Long Overdue Update

Life has been so incredibly busy and so much has been going on that it was both hard to find the time to write on the blog and hard to know just what to blog about. So, sorry for not writing for two months. I suppose I will cover a little bit of everything. Michelle and I survived our Teach For America training in Philadelphia. It was the most intense 5 weeks of our lives. We averaged 5 or 6 hours of sleep on week days and that was because we had our lives prioritized a little bit differently than other people there. Lots of people were pulling all nighters left and right, we just cared too much about being able to spend time with each other and getting some sleep to do things like that. We planned lessons, went to workshops, taught summer school during the day, and squeezed in as much sight seeing as we could. We got to be in Phily for the 4th of July so that was cool. All in all it was great living in Phily for that little while. I am glad we don't live there now but it was nice to get to know that city a little bit. We lived in dorms at Temple University and had all you can eat meals at their cafeteria. And everyhting was paid for by TFA so it kind of felt like a vacation...a vacation that you had to work harder than you knew was posisble on. We moved to DC the last day in July. There was a bit of a situation with our apartment that we moved in to (I could write an entire blog dedicated to what happened) at first but the management of our apartment copmlex is phenomenal and paid for us to stay in a hotel while they prepared a bigger and better apartment for us at the price of our old one. To make a long story short, our management made up for a bad situation by giving us money, a bigger apartment, and just being really cool. We love where we live. We live in Alexandria VA, just outside of DC. We wanted to be able to drive places and not pay for parking everywhere we went to so we decided not to live in the actual district of columbia. Michelle and I both love our jobs teaching. I am the Spanish teacher at a junior high/elementary school. I teach Spanish I to eight graders and do an exposure type of class to the elementary school kids throughout the week. I see each lower grade level one time a week. It is really a lot of fun to get to work with kids of all different ages. I like teaching Spanish and I really love being a teacher. I am so glad that Michelle and I are doing Teach for America. We thought it about it and prayed about it long and hard whether we should do TFA and I am glad we followed our feelings and instinct and decided to do it. It feels so right to be out here, we both love our jobs, our ward and all the friends we have made here are amazing, and everything just seems to be going well. The one thing I could do without is the traffic on the way home from work, but I guess I can deal with that. Michelle is a first grade teacher. She loves her job also. She is much busier than I am because she has to prepare everything for her entire class everyday. I on the other hand only have to prepare one lesson for the day and I have enough planning time to just do it at school. I really have a great situation. Michelle likes what she does though and its worth the time and effort she puts into it. Everyday she comes home with cute stories of the things he kids do and say. Being a teacher is a very rewarding job. I have a picture that a third grader drew for me that says "You are cool." He is a Latino student that I have been helping because he is an ESL student (English as a second language) and is a little behind. It is really just a great job. I am excited to get to do this for the next couple years or maybe longer, you never know. Changing topics entirely, we love living in DC. There is so much to do and see. We want to do everything by the time we leave here in a couple years. Our ward does so many fun things together and we have made lots of friends. We have done some unique things to DC already as well. We have gone to Arlington National Cementary, a Nationals game, visited some mouments, visited the DC temple and things like that. We are hoping that our friends that live in other places will want to come visit us and stay at our apartment. If anybody wants to come, we have got an extra bed room for you! I will have to write a more in depth blog one of these days just on our apartment or our jobs or what we do for fun out here, because there really is so much that I have to say, but this is going to wrap up my blogging for now. This is my first blog since I decided to start blogging again, so this is good for now. Michelle is barbecuing some chicken on our new BBQ and it smells really good, so i'm outta here!