Winter Wonderland

Well, winter has been thrust upon me here with little regard for my feelings or mental well-being.  The first few major snowfalls resulted in quick melts within the next few days which I was particularly pleased with!  These melts happened usually the next day, always after I'd done a thorough job shoveling.  So this time I decided to not shovel and wait for it to melt.  Well... that was a bust.  The snow is still there and I am upset to say the least!  Perhaps if I can muster up the energy to pick up a shovel (that and I have somehow injured my back which prevents me from wanting to move around) I will TRY and make a path around my giant vehicle in the driveway.

This weekend has been a lazy one but still quite fun.  Thursday night Monika and Carmen and I attempted (I'd say fairly successfully) to make home-made sushi!  It was delicious and pretty fun.  Friday night was Brandi's birthday and we celebrated in typical Wemindji style, Pictionary and a sordid game of "Never Have I Ever".  Saturday I cleaned, organized, and stayed in as I promised myself one night where I did nothing (my favorite thing to do).

I didn't realize how soon Christmas (and Christmas break) was coming up!  I guess that week in Val D'Or really sped things along! This month of December will be super busy as we have the Christmas concert, Christmas Tea for parents and families in our classrooms, Staff Dinner, Secret Santa, birthdays and lots of other events coming up.  It is a few 5-day weeks smushed together (usually I abhor 5-day weeks) and there is so much to cover in those weeks as well as practice for the concert and prepare for all the social gatherings ahh!!

With the mail service being a little iffy at the moment, it is also hard to do a lot of shopping.  I worry that my things will not get here in time so I am going to leave the bulk of my Ontario shopping until I get home.  It will be a mad dash but I'd be really sad if I ordered things and they didn't arrive in time before I left for Oakville.  I have managed to get all my Wemindji shopping finished which is awesome and now the fun begins! Visiting the post office daily until all my million packages arrive!

Last week was my first week back after being away in Val D'Or and Oakville.  The kids missed me and I missed them!  The classroom was intact and really nothing was out of order which I appreciated! There is nothing worse than coming back to chaos and your stuff missing/all over the place so I was grateful!  The kids had fun with their supply teachers and I was able to pick up right where I left off!  It was a 4-day week with a data-oriented PED day on Friday.  As soon as we got back from lunch 2 hour scheduled power-out happened and everyone got to go home a little early.  Of course I had piles of marking to catch up on so I stayed behind.  It was kind of nice though, plowing through my work and organizing my classroom uninterrupted for a couple of hours!  This Thursday night I will probably decorate my classroom with all the fun Christmas stuff I picked up in Oakville and Val D'Or and do my Christmas door!  I can't decide on what I will do.  I have 2 ideas, one recycled from a previous year that I had stolen from a colleague in teacher's college and one of my own.  Either way they will be super cute.

Last week I also introduced my class to their new classroom pets!  As a reward for excellent behavior (and I needed to NOT have 6 hamsters in my living room) I brought 2 hamsters into the classroom as our new pets.  The kids were ECSTATIC.  I knew naming them would be an ordeal so I had everyone pick one name for a girl and one name for a boy.  We threw them into two separate baskets and drew fairly to see what the names for our new pets would be.  We came up with Nick and Mary.  Now, don't get me wrong.  Nick and Mary are two very decent, classic, respectable names.  Just not the kinds of names I personally would have named hamsters, nor expected a class of 7 year-olds to name hamsters.  There were some golden picks like October, Awesome, Princess and Boy but fair is fair and we have Nick and Mary. Nick is very sweet, loves to be held and seems to like the kids.  Mary is perma-afraid, pees whenever I touch her and generally hates the world.  So we'll see!!  We have a new chapter book we are reading together about a classroom pet hamster which is really cute and I am excited to embark on tons of creative writing opportunities about these new guys!  I am still waiting on a kind gentleman to come and pick up his two hamsters and then I will be down to 4 hamsters.  JUST 4 HAMSTERS YAY...  Still praying none were early developers and procreated before I could separate them. 

Anyways, I have a full schedule today, putting up my Christmas lights, MAYBE chopping down a Christmas tree for my living room, cleaning my 6543 hamster cages, decorating my house?  Who knows. 

Current set up

Nick!

The elusive Mary

My arm was twisted, I had to hang this.

My first home-made sushi!

Wemindji before it gets covered in 3 feet of permafrost.

4:30pm. There is snow everywhere now.

Get Comfy.

