Letter to my Dad

Dad,

Since I was a little girl, my time spent with you has always been precious to me.  Although you’ve traveled for work throughout my entire life, I don’t know another dad who has spent more time with his children than you have.  Despite your traveling you’ve managed to do so many things for me and for our family.  You have taken our family on countless vacations, and all of them are cherished memories of mine that I will have forever.  I can’t count how many times you made it home from a business trip just in time to leave for an away basketball game to watch me cheer, or to drive me hours away for a horse show.  You’ve always been there for me when I’ve needed you.  You may think that it goes unnoticed, but I promise you that I notice and I promise you that I appreciate how much you’ve done for me. 

You’ve bent over backwards for me for 22 years Dad, but you’ve also given me something much more precious than that, something that many children don’t get in a father.  You have always believed in me and you have always loved me.  Never once have I doubted that you love me, and never once have I doubted that you would support me in anything I want to do.  I know that you will always believe in me and that means more than you can imagine.  You are one of the few constants in my life.  I move from Arkansas to Illinois and back and forth.  I am constantly making new friends and saying goodbye to old ones.  But I know that I can always turn to you for support and that you will always be there for me with your humorous wisdom.  You’ve encouraged me to make my own decisions, and to make them the right ones.  If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t be the strong and independent person that I am today.  I love you so much Dad.  I am so blessed to have you as my father. 

~Kelsey

Christmas Time!

It is officially Christmas time and I am so excited that it is!  Christmas by far my favorite holiday.  I love all of the beautiful lights and decorations.  I was able to go home over Thanksgiving break and help my family decorate our house.  In our family it is a tradition to play Harry Connick Jr. and sing as loud as we can to the songs while we decorate our tree.  Some would say that our tree isn't "beautiful" as far as all the ornaments that we put on it, but I think that our tree is the very definition of Christmas.  We don't have a single ornament on our Christmas tree that doesn't have a story or a personal meaning to someone in our family.  Each of us has certain ornaments that we put on the tree with a smile because of the happy memories that the ornament brings to our mind.  Christmas is all about family to me and our tree definitely represents family.  My favorite part of the season is that I get the chance to go home for a few weeks and just spend some much needed time with my mother, father, sister, and brother.  I miss them so much during the school year and I think that may be what brought about my great love of Christmas. 

My Memoir

I had to write a memoir for a class and I was told to post it on my blog, so here it is :)

Moving to Illinois

When I was nine years old, my family moved to Lawrenceville, Illinois.  I remember many things about this move.  My mother, bless her heart, took her three children (ages 3, 7, and 9) house hunting by herself.  My dad travels a lot for business and wasn’t able to make this trip with her.  We drove from house to house looking at so many different ones.  After about house number two all of us kids were shot, but we kept going until mom found one that she loved.  Want to know what the one she loved looked like to me?  We walked in and there were dog cages all over the place.  They were stacked up on every single wall, and we had only gotten through two rooms.  Of course, being a dog lover, I loved the idea of moving to a house with all these dogs!  Little did I know the dogs wouldn’t come with the house.  Now I’m sure you are wondering, “Why all the dog cages?.”  Apparently the owners bred dogs for a living.  The sad part is that they didn’t take very good care of them and there was mess all over the house.  But my mom didn’t care.  She had fallen in love with all of the solid oak floors and the huge oak beams in the ceilings and the oak staircase.  All she could see was wood everywhere and that is how we decided on the house!

After finding the house, Mom and Dad went back up to look at it together.  “It’s a fixer upper alright,” I remember Dad saying.  But Mom had fallen in love with this 100-year-old house, so Dad gave in.  Next thing I knew, we were off to this new (but very old) house!  My sister Shelby and I couldn’t wait to get out of the car after our eight hour drive to the new house.  We jumped out and ran inside to get dibs on the good bedrooms before anyone else could.  At 9 and 7 years old, this house looked huge to us.  There was a basement, a main floor, a second floor, and a full sized attic!  We explored that house like it was a foreign country.  We found a laundry chute that went all the way from the second story to the basement!  We had fun with that for hours.  One of us would stand at the top and the other at the bottom and we throw all sorts of things down that laundry chute.  Mom had to put a stop to that, though, after we tried to send my little brother down it.  Oops!    

Shelby, Scott and I noticed that Mom and Dad had placed all the mattresses in one room until they could get all the beds put together.  The three of us made the coolest mattress fort that anyone had ever seen.  After that though, our new neighbors came over to welcome us and help with the moving process.  They had a son about my age and he started to take the mattresses and ride them down the stairs!  I couldn’t believe this boy would do that, but soon we all joined in and had a great time.  Until the parents put a stop to this as well. 

The best thing I remember about the move is the first night in the new house. I remember getting the bedrooms put together, but our living room and our kitchen were still empty.  We sat in our living room that night with no TV and no phones, and we ate pizza together (because we couldn’t cook yet either).  We talked about the day and about moving and leaving all of our friends and about starting our new life and new school.  My little brother took it the hardest, but we all had such a great time that day.  That is one day in my life I will never forget. 

First Time

    Ok, so this is my first blog post ever.  A little bit about myself.  Hmm, well my name is Kelsey and I'm 21 years old.  I am in early childhood education major right now and just started the Teacher Ed. Program at Harding University.  I absolutely love school and so far I am loving all of my classes this semester.
    Alright, now that the introduction is out of the way, let get to the point of this blog.  I created this blog as an assignment for a class.  The class is about teaching writing to early childhood level (Pre-K through 4th grade) students.  On the first day of class, my professor came in and just as I expected her to, she talked to us about the importance of writing for children.  I already knew this, we all know writing is an important thing for children to do, but just like all the other things that are good for our kids (veggies, brushing their teeth, taking a bath), they hate to do it.  How do we get them to enjoy writing?  Well, it is only the second week of class so I haven't gotten that far yet. Haha.. BUT, I have learned that you can't teach anything well that you aren't comfortable with and that you aren't passionate about.  If we want our children to stop thinking of writing as a chore, we should SHOW them how much fun it can be.  The only way to do that is to write ourselves.  If we pound the importance of writing into our students and then give them a prompt or a theme to write about and go sit at our desk and click away on the computer, they aren't going see the importance.  We as teachers need to lead by example, we need to write so that they can see us doing it.  We also need to share our writing with them.  If they see us writing, they are going to want to do it too.  That way we can say "Do as I do" instead of "Do as I say, not as I do."