Thirty years ago this month, we made a life transition. I left my jobs at Johns Hopkins Hospital as a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner and Johns Hopkins University as an adjunct nursing instructor. My husband left his job in Delaware at the Nemours Children’s Hospital in Newark and we moved, “home” to Buffalo, New York. We…
Slice of Life Tuesday: Early Decorating
It’s not even December yet, and my tree is up and decorated! I am impressed with myself, can’t you tell? For a lot of reasons, I’ve never decorated this early. My husband has a mid-December birthday and I usually aim for having the house decorated by then. The tree usually stays up until just past…
Holiday Cactus Resource on TpT
Few probably know that I have some classroom resources on the Teachers Pay Teachers website. My user name there is Garden Club Lessons. I taught an after-school garden club for 13 years at the elementary school my boys attended. For the most part, I researched topics and then developed my own lessons. It’s not anywhere…
Silent Sunday: Randomly Forgotten Photos
Poetry Friday: Simple Gifts
Music played a large part in my early life. As elementary students, we were introduced to Orf instruments in third grade, playing wooden xylophones and more as part of our music class. Choosing an instrument came in fourth grade, and I chose the flute, mostly due to my diminutive size. Due to the instruction on…
Gratefulness
It’s been a weird fall. There were days that have been very hard, such as the first day I saw my mom on a respirator in ICU. Or, the day we had to fly emergently to New York because she was in ICU. The day she was admitted to a nursing home, and then, the…
Silent Sunday: Autumn in Many Places: Wisconsin, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New York
Poetry Friday: Poems Borne of Experience
Ten years ago, during the summer of 2011, my eldest son participated in the National History Day contest with a friend. Let me be clear, they were in the national part of the contest. This meant that they had participated at the district level, the regional level, the state level, and were selected to go…
Traveling While COVID is Still Raging
Today, I’m going to offer some tips on things we did to protect ourselves while traveling during the COVID 19 pandemic. We traveled three times in 2021 to see my parents in western New York, twice by car and once – the last time, in an emergent situation – by plane. The trip from Wisconsin…
The Tradition of Sending Christmas Cards
I’ve spent considerable time this morning making our Christmas cards. I’m not physically making them but digitally constructing them on Shutterfly. No, this is not an advertisement for Shutterfly. I use their site because I am used to it. Each year, in March, I make family calendars through their software. And, I occasionally order a…