What a crazy couple of weeks it has been since I last poured my heart and soul out onto this page! 

First of all:  allow me to update you on the hamsters (since I know that is the main reason why anyone reads this anyways, correct??).

I still have 6 in my possession. 
- Carmonika, the original (who looks permanently shell shocked whenever I open her cage),
- 2 blind hamsters (I will elaborate),
- and 3 "normal "(putting that incredibly loosely) babies.

Carmonika I will keep forever.  I have found a home for a blind one and one of the other male hamsters with eyes.  I will keep the second blind hamster and two "regular" ones for my classroom pets. 

OKAY so let me explain the situation with the blind ones.  I THOUGHT I had 2 albino hamster babies because they were pure white and never opened their eyes!  So cute!  Well upon further investigation I realized that they in fact HAD NO EYES.  I did some quick internet research which revealed a genetic abnormality that occurs in these kinds of hamsters due to bad breeding.  Well, "bad breeding" should be the middle names of all of these babies due to how often they like to practice jumping to their deaths from human heights but I will leave that one alone for now.  So basically I couldn't give the blind ones to a pet store knowing they would likely become snake food so they had to stay.  I tried unloading the two regular hamsters I had left in pet stores in Oakville and on friends but no luck!  So I decided to bite the bullet and keep 3 babies (one blind one at home and 2 in the classroom) and give 2 others away to a gentleman in a nearby community.  So now I have DEFINITELY paid for a lifetime membership in the Singles Club and have accepted my fate as the crazy hamster lady.  Thanks guys.

Okay, second thing.  I was going to separate the kids before I left but found out 2 weeks old was too early.  I was able to clean the cage and let the babies out in their playground for a stretch of the legs which was super cute!  It was too early to tell who were boys and girls so I had to leave that until before I left last week (more on that in a second).  Now I THINK I have identified their genders but I definitely had a boy and a girl in the same cage for a period of time and chances are they have mated and I will have 3 billion blind hamsters running around my house.  Honestly, when will my life become easy like the movies? 

Okay SO moving on from hamsters.  Last week Monika and I were offered the last-minute opportunity to go on some Nelson math and literacy training in Val D'Or.  This training took place at the end of last week.  Since last Monday was a holiday and Tuesday was a travel day for the training, we were taking, we decided to make a little "vacation" out of it.  SO Monika and I left on Friday right after work and drive to Oakville and squeeze in a quicky visit with family before heading to Val D'Or which is equal distance from Wemindj (so no extra driving other than down to Oakville).  We made it pretty much intact as the roads have now been affected by the northern winter and were able to spend some quality time with family.  It was a short but sweet visit, I managed to get some wonderful shopping in for Christmas in the classroom and some quality time with BOBO! Then on Tuesday morning we booted it to Val D'Or to check in at our gorgeous hotel The Forestel and explore all that Val D'Or had to offer!

The training was very useful and I learned A TON about guided reading, guided writing and took home some great ideas about using a particular math program in the classroom.  It was a small group comprised mostly of department heads and consultants with a few teachers thrown into the mix.  We shared some great ideas and overall it was a very useful training.  Hearing stories from other schools made me realize (again) how lucky I am to be working at MES in Wemindji.  We have such a dynamic and creative staff and the students are working at full capacity to be successful.  I am so proud of the hard work we as teachers do every day and even more proud of our students for rising to the occasion and trying their hardest to meet the high expectations of the GVC and those which we set for them.  We met a bunch of AMAZING people and friends for life and heard some incredibly hilarious stories about other communities.

Anyways, thanks to my amazing supply teachers, I am looking forward to going back to an intact classroom and good reports.  There are only 6 weeks until Christmas break and it is going to be INCREDIBLY busy with introducing a new guided reading program into my classroom, digging deep into new, fun writing tasks, organizing and participating in the Christmas concert and taking over the school's Breakfast Program officially with Monika.  Oh and raising my grandbabies and possibly my great-grand babies.  Stay tuned.

5:30 on the James Bay Highway - PITCH BLACK.

Babies! The two bottom ones are the blind ones...

Road trip with the hamily!

First civilized meal.  Obligatory McD's stop

Dollarama weeps when I am done with it.

Letting Mama drive the beast.  She found it empowering.  As do I.

OMMMMM

Weather whiplash.

Last supper with my family.  Delish!

My SWANKY hotel room at The Forestel last week!!

I honestly cannot hype Mike's up enough.  I LOVE MIKES.

