Stink Face

One of Maelin's best tricks (I think) is her "Stink Face." It's so adorable...

She doesn't do it much, but when she does, it's guaranteed to get you laughing. No matter what kind of mood you're in, her stink face is so funny and cute...and she knows it! If she feels like making the stink face for you (and she doesn't do it often, so when she does it's a big treat), she'll hold it for about 2 seconds and then burst into a gorgeous, toothy grin. She knows it's a cute trick and she knows that it's totally adorable when she does it so she can't help smiling and laughing at you afterwards!

It's been real hard for us to get a picture of Maelin's stink face because she doesn't do it very much, but we finally got one. We were getting her to make it for Kevin during dinner the other night and I happened to have the camera sitting on the table so I was able to whip it out and take a picture of her stink face. Now remember, she's doing this because she knows its funny and in about .5 seconds, she's going to burst into laughter because she knows how cute she is. I didn't get a picture of the giggling, just the stink face...Enjoy!!

Maelin and her Good Friend Gizmo

Here's a picture that tells what a good kitty Gizmo is...



Maelin LOVES Gizmo...a bit too much sometimes. If you've ever met Gizmo, you know he's much more than a cat. He's a dog, a manatee and a huge lover boy. He loves any sort of attention: even the hitting, pulling tail, slapping and laying all over kind.

We are lucky to have such a sweet boy for Maelin's first pet. She adores him and he can't seem to get enough of the hitting, patting and pointing. Maybe someday he'll have enough, but for now they are both pretty happy with each other...

Christmas Presents Are Starting To Arrive!!

I'm teary-eyed as I write this because I just can't believe the generosity of people but I know this might help brighten your day as well.

I went into the office today and waiting for me was 3 boxes of brand-new school supplies from people I'VE NEVER MET!!! Pencils, Eric Carle (author of Very Hungry Caterpillar) Drawing and Writing Books, Paper, Crayons, etc... all from people I've never heard of before who read my blog post or my email and wanted to help out.

It's amazing. My principal and the school secretary were all smiles this morning and talking about the generosity of complete strangers. I can't WAIT to create gift bags with all our stuff for each of our kiddos.

I will be sure to take plenty of pictures of all the stuff with our kids when we get everything together. I want everyone who is considering donating something or has already sent their gift to know that my kiddos and I thank you from the bottom of our hearts and we are so very excited!!!

What an amazing day!

What My Class Wants For Christmas...Can You Help?

I work in a very impoverished school district. At last count, my school is over 94% free and reduced lunch, 74% Hispanic, 22% White, and our annual residential turnover (how quickly kids come and go) is 26%.

To put that into perspective, the school that is by my house (which Maelin will probably go to) is 26% free and reduced lunch, 9% Hispanic, 85% White, and our annual residential turnover is 4%.

To put it bluntly: I have 26 8-year-old kids. 7 of them are homeless: they either live in shelters or with other family members. Most of them don't have their own coats, boots or enough food to eat at night. 5 of my kids' families have lost their jobs recently in the tough economic times we are facing and their futures look even more bleak. The school lunch and breakfast that we serve every day is the only times a few of my kids even get to eat. Five of my kids have family members (a mom or dad or brother) in jail, 2 just lost their cars and have no transportation and the vast majority of my kids don't have enough books, pencils, paper or even crayons at home to do their homework.

It's not that the parents are deadbeats or don't care: I've met all my parents and you've never seen a group of parents that are more devoted to their kids and passionate that their kids MAKE IT: they want their kids to rise above their situation and become better than they themselves have it.

I'm making a passionate plea to all of you: I know we are all tightening our belts this holiday season, but if you could find it in your hearts to sponser a child so this Christmas every child in my class gets at least one present this holiday, I would be eternally grateful. There is nothing more heartwarming than the smile on a child's face when they are used to getting nothing (which reinforces to them that they don't matter and they don't deserve anything) and someone, somewhere, shows that they care about that child and that they MATTER to someone.

I've included some sayings from my kids' writings when I asked them to write about what they hoped for this holiday season: (I didn't edit their responses...)

"...I need some socks because all mine have holes in them."

"...I would like two blankets because my house gets cold."

"...I would like a dol becasue I really want one."

