Archive for January 9th, 2007

“I’ll Help You Teach”

I went into Mrs. Z’s second grade classroom this morning to pick up some children for a reading group.  Brad met me at the door and hugged me.

“You’re here to get me?”  Brad asked in his adorable lisp, his arms still hugging tightly to me.

“Not this time,” I replied.  “Since I got to work with you and Missy last semester, and since you both have become such great readers, Mrs. Z and I decided to let two other children read with me this semester.”

As I started to leave the classroom a few minutes later with the two new children, Brad walked out with us. He still didn’t understand.  I stooped down and explained again that he wasn’t going to work with me anymore - but that I was going to miss seeing him every day, and I was so very, VERY proud of him for graduating from my group, and I would still see him every day when I came to the room to get the other children.

Finally, he understood.  Smiling brightly with the idea of “graduating” from working with the reading specialist, he offered, “I can still come to your room - I can help you teach the other children.”

Quotes about brothers, sisters (siblings) and family

Since I’m looking for something to put on the top right of the header on this blog, I’ve read a lot of great quotes about siblings and family lately.  I wanted to share some of them here.  I found most of them at Quote Garden.

Quotations are great for condensing wisdom, humor and/or insight into a few words.  Forgive this long list, but read them all!  They’re so good…and so true:

Our brothers and sisters are there with us from the dawn of our personal stories to the inevitable dusk.  ~Susan Scarf Merrell

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago - the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider…. It doesn’t seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we’ve traveled.  ~Jane Mersky Leder 

To the outside world we all grow old.  But not to brothers and sisters.  We know each other as we always were.  We know each other’s hearts.  We share private family jokes.  We remember family feuds and secrets, family griefs and joys.  We live outside the touch of time.  ~Clara Ortega

If you don’t understand how a woman could both love her sister dearly and want to wring her neck at the same time, then you were probably an only child.  ~Linda Sunshine

Sisters are different flowers from the same garden.  ~Author Unknown

The family.  We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.  ~Erma Bombeck

Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others.  Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

Our most basic instinct is not for survival but for family.  Most of us would give our own life for the survival of a family member, yet we lead our daily life too often as if we take our family for granted.  ~Paul Pearshall

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.  ~Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Family faces are magic mirrors.  Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.  ~Gail Lumet Buckley

The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit.  No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child.  He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.  ~Pearl S.

I’m a rose in the family garden.  A few thorns here and there, but singular, sweet and not too hard on the eyes.   ~The Median Sib

Michael Moore and that odor in NYC on Monday

Funniest line I’ve heard in awhile . . .

“Michael Moore farts, and NYC goes on alert.”

Tiara-tip to Jane.

Day 1 of Framing the House - Looking GOOD!

The framers started today!  The lumber was delivered a couple hours late, and so they didn’t get as  much done as they’d hoped.  Nevertheless, from this picture, you can see where the bay window will be in the back - coming out onto the back porch.  The room in the foreground is the guest room we added to the plan which will be next to the garage.  By this time tomorrow, it will look like a house!  YEA!!!!

A new motto for THE MEDIAN SIB? “Nothing in the middle of the road . . . “

I’ve been looking for quotes that have something to do with middle/median/average to go on the right side of my blog header.  Here’s one I like:

“There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes . . . and dead armadillos.”

~Jim Hightower~

Don’t you love it?



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