Coco’s Favorite Things – Pt. 4
Coco's latest math video. The kids at school ask me every day how Coco is. I'd love to bring her to school, but the last time I did, and I am not kidding, she pooped in the hallway.
A little behind-the-scenes action:
Special effects extravaganza.
Editing late into the night.
Coco’s Favorite Things – Pt. 3
Okay, this might need a little explanation. Every week at my school I've been making a little reading, science, or math-related video that plays on the morning televised announcements. I make up some silly character and the kids love it and we all might learn something at the end of the day if we're not careful.
This week I did "The Number Ninja," co-starring Coco. It came out okay, but you know what they say about working with kids & animals. Each 3 or 4 seconds of her screen time was preceded by about 10 to 15 minutes of Carrie and I chasing Coco around the dining room table as she played "gotta catch me!"
And as I finally finished editing this beast together after hours of toil lasting late into the night, my tactful wife watches it and says "I like how you can see your underwear every time you get up … are you leaving that in?"
Showbiz!
Almost Famous
Happy Labor Day! I hope everyone is having a relaxing 3 day weekend like we are. After those first 2 weeks of school Chris and I really needed it. We also decided to have Coco spayed because we have heard this can be a pretty rough surgery and we wanted an extra day to take care of her. Here she is relaxing on her pain pills and enjoying being pampered.
I also wanted to share a fun story that some of you know that happened the first week of school, and I just now am getting around to telling it. On July 5th, as some will recall, Chris and I had a party celebrating the 4th and some girlfriends from school, our neighbor, and Coco took this pic below.
Me, Coco, Lydia, Heather, Stephanie
A few weeks later I get a call from Heather saying that she had just read about a contest where you can enter yourself and 3 of your friends to win a dinner with the famous Australian Chef, Curtis Stone, and if you won, you and your 3 friends would be featured on the Today Show. Heather of course had this picture of us from the party, so she thought she would enter us in the contest and send this picture in along with it. So we had to write a little essay saying why we deserved to have Curtis Stone come and cook us dinner. Lydia, Heather and I all work at the same school, but Stephanie doesn't, but we still wrote something saying why we as teachers deserved it. We just pretended Stephanie was a teacher as well. And before we sent it in we made sure Chris doctored it up a bit, being the good writer that he is, and off it went….
Flash forward to the 2nd day of school, and Heather gets a call from a producer at the Today Show. The girl proceded to tell Heather that out of 2000 entries we were in the top 7! We couldn't believe our ears! She needed us to send in some more information that day and we did it as fast as we could. She then basically told us that we had a really good chance of winning this because she loved our story, she loved Coco, and basically to get ready for Curtis Stone to come to our house to cook for us! She even talked to us about coming to our school to film us in our classrooms and how we may have to take the day off so that we can go shopping with Curtis before he does the cooking. We even got it cleared with our principal. In addition, she told us that if we did win they would come to town the very next week! That meant he was maybe coming to my house, to cook in my kitchen and all of us would be on the Today Show. Whoa! We were all in shock. We all wondered if this could really happen and of course started preparing. We all got together that night and pondered what we would do if we won. We wondered what we would wear, what would we say? We also had heard that the camera adds 10 pounds so we talked about eating only salads until our big debut ha! You name it, we were gonna be ready! And we would hear their final decision the next day, but honestly it felt like we had already won….
So, I am sure you can guess what happened…we got the call, and we didn't win. The producer told Heather it was such a hard decision and it was between us and another group, but they decided to go with the other contestant..blah blah blah. We figured that this was their normal speech that they told to all of the contestants who didn't win and we were disappointed to say the least. We then found out that the person that did win was a teacher from Frisco. That same morning the teacher was featured on the Today Show. They called her in her classroom live and told her that she had won the dinner with Curtis Stone! Her story that had won her the spot was that she was a new teacher and she had just moved to Frisco, and she had never used her kitchen before in her new house…our story was so much better!
So, my friends and I are all still waiting to see when this story will air on the Today Show. I wanted to share our almost famous story so that if you do happen to watch the Today Show and you see this story air then you can just know how much better it would have been if it was us! ha! Oh well, maybe next time! It was sure fun while it lasted.
Love,
Carrie, Chris, and Coco
First Week of School
Chris had a pretty easy first week because he has a new job at his school. He is the math and science instructional support teacher, so he does not have an actual class this year. He will be pulling kids to tutor and helping the teachers at his school, but for the first week he just helped out where and when it was needed. He's really enjoying it.