"...in the store, I would like new shoes."

"...I need some pencils at home because I don't half any and I half to wait until my couzin is done with his homework. Also his homework has a lot of pages to do and it takes forever and ever and I don't get to finish not much of my homework."

"...a beautiful, red, sparkly dress. Like a princess."

"a Bratz Babby"

"Operation Hulk"

"...a bike so I don't have to share with my brother and cuzzin."

"...I would like a nice dress that comes with a crown."

"...chapter books at home because I can onlee read the baby books of my brother."

Here's the deal: We'll take anything EXCEPT cash/checks. Gift cards to Wal-Mart would be the most helpful because we could trade them in for gifts and the Wal-Mart here in Commerce City gives us tax-exempt status. We'd also love any chapter books, school supplies, etc. My student teacher and I will take care of making sure every child in my class will get something new this Christmas.

Please send what you can to:

Alsup Elementary School
c/o Mara Corzine
7101 Birch Street
Commerce City, CO 80022

Again, thank you for caring about these kids. Anything you can send us will be greatly appreciated!! Let's show these kids that people do care about them and that they matter!!

"What I Know About Women"

My friends and I got together last week for a bit of wine, cheese, bread and grapes (yummy!) and while we were there, one of us had ripped this out of the O! Magazine that Oprah produces.

It's got some pretty big words, but if you read it (yes, we had to re-read a few of them a couple of times to understand what he meant), it is so powerful and affirming. Hope you enjoy! (it made for a lot of good conversation around the bread/cheese/wine table! We had a great time discussing these and all of us had a personal connection to most of them...)

WHAT I KNOW FOR SURE -by Mark Leyner on Women

1. Even little girls, in all their blithe, unharrowed innocence, have a presentiment of sorrow, hardship and adversity…of loss. Women, throughout their lives, have an intrinsic and profound understanding of Keats’s sentiments about “Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu.”

2. This sage knowledge of, and ability to abide, the inherently fugitive nature of happiness somehow accounts for the extraordinary beauty of women as they age.

3. Women have an astonishing capacity to maintain their equilibrium in the face of life’s mutability, its unceasing and unforeseeable vicissitudes. And this agility is always in stark and frequently comical contradistinction to men’s naively bullish and brittle delusions that things can forever remain exactly the same.

4. Women are forgiving but implacably cognizant.

5. Women are almost never gullible but sometimes relax their vigilance out of loneliness. (and I believe most women abhor loneliness)

6. In their most casual, offhand, sisterly moments, women are capable of discussing sex in such uninhibited detail that it would cause a horde of carousing Cossacks to cringe.

7. Women are, for all intents and purposes, indomitable. It really requires an almost unimaginable confluence of crushing, cataclysmic forces to vanquish a woman.

8. Women have a very specific kind of courage that enables them to fling themselves in to the open sea—whether it’s a new life for themselves, another person’s life, or even what might appear to be a kind of madness.

9. Women’s instincts for self-preservation and survival can seem to men to be inscrutably unsentimental and sometimes cruel.

10. Women never—no matter how old they are—completely relinquish their aristocratic assumption of seductiveness.


And here is one last thing I know—and I know this with a certitude that exceeds anything I’ve said before: that men’s final thoughts in their waking days and in their lives are of women… ardent, wistful, thoughts of wives and lovers and daughters and mothers.

Maelin's New Toys

One of the reasons we decided to sell our wonderful house in Wash Park was because it was 950 sq feet and had no backyard for Miss MaeMae to run around in. My dream was that she would have a yard with a swing set, sandbox, tricycle, etc. to play with.

Our new house has a great backyard with a covered patio, but we were severely lacking in toys for our little one. We got her a swing that we hooked up to the covered portion of the patio, but that was about it. Since she really enjoys just playing with the dirt and pine cones of our yard, we figured we had till next spring to really furnish the yard properly for her.

We were looking around at different swing sets and sandboxes for her: possibly xmas or bday presents since they are very expensive! We were thinking that we would get her a sandbox for xmas...

Then some friends of friends moved into a huge house and they just happened to have a swing set in their backyard that they weren't going to use: AND a sandbox! Both were in very good (used) condition and they said we just needed to come pick them up and they're ours! So exciting...

