and forth that I find appealing....maybe it's just because my dad, who as a truckdriver, wasn't home much and when he was was always too tired to spend a lot of play time with us growing up, that being a hands-on dad was a requirement for my husband. Whatever it is, even when I'm upset or frustrated with my hubby, all it takes is seeing him interacting with the boys and I see why I fell in love with him in the first place. Maybe that's why that afternoon was so important to me....I needed to once again be reminded of the man I chose to marry and spend my life with.

then I decided that dinner could wait and I grabbed my trusty camera and joined them outside, so that not only could I savor the moment, but also save it . My boys won't be this age for long and soon they may not want to spend time kicking a ball or playing with cars in the back yard.

The frustrations of a junior high teacher, part 2

Ok....it's the end of the six weeks and I'm grading unit tests. I teach Texas History and we've been studying Native Americans, and the Cattle Kingdom era. We've discussed the Trail of Tears, destruction of the buffalo, cattle drives, the invention of barbed wire and the difference between tenant farmers and sharecroppers to just name a few things. We've spent 4 weeks studying this and I really thought I'd done a pretty good job of sharing my vast knowledge about cowboy life. So naturally, I was quite perturbed when I read some of the following answers.....

• The purpose of a cattle drive is to help the cowboys stay in shape.
• The cattle drive is when we ride a cow from Texas to Louisiana so that the farmers can take their cotton to market. I'm not sure why they had to ride cows--what was wrong with their cars in the 1880's?
• The cowboys went on cattle drives so they could go somewhere fun and it was faster and cheaper.
• A cattle drive was the only type of transportation before railroads were invented.

What's really sad is these students are often pretty bright, and can "spit out" answers that I've given them, but when I asked them to think or to apply the knowledge, they can't do it.

*K* isms

I'm the absolute worst mom when it come to writing in baby books, but I want to remember some of the cute things my boys say, so I think I'll just write a few of them here......

**K has just recently become potty-trained and when we were at a soccer game, we were nowhere near a bathroom so I told him to potty on the tree. Now he thinks he needs to potty on every tree around. :o) This weekend I was looking at some houses online and commented that the backyard had a lot of trees. K got excited -- he clapped his hands and said "I can go potty on all those trees!"

**Last week, E called and said he was stuck in traffic so K and I were going to have to take T to soccer practice and K did NOT want to go! He kept saying, "oh no! what am I going to do? what am I going to do???" LOL--can you tell he's been watching Vegie Tales a lot lately??