I took a few shots of my classroom, because I realized not many people have had a chance to see my room. I am in a portable, and I have only taught in the main building of our school once. I like the portables because you can control your own air! In the main building, the school district controls the air so it is either freezing or way too hot. That is one perk of being in a portable.
Got to have those helping hands! Kids LOVE helping the teacher. Some of my jobs for them if you can't see are, "Errand Angel", "Line Leader", "Hand-Out Hero", "Door Dude"-you get the point…
My great bookshelf, that is now even better because Chris gave me a whole bunch of chapter books he was not going to use this year.
And last but not least … our lil' miss Coco. She had a rough week because she missed us so much. Every morning we would try and say goodbye to her and she wouldn't even look at us. BUT when we got home she was SO excited to see us! To make her feel better I gave her this Hawaiian lei to chew up. I got it at a new nail place in town I tried out called Hawaiian nails – ha! But I told her that while she was chewing it up she can be dreaming of the day when Chris and I can retire and we will all move to Hawaii to live happily ever after. Hopefully that will help her not to be sad while we are gone. She seemed to like the idea.
Now if only we can all get through week two…
Love,
Chris, Carrie, and Coco
The End of a Great Summer
Chris and I have been having a wonderful summer and we are for sure sad to see it end. We head back to work tomorrow, not yet with the kids, but for lots of teacher inservice meetings and setting up our classrooms. Good thing we both went up to our schools last week, so we are done with our rooms. Yay! I used to love setting up my room and doing cute bulletin boards, but since I am going into my 7th year of teaching, I try to get in and get out! Ha!
We also both finished our summer classes for our masters programs. Chris has been doing his for a while, but this was my first class and it was hard! However, we both found out that we made A's so I guess our hard work paid off. Now I just have 33 hours to go! We will see how it goes while trying to teach at the same time …
Here is a kind of a long recap of what other activities we were up to the last few weeks of our summer!
In our last post Chris wrote about our July 19th wedding anniversary. It was a great 1st anniversary! The weekend of I was actually at my annual mother daughter trip (more on this in a minute) and so I headed back a day early to be with Chris on the actual day. To celebrate we went to a really nice sushi restaurant that I think started in New York, called Nobu. Chris and I have really been into sushi lately, we even try to make it ourselves occasionally, and this food was sooooo good! Of course, for us it is only a place we can go on very special occasions such as this. We had several courses of Sushi and then when we got dessert, this is what they brought out. I had kind of mentioned it was our special day. The flower reminded us alot of Maui, where we went on our honeymoon, and we wished we could have gone back there this summer. Maybe soon.
Before our anniversary, I was at my annual mother daughter trip. This was our 27th year to do the trip with the same moms and daughters. I am the youngest of the girls (28), the other girls are all 30, so we started doing this trip when we were all babies, and have not missed a year since. I could write a book about the history of mother daughter, how it started, tidbits about each and everyone who goes etc, but I will try and keep it short. However, as you can imagine, these moms and daughters are like family to me.
The people that go on the trip are my mom Chris, and sister Claire, Sherron and her daughter Holly, Val and her daughter Heather, and Charlotte and her daughter Katie.
Back Row: Heather, Val, Charlotte
Front Row: Sherron, Claire (my sister), Chris (my mom), Holly, me
Katie was taking the picture!
We started this trip when we all lived in Corpus Christi, and we would go to the beach for a few days together. When Charlotte and Katie moved away, we started going to Galveston which was closer to them. Then for a few years we floated the river in the Hill Country, and then for a few years we went to the lake in Austin. For our 25th anniversary we went to Telluride, Colorado, to hike the mountains, and now for the past couple years we have ended up back by the river in Wimberly, Texas. We are a group of mothers and daughters who love going places where there is water. We have gotten lucky in finding places to stay that have plenty of room for us to cook our meals, (every mom and daughter is assigned to different meals/days), and lots of room to spread out to talk and relax. Since this is the only time of the year we get to catch up, we do a lot of talking and a lot of eating!
This year we were back in Wimberly, Texas, to a place called the Seven Star Ranch. It is really just someone's vacation home that they rent out. It is by the river, but it is on several acres of land, so I think that is why they call it a ranch. Here are some pics of the weekend.
Heather and Claire
Katie and Charlotte making dinner.
Sherron, Claire, Chris, Holly
Candid shot of Sherron and Charlotte chatting. And a little bit of the huge ranch house.
This is why we love this house! The kitchen is big and open so we can all stand around and talk with the cooks!
A view from the porch. The river is many steps below!
Our own pool!
We had a great time this year, and I think we plan to return to the same house next year.