We went down last weekend and loaded up the swing set (complete with slide, glider, double swing and weird screwy-thing that you stand on and twirl) and the froggy sandbox (complete with very clean sand!) into Papa Dan's truck and we were on our way! Uncle Chad and Aunt Jess came down from Loveland and along with Uncle Jeff, we all set up the swing set in the backyard and filled up the froggy sandbox.

Maelin is in business!

She LOVES the swing set and the sandbox. Right now, she has a good ole' time sitting in the sandbox and dumping the sand everywhere...she runs right to it and pulls the cover off and jumps in and just grins and giggles. She also loves her swing set. It's a bit big for her but it's in good enough shape for her to grow into it and she loves going down the slide and swinging on the "big girl swings."

We are so lucky to have such good friends that help us take care of our little one! Here are a few pictures of Maelin enjoying her new swing set: as my brother says, we've really turned into the suburban family now!



Our new swing set!



This is Maelin with Aunt Jess enjoying her new swing set right after we had set it up.


Maelin decided she wanted to try out EVERYTHING on her new swing set...she went right down the line and Aunt Jess went with her. :-)




This has nothing to do with her new toys but she sure enjoyed playing in the leaves last weekend while Daddy was raking up 12 big garbage bags of them! That's what you get when you move to a house with established oak trees!

Obama Wins!!! How Far We've Come...

I was more proud to be an American last night than I ever have been in my whole life. Barack Obama won the Presidency by a LANDSLIDE. Even in my wildest dreams, I never thought the race would be so one-sided. At current count, it was Obama 349 to McCain's 162 electoral votes.

Even if you were a McCain supporter or you just didn't agree with Obama's policies, I hope you were able to take some pride in the historical night. We elected an African-American to the highest office. Now every parent can TRULY tell their sons and daughters, "This is America...you can be anything you want to be" and mean it.

I'm not going to go into a long tirade about how I think Obama is the best man for the job, or give you a long list of why I voted for him. I looked up some history on the Civil Rights Movement in the USA and I thought you might be interested in seeing how far we've come as a nation to be able to elect Obama to the White House. It makes me proud...even if you voted for McCain, I hope it makes you proud too.


Early civil rights efforts

The history of the civil rights movement in the United States actually begins with the early efforts of the fledgling democracy.

1783 -- Massachusetts outlaws slavery within its borders.

1808 -- Importation of slaves banned; illegal slave trade continues.

1831 -- Nat Turner leads slave rebellion in Virginia; 57 whites killed; U.S. troops kill 100 slaves; Turner caught, tried and hanged.

1857 -- Dred Scott Supreme Court decision rules that slaves do not become free when taken into a free state, that Congress cannot bar slavery from a territory, and that blacks cannot become citizens.

1861 -- Confederate States of America formed; Civil War begins.

1863 -- President Lincoln issues Emancipation Proclamation freeing "all slaves in areas still in rebellion."

1865 -- Civil War ends.

13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, added to the Constitution.

1866 -- Ku Klux Klan formed in secrecy; disbands 1869-71; resurgence in 1915.

1868 -- 14th Amendment conferring citizenship added to Constitution.

1870 -- 15th Amendment barring racial discrimination in voting added to Constitution.

1896 -- Supreme Court approves "separate but equal" segregation doctrine.

1906 -- Race riots in Atlanta; 21 dead, city under martial law.

1923 -- Oklahoma placed under martial law because of Ku Klux Klan activities.

1925 -- Ku Klux Klan marches on Washington.

1943 -- War contractors barred from racial discrimination.

1952 -- Racial, ethnic barriers to naturalization removed by Immigration and Naturalization Act.

1954 -- U.S. Supreme Court declares school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling.

1955 -- Rosa Parks refuses to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus as required by city ordinance; boycott follows and bus segregation ordinance is declared unconstitutional.

1957 -- Arkansas Gov. Orval Rubus uses National Guard to block nine black students from attending a Little Rock High School; following a court order, President Eisenhower sends in federal troops to ensure compliance.

1960 -- Four black college students begin sit-ins at lunch counter of a Greensboro, North Carolina, restaurant where black patrons are not served.

1961 -- Freedom Rides begin from Washington, D.C., into Southern states.

