The luckiest teacher on earth!

Right now, I honestly feel that way - like I'm the luckiest teacher on Earth! Every year, at the beginning of December, I send out a note to my students' families that they need not buy me a gift for the holidays, that I'd rather, if they wished to do something, that they purchase something for the classroom - something that the students would all enjoy playing and using - like Kid K'nex pieces, floor puzzles, Ello creation things, etc. This usually works out well and we get a nice assortment of things for our room. Well, this year, one of the mom's brought in a nice gift bag and said that it was from all the families in that class. At circle time, we sat down to open the class gifts and I was brought to tears when I opened the 'big class gift' -- they bought a digital camera! A Sony Cyber-Shot -- 6.0 megapixels (my old, now broken camera was only 1.3!)!! I was simply speechless. I feel so blessed to be able to work with families who care so much! They knew that I used the camera quite a bit in the classroom and was very upset when my broke, but this was beyond generous!

Something a little bit happier...

Because the news in the neighborhood is not good (had to call the police last night regarding the light the neighbors shine into my mil's house), I will distract myself to share one of my most favorite stories.....

About 2 years ago, at our church, Niantic Community Church, around the holidays they were talking about the Heifer Project and said that at our Alternative Marketplace, they would be selling the book, Beatrice's Goat. They also mentioned that the goat given to the family in the book was purchased by money raised at Niantic Community Church. Yeah, right. I thought. I was thinking that they were talking about how collectively the money that people (collective people) use to purchase the Heifer animals go to families in other countries and that this was a true story about one such family.

I purchased a book for my children for Christmas but it wasn't until the following year that I learned that it was true that the people who raised the money for a goat 20 some years before had indeed been from our church and that the story of Beatrice and her goat were the recipients of that gift (apparently through Heifer you can track who got your animal donation). That in and of itself is pretty cool, but the super cool part of the story is that not only was Beatrice able to attend school in her village from the money they could raise from selling the goat's milk and such, but she graduated from school and then began attending college (I'm getting goosebumps!) right here in Connecticut! At a college about 20 minutes from here! How amazing is that! Last year Beatrice came to our church and spoke to the children about how the Heifer Project changed her life. That year an anonymous donor offered to match our church's gift if we were to raise enough money to buy an Ark ($5,000 -- two of every animal), AND their employer had a matching donation program, so if we raised $5,000 we would be able to triple that to make 3 Arks. Well, we not only raised the money for the first Ark, but we also raised enough money to purchase another one with the money raised from the congregation -- so last year we were able to purchase *4* Arks all together!! It is just so heartwarming! It makes my heart sing!

Here's a picture of Ahren with Beatrice when she visited our church: