Mrs. Moore's Musings

Hooray!  It's Memorial Day weekend which means not only a three day weekend, but it means that as a teacher and a mom summer break is clearly within my grasp.  So far, this weekend has been pretty awesome.  I went to the state championship soccer game yesterday, where my team did not win but they played hard, and they left everything they had on the field.  It wasn't the ending I wanted, but it was the game both teams deserved.  Today I have plans to hop in my kayak with my husband and daughter and see what we can find.  I also hope to explore some new bike trails up in Bentonville before it is all said and done.  I am on a mission to catch up on this X-Men thing so I can see the new movie. I watched the first one last night and I was impressed.  Who knows, maybe we'll have a movie marathon tonight after throwing some burgers on the grill and get all caught up.  None of this is revolutionary or exciting, but I am going to love every minute!...

Front page of the paper this morning Yesterday was Graduation Day!  Graduation day is my favorite day of the year.  As I was standing in the tunnel with my students, I told my principal it was like our Superbowl. I was wrong.  It is like the ticker-tape parade after your most favorite team in the world has won.  The parade isn't just amazing for the team in the parade, but also for the fans that show up, dress up, and get the honor of celebrating with the team they have stood by through seasons of trials-successes and failures-laughter and tears.  Graduation day is my favorite day of the year. I have attended a lot of graduations--five as a high school teacher--and therefore I have heard plenty of commencement speeches.  I have favorites (Aaron Harris) and I have some that I wish were shorter (not gonna tell), but they mostly have a similar feel to them.  Welcome, funny joke about how boring commencement speakers are, story about life, and finall...

My mom and my sister and I! I hate buying Mother's Day cards.  The one's with that faux-perfect handwriting font and embossed flowers with sentiments written by someone paid by the syllable.  I feel like they are designed for those TV moms who can deliver some profound lesson to her children in 23 minutes while never breaking a sweat or burning dinner.  My mom is not perfect.  It took me a long time to realize that my mom is a human being. When I was growing up, my parents divorced, and it took my mom a couple of tries before she met the man of her dreams.  It was really hard, watching my mom hurting because someone had hurt her, while she struggled to deal with two girls who desperately needed her because we were hurting too.  We moved a lot when I was little.  I am not 100% sure why, but as an adult now myself, I imagine the fact that we did not have a lot of money might have had something to do with that.  My mom sometimes embarrassed ...

Well, I survived.  I survived what may have been one of the most challenging week of my life in tact and still kicking!  It has been a crazy week of saying good-bye to my seniors, celebrating my son's last day of high school, enjoying and being amazed by my daughter and her friends' production of Hairspray!, and seeing my son and his dear friends off to prom!  I am telling you, when it rains it pours.  I have been running myself every which way, planning connections with no time to spare, missing said connections, relying on friends to get me through, friends continuing to amaze me by always coming through for me, and honestly, upon reflection, enjoying each memory that was made this week (even though in some of the pictures I could not stop crying long enough to get a good picture and I look like I am suffering from some terrible illness). Our handsome son ready for prom!  Now, this week will be slower.  I am going to focus on my juniors, getting the...

I freaking love baseball!  I love watching it on television (which almost never happens until the World Series, and then it is so late I become not very nice), listening to it on the radio (yep, if you pass me in my car and I am animatedly discussing something with no one, you know what's going on), but the very best of all is being there.  I love walking up to the ball park and seeing all the people in their sports attire. I love the food in the ballpark--the Crackerjacks and the Kettle Corn and those almonds covered in sugar are my favorites. I love that it is in spring so you are never sure what the weather will be. I love that perfect green and brown of the field.  I love that in baseball there is time for the fans and friends to wander in between innings, or discuss with their neighbor something either about the game or something totally random--and this is acceptable and expected behavior.  But, mostly I love the game.  I love that at any moment; someone ...

Beautiful Spring Day with these two amazing people! It is Easter Sunday.  I am blessed.  I have really thought about what to write about today.  It was a great week.  My students and I worked on their final Huck Finn projects, which ended up being hilarious, beautiful, and profound, just as Twain would have wanted.  I got to spend a little bit of quality time with my son, which is something I treasure more and more each passing moment.  I laughed with my daughter and one of her dear friends over ice cream as the days continue to amaze me with their beauty.  I do, indeed, cherish all these things, but that is not what has been on my mind as I have seen so many beautiful posts about the sacrifice and redemptive promises of Easter. As a human being, I label myself with many titles, mom, wife, teacher, daughter, sister, and friend.  I have failed at all of these things.  I am an extraordinarily flawed human being.  I have made so ...

My dad, my son and I after one of his first treatments  I want to start off with a huge thank you to everyone who took a second (some of you much longer) to pray for my dad (or offer your thoughts and wishes) over the last four months.  Some of you, I know, prayed for my mom and our family as well.  On Tuesday, April 8th we learned that my dad is 100% cancer free.  I will never forget reading that text, sitting by my dear friend, holding up the phone, and smiling with tears in my eyes.  I was not doing something that I loved (I was away from my students in a meeting), and I was having a kind of difficult day.  In fact, I had told my husband before I left how much I was dreading the day.  But, the  moment my phone buzzed, everything shifted.  The text was two sentences long, sent to my sister and I: "Best news ever! Dad is 100% cancer free!"  That is all it took, to change my entire day.  From the moment I got that text, all the ...