Happy Birthday sweet Rachel! I can't believe you are 9 years old! WOW!! You are becoming quite the young lady and we love you!
You've come along way from the first time we saw you......
Love your guts Rachey !!Here is a copy of an email that I sent to my daughter's teacher yesterday.
Mrs. Bingham,
This email is to let you know that Rachel will not be at school Dec. 1-3 because Mr. K**** is the substitute. I will not allow her to be in the same classroom with him. I have reasons to believe that he is "grooming" young girls at our school much the same as a child predator would, and I have to protect my child. I am sure that as a teacher you have taken a training all about grooming and are well aware of what I am talking about. If not, then go here and it will help you understand better.
http://www.amw.com/features/feature_story_detail.cfm?id=730
http://sexual-abuse.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_pedophiles_groom_victims
Here is my experience with Mr. K****: When my oldest daughter Meghan was in 2nd grade she was in Mrs. S********'s class and that was the year that she had her baby and had several subs over the course of a few months. Meghan would come home talking about how great Mr. K**** was and I wasn't worried until she started bringing home trinkets and other little toys that he had given to her for "being so good". These toys were always things that I thought were just dumb, but in hindsight, they were just the sort of thing that Meghan would've liked. For him to know this, he would have had to have several conversations with her about what she liked. That seems hard to do for someone who is supposed to be teaching a whole class of students. A few times he even gave her money to "buy a treat in the lunchroom", he wrote a note to her once and left it in her desk after she had missed a few days for being sick and told her in the note that he "missed her and hoped she was feeling better". Each time I got more and more concerned, but I didn't want to make a fuss. The final straw was the day that she was late meeting Rachel to walk home after school because Mr. K**** had asked her to stay in the classroom ALONE with him so that he could tell her how much he appreciated her being so good. When she and Rachel did get home and the story came out, I immediately got on the phone and called Mr. V******. I told him of my concerns and how I felt it was highly inappropiate for ANY teacher to be ALONE with a student let alone a MALE teacher with a young GIRL. He assured me that he would talk to Mr. K**** about it and that was the end of our conversation. I never followed up with him and I probably should have, but I also had a baby and life got hectic. I made sure and told my girls though, that if he ever subbed in their class that they were to call me immediately and I would come and pull them out of school. Meghan had told me that he had asked her our address, what color her room was, and all about our family. These are questions that NO substitute needs to know.
Fast forward to this last spring when the girls were in soccer. During one of Rachel's games, a few parents were discussing Mr. K**** and how they didn't like him based on how he treated their sons. One of the moms spoke of how he was rude and mean or sometimes just ignored the boys in the classrooms that he subbed in, but yet was super friendly and affectionate to the girls. Then she told of how once she had been there to volunteer and he was subbing. She left for a moment and came back to get her things only to witness Mr. K**** ALONE in a classroom with a couple of girls from the class he was subbing for while the rest of the class was at their prep class. Once again, he was ALONE with young girls when supposedly he had been told it was inappropiate. This mother's husband said that he had spoken with Mr. V****** also asking what could be done to not have Mr. K**** substitute at our school and was told "it couldn't be done". He said that he wrote a letter to the district expressing his concerns to them. I don't know anything further on that because soccer ended and I wasn't able to talk with those parents again.
Clearly, Mr. K**** is following a pattern. I am not being critical of you for choosing him to be your substitute. I am being critical of the fact that what he is doing is wrong and no one at our school is doing anything about it. I know that he did these same things at S*** ******* Elementary and because of teacher complaints, he has been banned from ever substituting there again. In fact, I personally spoke with Mrs. H*** the principal, and told of her of my experience with him. She knew about me because my friend was the PTA president there last year and my friend told her she should talk to me.
Please understand that I share all of this with you so that if you were not aware of concerns that parents have for this substitute, then you will know now. Also, if you could please gather all the work that Rachel will need for those 3 days and send it home with her so that she can work on it at home with me, I would appreciate that. Thanks so much for all you do for Rachel. She really enjoys being in your class. And thank you for reading this email.
Sincerely,
Jana S*****
So folks....what do ya think? Am I being too overprotective or am I doing the right thing. By the way I sent that email to the principal (Mr. V******) also. I am hoping to get a response from him. All Rachel's teacher responded with was three sentences. "I didn't know. I will not use him again. I understand why you feel this way." I didn't really expect more than that, because frankly I don't think she likes me or my daughter. That's not really the point. The point is that she needed to be informed and for some reason I felt like the principal just wasn't letting any of the teachers know about any complaints regarding this substitute.
I am shamelessly copying Cecily's "wordFUL Wednesday" (I usually do wordless wednesday, but it's too hard) and posting a picture and writing about it because I can't NOT talk about it! Am I weird or what?
This is my gorgeous girls taken in 2004. Long time ago, huh? I was reminded this week of how little they used to be. I was reminded in a weird way. You see...when they were adopted, they were ages 4, 3, and 20 months. They WERE little. Now they are ages almost 10, 8 1/2, and 7. Everyone always says that they think Meghan and Rachel look like twins because they are both blondies. Lately though I think it is Jenny and Rachel that are more like twins. Jenny, who used to be teensy tiny, is growing like a freaking weed and just won't stop. She is as tall as Rachel and they wear the same size clothes.