LOVE MIKES

The Haul - not all mine proud to say!

I hit a bird.

Oh and Flat Stanley came along for the ride.

My lovely note from my wonderful hammy-sitter Carmen!

The new (temporary) set up.  Ladies in the penthouse and gents in the bachelor pad.

My clear driveway. Ahh.

The Unveiling

2 WEEKS!!  2 weeks have come and gone (tomorrow technically but I can't wait any longer!) since my grandhammies have been born.  So much has happened in the past week.  They grew hair! They grew teeth!  They grew eyes!! They wander around the cage, stumbling and bumping into things, exploring what the new world has to offer!  So cute.  I figured it was time to separate when I: a) realized I could no longer control my impulses to cuddle these babies and would need to take care of it stat, b) I saw them eating food pellets (they can survive without feeding off Carmonika) and c) I have to cuddle them.

Carmonika seems to be doing a good job as mother, I feel bad taking her babies away from her but I have to think of the children.  It is getting tight in their house and soon I need to separate the babies further by gender so they don't reproduce!  However that wouldn't be the most upsetting thing to ever happen...

That being said, the MOST upsetting thing DID happen.  This Friday night was the staff Halloween party.  It was awesome, lots of fun with a theme of Superheroes and Villains.  I, of course had the best costume going as The Hamburglar but people really went all out!  It was a lot of fun, good games, good music and great company. ANYWAYS. It was blizzarding that cold and stormy night and I should have known something awful was about to happen (as when it snows something terrible usually is happening in my experience anyways).  As I came home I put down my things, got changed out of my costume into more comfortable attire, grabbed some water and went over to the cage to check on the kids.  I was greeted by a terrible sight.  One of the babies had DROWNED in the water bowl.  DROWNED!!!!! I was DEVASTATED.  I still am.  So so sad.  I remember this baby being a rambunctious chap, running around the cage chased by Carmonika trying to pull him back into the house.  He obviously got a little too explor-y and tried to take a dip in the water dish.  The hamsters are quite small right now so even the small amount of water in a small dish was too deep to climb out of and this poor little feller died :(  So I immediately got him out, cleaned up and refilled the dish with just a small amount of water, hopefully shallow enough that there would be no more casualties. So far so good but the damage has been done. 

I can say with confidence now that I have 5 babies left, 3 albinos and 2 grey/brown ones.  They are adorable and I can't wait to let them run around their fenced in yard and play with their new toys!! And cuddle them of course.  I've got a home for one of them, 2 will go as classroom pets (I have to secure permission first but I think it'll be fine) and that leaves 2 more.  I might keep one for myself but I need to get another cage if that's the case and I am still waiting on an express order from an online pet store with a cage included so that needs to happen! I have to assume that 2 died of natural causes although we will see if I find any teeny bones when I clean the cage tonight.  Ehhh... :S

Otherwise another busy week has passed.  Halloween with the kids was hectic but very fun.  Carmen, Monika and I didn't get very many trick or treaters this year (it was a wet kind of night and we weren't in the best location) but it was fun nonetheless.  Report cards are due this week and I haven't started so that's going to be a lot of fun but that's the life!! Christmas vacation starts in 7 weeks and I am very excited to drive home and visit with all my friends and family and enjoy some time off! 

Last night Carmen, Brandi and Shauna's students held the first of many fundraisers for a summer trip to Nicaragua.  These ambitious and awesome teachers are organizing a trip through Me to We to South America with some high school students to participate in community improvement projects that will benefit that particular southern region and enhance the lives of the locals as well as provide Wemindji students with a life-changing, character building experience.  The monetary cost is high so fundraising has begun on a grassroots level and all help is appreciated!  Contact me if you want more details! 

Anyways I am going to spend the day cleaning, cooking, maybe starting report cards and celebrating the extra hour of sleep I got (although I spent it with a splitting headache so really it counts for nothing).  Oh yah, it hasn't stopped snowing since last week so my hermitism has officially begun!

Dirt pudding for the kid's Halloween party! Yum!

Class-designed pumpkin

My November door! See a theme....

Burgling ALL the burgers.

Monika was Super M! (Or, Marsha's sidekick... HA)

OAKVILLE represent!

Two of the babies!

More babies!!

BABIES!!

EEE!!

Delicious fundraiser takeout made by Carmen, Brandi and Shauna's students.

Hard at work cooking up orders raising tons of money!

My life.