1962 -- President Kennedy sends federal troops to the University of Mississippi to quell riots so that James Meredith, the school's first black student, can attend.

1963 -- Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is killed by a sniper's bullet.

1963--Race riots prompt modified martial law in Cambridge, Maryland.

1963--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers "I Have a Dream" speech to hundreds of thousands at the March on Washington.

1963--Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, leaves four young black girls dead.

1964 -- Congress passes Civil Rights Act declaring discrimination based on race illegal after 75-day long filibuster.

1964--Three civil rights workers disappear in Mississippi after being stopped for speeding; found buried six weeks later.

1965 -- March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to demand protection for voting rights; two civil rights workers slain earlier in the year in Selma.

1965--Malcolm X assassinated.

1966 -- Edward Brooke, R-Massachusetts, elected first black U.S. senator in 85 years.

1967 -- Riots in Detroit, Newark, New Jersey.

1968 -- Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee; James Earl Ray later convicted and sentenced to 99 years in prison.

1978 -- Supreme Court rules that medical school admission programs that set aside positions based on race are unconstitutional (Bakke decision).

1979 -- Shoot-out in Greensboro, North Carolina, leaves five anti-Klan protesters dead; 12 Klansmen charged with murder.

1983 -- Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday established.

1988 -- Congress passes Civil Rights Restoration Act over President Reagan's veto.

1989 -- Army Gen. Colin Powell becomes first black to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

1989 -- L. Douglas Wilder (Virginia) becomes first black elected governor.

1990 -- President Bush vetoes a civil rights bill he says would impose quotas for employers; weaker bill passes muster in 1991.

1991 -- Civil rights museum opens at King assassination site in Memphis.

1994 -- Byron De La Beckwith convicted of 1963 Medgar Evers assassination.

1995 -- Supreme Court rules that federal programs that use race as a categorical classification must have "compelling government interest" to do so.

1996 -- Supreme Court rules consideration of race in creating congressional districts is unconstitutional.

Isn't it amazing? Just 40 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King was marching in the streets, people were being murdered and just 20 years ago, President Bush vetoed a Civil Rights Act.

Republicans, Democrats, Independents and everyone else: we should be proud of America today. No matter what party you belong to: you belong to the United States and we've overcome centuries of bigotry, hate and exclusion.

To quote President-Elect Obama, "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where anything is possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer. It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, on this election, in this defining moment, change is coming to America."

I am proud to be an American today. I hope you all are too and can take pride in our country. We've come a long way.

Our First Trick-or-Treat!

Oh, we had a good (busy!) time on Halloween! It's such a fun holiday. Even though Maelin was very sick (she did have Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease again and this time was worse than last time because she had so many sores inside her mouth, she couldn't eat or drink a thing for 3 days...) she still had a great time. (Maelin was the Strawberry Fairy, by the way...)

We went to Daddy's work for a Trick or Treat Parade on Thursday afternoon before we went to the doctor and he was able to show her off there and she had great fun running around his office and messing everything up. She got her first official piece of candy there: a dum-dum sucker which she made into quite a mess. (who knew they were so sticky???)

Then on Friday (Halloween), Kat and Daddy took Maelin down to Boulder so Grandma Lea could play with her at her work (I was at work and Kat was off so she baby-sat while Maelin was still sick and we didn't have to take her to daycare.) Maelin had fun down there but was a bit freaked out, I was told.

Finally, it was time for Trick or Treating! We got Mae all dressed up and took her outside for a few pictures (see below) and we were on our way! Mae was so excited...she was running down the street with her Elmo bucket and made right for our sweet neighbor's house where she was waiting with all sorts of special treats for Maelin. Maelin went right inside the house...she did that with 3 other houses too. She didn't understand why we knocked and people came to the door but then we didn't go inside! Weird...

Anyway, we hit up about 10 houses which was just the right amount for an 18 month old who didn't really understand what was going on. She got a jawbreaker in a wrapper that she was pretty excited about...would NOT let us take it away from her.

Then we all went home (Kat and Jeff came with us) and Maelin played with her candy for a while and we had pizza and wine and passed out candy to the other trick-or-treaters. We had a really nice night!

p.s. Maelin is feeling much better now. Today was the first day that she was able to eat again...whew!