It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas!

Cookies are EVERYWHERE! Have we ever told you about the insane deal that our school parents give us every holiday season? As a treat for the teachers, all of the parents of students at the "G" bake bake bake so that we can come to school one day, receive a bag, and be told to pick out "48 of our favorite cookies" from the loooooong table of homemade baked goods in our theatre. It's crazy. The funny thing is that the very next week, the parents of students at the "M" (what we are calling our schools so that our blog doesn't come up when our schools are Googled) do the EXACT SAME THING. What does that mean? Yes, 100 frickin' cookies in our apartment. GET THEM OUT or I will eat them all! So...what do we do? We feed Clay's advisees, we host a dinner party, we hand them our to our students...and we might just freeze one or two as a treat for later. Gotta love Christmas time!

So...this week has been busy with lots of grading and exam preparation, but this week is a short one for both of us as we head into exams and have a break from teaching for 3 weeks. It's amazing what this long of a break can do for us professionally (and personally). Teaching can be exhausting, so standing up in front of high schools for 5 periods a day, 5 days a week can really begin to make your head spin. But give us a few days to sleep in, read, and reflect, and we are good to go. Lucky for us, we get three whole weeks to do all that--and we can't wait to take advantage of it! Louisville, here we come! and then it's Blair's wedding in Chicago--beautiful!

Thursday night, Clay and I took his wonderful advisees out to Crust Pizza and then to Walmart so we could buy a 10 year old girl some Hannah Montana and High School Musical 3 stuff for Christmas. Seeing the guys play with all of the toys was pretty cute. And man, can they shop. They are in and out in less than 10 minutes flat. Wow. They know how to do it.

Friday night we hosted four dear friends for dinner--our first dinner party in our new apartment and with our new furniture. It went well, but I have to say that I have yet to master the art of dinner parties. Although I thought I had prepped a fair amount the night before and that afternoon, I still found myself in our tiny kitchen throughout the entire cocktail hour. One day I will learn how to host gracefully and actually be relaxed at our own functions. That said, our black bean and mango salsa, Valencia Shrimp and Scallops, green beans with roasted vegetables, fresh bread, pear and blue cheese salad, and fruit cobbler with vanilla ice cream went over pretty well, I think. Clay and I definitely had to take Camden for a walk when it was all said and done--we were stuffed.

Saturday brought more cookies! (See above). We went to church to help bake cookies for the caroling at nursing homes that the YAM's (Young Adult Ministries) did today. We couldn't actually sing due to the M football banquet this afternoon, but we had fun baking with some new friends.

The football banquet was very classy and touching--way to go, Clay, for two undefeated seasons in a row! After that, I headed to a new yoga studio in town for a free (holiday special) Yoga for Athletes class that was glorious. I have been trying to keep up my running even though its gotten colder outside and the CC season is over, so it feels good to stretch out my hips and hamstrings and spend some time really stretching. Love Yoga. I always feel so calm and centered when its over.

We had the dorm Christmas party tonight, and now Clay and I are going to watch another episode of the Office (Season 4--thank you, Brittany! We are LOVING watching an episode every night before bed!) and then head into our last week with the students before 2009! Awesome!

I'll leave you with a cute pic of the Cam-dawg:

So Many Books, So Little Time...Hmm, which one should I choose?

Is this our dog or what? :-)