The problem is that I like to use the "pass down" method in clothes usage around here and her being the same size as Rachel completely SCREWS that up! Just this morning I had to go to the store and buy her a coat because she has outgrown her other one, but yet Rachel still fits just fine in the one she has and can't pass it down. So I had to go and buy one the exact same size as Rachel's for Jenny! ARGH! Stop growing already!
I just want her to be little again. Matter of fact, I want all of them to just be little again.
This weekend Mike picked some of our grapes and got the older girls involved in taking them off the stems in preparation for making juice. If Mike and I do that part, it always takes so much longer because we have to chase kids during, so we decided to offer more allowance as an incentive (okay, it was a bribe) to do that part for us. Meghan was pretty good about helping, but she would rather have been pretending she was married to Zac Efron than help and so she kept stopping and wandering away. Rachel, on the other hand, was gung ho and all about getting it done. She is kind of OCD though and this was the perfect job for her.
Anyway, we got 4 batches of grape juice done for our food storage (24 quarts) and will be sharing the rest of our grapes with a neighbor so that she can make juice for her family to use. 
What was funny was that during the time we did grapes, I was trying to catch up on the laundry and had washed Jenny's bedspread and hung it out on the swingset to finish drying. (I don't have a clothesline-wish I did!)
Well, Jonathan thought of a fun thing to do and him and Sidney took turns running under the quilt! It was pretty funny to watch.
* Did you notice that all the kids are wearing their BYU shirts? 'Cuz HECK YA- it's BYU time!!
I thought this was fun. I heard Sidney giggling and came out of my room to see Meghan and Rachel pulling her around in the laundry basket. You would have thought that they were the only kids in the world to think it up when they said, "Look Mom! Look what we are doing with Sidney"!
So, of course, then I HAD to show them that pulling a baby around in a laundry basket has been done by older siblings since probably the dawn of time! Here is my older sisters Amy and Marni pulling me around. And I was even the same age as Sidney is. Funny!
WOW! It has been a busy few days and I have been a loser in posting. Friday was Rachel's birthday and we celebrated by taking the kids to the zoo.
Here are some of my favorite pictures of Rachel through the years.
Happy Birthday Rache! We love you tons! ;))
At our house, dealing with "spectacles" is definately a "spectacle". 
I have completely lost count as to the number of glasses that my "sweet darlings" Meghan and Rachel have had and/or broken. Frankly it's too many to count. But since they need them to see and therefore function in society...We just keep getting them pair after pair after pair after pair.....
Anyway, Meghan's broke (she helped them along) right before her birthday, which is coincidentally, RIGHT before CHRISTMAS. So, for Christmas Eve, we went to Walmart and picked up her new ones. She likes them. They are Hannah Montana frames! That sentence had an exclamation mark simply because you need to imagine that a 9 year old is telling you that bit of information. I hear it a couple hundred times a day. (Oh yeah, Meghan is the blond on the left)
And Rachel's broke a week after Meghan's broke. These two have a tendency to do this sort of copycat thing. ANYWAY, we couldn't afford to buy TWO new pairs right at the holidays, so we taped Rachel's up (she broke them on the earpieces), and told her to hang tight for a month or so. Well, last week she and I went to Walmart and had her eyes examined. Her prescription has changed quite a lot. (That's probably why she couldn't see the board at school) And she also got her new glasses. They are Hannah Montana frames TOO! LIke, Oh my heck!
(Rachel is the blond on the right)
They are both thrilled and we are poor and we'll see how long these glasses last.
Rachel is my sometimes sweet, sometimes naughty 1st grader. She has a fabulous teacher that tries to keep her in line during the hours that she is not with me and I am keeping her in line.
I love her curriculum for 1st grade. Each of the kids has a notebook and each week they have a new letter and number and for their homework they have to create a page for that letter and number. She also gives a few guidelines. For example, they have to write the letter upper and lower case each 20 times. They have to have a border to their page and it has to be in color. They usually have to think of an animal that starts with that letter and either draw and label it or write a fact about the animal. A few times she has wanted them to do word lists. For the letter "g", they had to have a list with words that use the "hard g" sound and words that use the "soft g" sound.
This week they are on the letter "L". There were the usual requirements: write the "L" in both upper and lower case, think of animals that start with "L" and write a fact about them, write 5 sentences about things you love ("I love..."), and write as many words as you can think of that have double consonant L in them. Like: pillow, smell, etc.
Maybe you can see where this is going....
Rachel had a great list of words. She wrote: well, tell, will, bell, fill, call,pillow, shell, sell, spell. And then she showed my expert parenting skills with her next word. Can you think of what it was? Oh yeah! She wrote....hell.
I said, "Rachel honey, you can't write a bad word on your homework. Think of a different word please."
And then I walked away and laughed.