Jumping to a few weeks later….Chris and I then took a trip to Corpus Christi, for several events. One was my 10 year high school reunion, and the other was an anniversary present from my parents – tickets to see Willie Nelson, John Mellancamp, and Bob Dylan.
Here is a pic from the reunion party. Chris was such a good sport coming with me. I know spouses' reunions can be awkward when you don't know anyone! But we still had a good time and I had fun seeing old friends!
We didn't get any pics from the concert, because cameras were not allowed, but we had fun at that as well.
So in all Chris and I had a great summer and I guess we are as ready as we will ever be to head back to work!
But…..
… then again, what is Lil' Miss Coco going to do all day while we are gone?! With that face I may have to enroll her in Kindergarten so she can come with us! Ha!
Love, Carrie and Chris
Harper Comes to Town
We had such a great time this week with my family. My mom, dad, Aunt Linda, and sister Kelly all drove down to introduce Harper to her Grandma and Aunt Kathy & family. We had a gathering Monday night at our house and went down to Matt's in Lakewood on Tuesday night. Can't keep the fam away from that Bob Armstrong dip! And of course, the biggest reason everyone made the long trip was to meet COCO. You know it's true.
Coco, dad, Kelly, and Grandma take a break from eating my guacamole.
I've been working for the school district's bilingual department all summer and the ladies there are not shy about bringing in their homemade specialties. It's the greatest. They schooled me on making tortillas and guac. Last week they told me I'm now an honorary Mexican … but I had to inform them that yo soy Cubano, actually. Either way, viva la raza. Here's the basic guacamole recipe.
Holiday fun and Home Improvements
Wedding Weekend!
Chris and I had a wonderful weekend this past weekend because not only was it our lifelong friend Holly's wedding, but we got to take our new puppy, Coco, to meet my parents, Uncle Willy, sister and brother-in-law. We had a super time!
We arrived Thursday night after a very long 8 hour drive to Corpus. It made it even longer because we had Coco with us and had to stop a lot, but she was so good, we were so proud of her.
We had a nice dinner with everyone and got Coco set up. We also heard all about my mom's knee replacement surgery that she had just had on Tuesday of last week, so we were trying to get her to relax and put her foot up, but if you know my mom, she can never sit down! We tried our best. I personally did not get any pics on my camera of Coco meeting her extended family or my mom's knee, but Chris did with his new camera, so we will have to share those pics later. But, here are some pics of the wedding festivities.
Friday we went to the lovely bridal luncheon and it was so fun. Here are Holly, her Aunt Beverly (to her left) and her mom Sherron (right).
Here are the bridesmaids, houseparty girls, and her flower girl (the little blond girl in the front) and guess what?! her name was Harper! Reminded me of a little someone in our family! ha!
I know you may be thinking, what the heck is that thing? But actually this paper mache bride has alot of meaning because it has been at every bridal luncheon of all of our close family friends for the last couple of years. And for each girl's wedding, a little ribbon or symbol is placed on the bride to remember the occasion. So, I was the last girl who had her at my luncheon and there is a pink ribbon on her wrist to remember, so I think it is turning into a pretty cool tradition. However, being that this girl has traveled many places, she did indeed get some plastic surgery before her apperance at Holly's luncheon, so she should be set to now make it to many more luncheons in the near future! 
We also attended a really lovely rehearsal diner at Holly's house Friday night, but I must have been too busy to take pics. So we jump to the wedding night!
Holly and her husband Jason actually got married at the same place Chris and I did, the Art Museum, so some of you might recognize it. Here were her houseparty girls on a really pretty rock that Chris and I took many pictures on as well.
The happy couple!
And here is my brother- in-law, William, sister Claire, and another lifelong friend of ours, Heather. We were waiting to take more pics outside after the ceremony. And it was very windy! When is it not windy in Corpus?! Anyways, as you can see Holly had her bridesmaids wear black and her houseparty girls wear really bright colors. Then the flowers were super bright and gorgeous. It was a beautiful combination!
First dance!
Cutting the beautiful and yummy cake!
This picture is all of the moms and daughters that go on our annual mother daughter trip. We have gone for I think 27 years, so this summer will be our 28th. Isn't that crazy that we have made a point to make it work for so long? We have because we are a very special group of moms and daughters and we always have such a wonderful time together.
Also, here you can see my mom in her wheelchair with her leg propped up. My mom was so sad that she couldn't dance the night away with my dad, but we keep telling her that if she will let her knee heal, then no one will be able to stop her! ha! And it is true!
Hope everyone had a great weekend! I will get Chris to post the pics that he took with his new camera soon!
Congrats Holly and Jason!!!!!!!!!!
Love, Carrie