Blah blah blah

Things are back to normal here. I finally got rid of my sinus infection and the stomach bug. My only complaint at the moment is that I have a lot of back pain (I'm sure it's due to the fact that I've been carrying hundreds of pounds in books everyday for the past two years....from home to work and vice-versa) and that I don't have a very comfy bed!
I'm slowly getting ready for Christmas. I've been printing off Christmas activities by the dozen for my kids to do and we'll start them pretty soon. I also bought my Christmas cards today so I'll have to get on that.
Today we had a meeting for all the English teachers about the trip to England with the grade 4s. I'll be going on the first trip from April 2nd-6th. We'll be staying in Windsor. We'll visit the Windsor castle, London (Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Mme Tussauds, etc.) and Oxford. The place we are staying at has an Olympic size pool, a jacuzzi (for teachers only) and all rooms have bunkbeds and en suite bathrooms (so we don't have to sleep in beds with anyone else).
Other than that, I am giving a lot of private lessons now and it's quite stressful. It's difficult to throw on 6-7 hours of private lessons to plan for each week seeing as I have a job that requires a lot of planning and time. Oh well! I'll survive! I have to take one for the team cause Steve will be out of work tomorrow so I have to support us for a while. He's happy that his company is closing cause he hated his job but obviously he's not happy to be unemployed again. We're just hoping that he'll find a job fast this time....
Ok, I'm done!

CAUTION: Do not read if you have a sensitive stomach (or if you are eating)

I finally saw the doctor and it turns out that I have a sinus infection in 4 out of 6 sinuses so he put me on some serious meds. On Tuesday morning I started taking my medication (6 pills in the morning) and at lunch I took the one pill for the pain. Well at 12:30 I started feeling sick to my stomach and a tad dizzy. I went to teach my grade 5s and half way through I had to run out and puke my brains out. Luckily the student teacher next door heard me leave and came to watch my class. After that I felt a lot better and went to teach my grade 4s. I started feeling nauseous again and ended up taking them out to the park earlier than usual. I decided to walk home (45 minutes) cause I was afraid to vomit on the metro. So, when I got home things didn't get better. This time it was coming out the other end.... enough said. Finally I went to bed. Do you know how painful it is to vomit with a sinus infection?
On Wednesday I woke up and threw up first thing in the morning. Realized that I actually have the 'gastro' (a 48 hour bug, common in France, known to make everything come out both ends). I ended up calling in sick to work and stayed home all day running from the bed to the toilet. When Steve came home from work (8pm) I finally ate something and took some medication for the gastro.
Now it's Thursday morning (8:30am) and I feel a lot better but I am going to stay home again and catch up on sleep and just take it easy. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

I hate nature shows

I am still sick. My mommy told me that it's a sinus infection so I am going to try to get that checked out this week. Moms always know everything! I hate being sick and if it does turn out to be a sinus infection and I go on antibiotics again, it will be my second time on antibiotics in two months. It's only November, can you imagine how drugged up I'll be by the end of the school year? I need to build up my immune system...anyone have any ideas?
I haven't done much this week seeing as I've been sick. It's been school, tutoring, marking, bed. However, today Steve and I decided to get out of the house and so we went and saw the movie "Borat" and it was hilarious. It's so politically incorrect but it's funny. Now we are off to meet Emily and Jeremie at the restaurant "Breakfast in America" for dinner.... haha! Maybe we can still order breakfast at 8pm, if not they are known to make a mean burger!

I'm feeling Active and Bilingue, how about you?

I'm sick again. These damn French kids have so many germs....yucky! I am all plugged up and I have trouble sleeping at night. When I don't sleep, you can guess what kind of mood I am in the next day.....
Tomorrow I don't have any classes cause the grade 3s are on a 'sortie' for the day so they won't be around and French kids never have class on Wednesday afternoons BUT I still have to go to school cause legally I have to be in the building...damn rules! Luckily (or not!) I have a lot of marking to do so I can finally catch up.
Speaking of marking....how do elementary school teachers do it? I hate marking....it's so boring and annoying. Now, I sometimes only skim the first part of the creative writing and write 'good', 'great' or 'excellent' so that they think that I've read the whole thing. They get so excited when they see 'excellent' on their pages....little do they know.....
Actually, this whole week has and will continue to be a big English test week for the kids. They have grammar, creative writing, dictation and all that junk to be tested on...so they are all stressed out and so am I cause I have a lot more marking to do than usual (maybe that's why I am getting bored and annoyed with it?)
I guess that's it for now.
Oh ya, I got a little package in the mail from Goda today. It was a picture frame with a picture of Jonas (her baby) in it. He's SO cute!
Remember I love babies so don't freeze or burn your kids...give them to me! (see blog below)

eh?

I like the fact that the word 'eh' can completely change a comment into a question and make the person you are talking to feel important. For example if I said "I like that sweater", it's just a simple comment but if I said "I like that sweater, eh?", now the person who I am talking to is involved and feels special cause in a way I've sort of asked for their opinion. This is what I tried to explain to my non-Canadian friends and I think that it's starting to grow on them. Cool eh?

In the past 5 days, I've watched 16 episodes of CSI with Steve. We are addicted. We can't wait to get season 5 on Saturday. I'm still sad though that Grey's Anatomy is finished here for a while.

There's only one thing that I miss about BTL (the job I hated more than anything)...it's the fact that I always knew the weather. I had so many 2 hour one-on-one conversation classes and at the end of each class as I packed up my stuff we would discuss the weather (easy chit-chat for non-anglophones and best thing to talk about when you have nothing left to say). I would leave every class knowing what the weather would be like for the week. Now, I am forced to watch the news to find out.
Speaking of weather it's just gotten cold here. The temperature finally fell yesterday to 12 degrees (today it's 11). It was the hottest October France has had since 1989 (I heard that on the news). On Saturday we were still only wearing sweatshirts and no jackets. It's going to be weird to live a Canadian winter next year...I'm going to freeze.

One last thing...a few weeks ago while watching the news, I heard a very shocking story. There was a French woman who froze her two babies. Her husband discovered them one day while looking for something in the freezer. They were from two separate pregnancies and she didn't want to tell her husband that she was pregnant so she would give birth alone and then kill the babies and freeze them. She also confessed to having a third baby and burning it in the fireplace. Here's the thing.....if any of you (friends, family or anybody else that reads this blog) ever had the urge to freeze their children, please call me. I will gladly take your kid and raise him/her and give them back to you when you are ready....but please, don't freeze your kids.

Well that's it for today. I am still on holiday until the end of the week. I don't want to go back to work on Monday....