Summer, summer, summer!

A gift from a student!

Some jobs in life come with financial perks and/or annual bonuses.  While the perks of teaching are not financially enticing, they are most certainly gratifying.  Besides having summers off (read unemployed), we are inundated with compliments daily.  My love language is written word and I have saved EVERY single card, note, and/or illegibly drawn on crumpled tissue I have ever received.  I have almost a full file drawer of these notes in my classroom.  At the end of the school year I could care less about the gift cards and more about what the parents and kids wrote to me.  Don't get me wrong, the gift cards are certainly appreciated, but the message is meaningful.  On the last day of school this year, a parent with whom I certainly went round and round, actually stood in front of the room of nine and ten year olds and gave a tear-driven speech outlining all of my fine attributes and all that I had done for his son.  You could have knocked me over with a feather.

This year my favorite gift was most certainly intangible and I didn't receive it until a week after school got out.  I stopped in to sign some paperwork at another school site today and the mother of one of my students works there.  As I was leaving she called out to me and let me know that her son named his 4-H fair project Heifer after me.  At first I was a bit stunned and then I asked if the name was "Mrs. Isbell", or "Joy".  She said he chose the more informal approach because he "loved me, and he would love that Heifer".  Choking back tears, I got in my car and drove away thinking to myself that I might possibly be the luckiest girl in the world.  Sure, I don't get $10,000 bonuses, but those posers most certainly do not have livestock being loved in their name.

This family of four is a week into summer and so far our list of accomplishments is quite high:
1) 3,000 pumpkins transplanted from the greenhouse into the pumpkin patch.
2) Afternoon of swimming and a BBQ at Bradley's parents' home.
3) Afternoon of swimming, bug collecting, and trying to light things on fire with magnifying glasses on the Scott River.  (Thanks Papa Hilton, I guess that's how they do things in the South :) )
4) Mom is 2/3 of the way done with two different admin credential classes.  Which means that the boys have been without Mom for three weekends while she has been in class.
5) So far a tally of six different squirt gun purchases.
6) One box of popsicles eaten.
7) One propane BBQ canister drained.
8) We got rid of DirecTV and now only watch things off of our Apple TV.
9) Two little boys working their way from farmer's tans to muscle man tans.
10) Double digit miles logged in warm outside air with the Double Bob.
11) THOUSANDS of extra kilowatt hours banked.

As I go back to school this summer, I can't express enough gratitude towards my husband and my boys.  Bradley has been so supportive while I drive 4+ hours each weekend and he is on single-parent duty over night, or while I finish papers or reading and he keeps the boys relatively quiet.  I know it will be for the best and I am so excited about what I am learning.  But the question that begs to be answered is: How many principals get a namesake Heifer?  My guess is not too many, but there's first time for everything.