MLK Weekend

When you are a teacher, 3-day weekends are both a good and a bad thing. They are great because we get an extra day to relax and get things accomplished, and be free from the students. However, for some reason adding an extra day onto the weekend causes my students to think that they are on vacation and forget all the rules when they come back to school. As usual, we came back to school today from the MLK holiday weekend and my students were being ridiculous. Some of them even began to develop this delightful little "I'm smarter than Mrs. Roche even though I'm only 12 years old and have nothing more than a 5th grade education" attitude. Let's just say that when I called their moms and informed them that their child was trying to tell me how to do my job so apparently their child must have managed to double their age, get a college degree and a teaching certificate over the weekend, their attitude suddenly changed. The fact I had such a nice, relaxing 3-day weekend is probably the only reason that I was able to deal with these children today....plus, we have planning day on Friday so I only have my kids for 3 days this week :)

This past weekend began, as it always does, at exactly 4:05 on Friday for me. As soon as those kids leave my classroom, I am officially in weekend mode. I race home, let the pups out and head to happy hour. We met up with our usual group at Wild Wing Cafe for wings and drinks. After happy hour, we decided to continue our evening at Timeout Sports Bar. On Friday nights, they have $5 margarita and long island pitchers which are as terrible of an idea as they sound. Not only does Timeout have good drink specials, but also fantastic people watching. It has a nice mixture of middle-aged, trashy Jacksonville people and creepy looking UNF kids. Nonetheless, we still had a great time.   

Saturday was my lazy day. I literally did nothing productive and of course procrastinated on grading papers, my speciality. However, Jared was very productive and managaed to finally get our garage organized, a project that keeps getting put off. So my dad and brother came over and the three of them spent the day hanging shelving and organizing the garage. There is still work to be done, but I'm glad that the bulk of that project is completed so that I don't have to listen to Jared complain about our garage being a hot mess anymore. Ok so maybe he didn't refer to it as a "hot mess", that's my verbage.

Saturday night Jared and I stayed in and made a homemade pizza. It was a lot of work, but absolutely delicious. Movies, pizza and wine made for a great date night at home.

When Sunday rolled around, it was so nice to not have to worry about doing school work because I still had an extra weekend day to get things accomplished. Heather and I went to lunch at Blackfinn, which was delicious, while Jared and Josh went to Jax Gun Club to shoot skeet. We were planning on going to a cookout at the Bush's house later that afternoon, so Heather and I went shopping for something to bring to the cookout. We spent about 5 minutes in Publix getting food and about an hour in Total Wine...you can see where our priorities lie :)

Soon it was time to go over to the Bush's for the cookout. I was in charge of making the martinis, as usual. So I guess if teaching doesn't work out for me, I could always make a living as a bartender...except for the fact that I can't stay awake past 11:00 at night. I created a pomegranate martini and a passion fruit martini, which were both delicious. We had a wonderful time at the cookout, playing with Jackson and hanging out around the bonfire. We especially enjoyed celebrating Jared and Ryan passing the Certified Financial Planner licensing test!

Jared and I celebrated MLK Day by laying around on the couch watching TV. I did have to dedicate a few hours to grading papers, but for the most part, I did my fair share of relaxing. We shared a fun weekend with great friends and we are very excited for all our visitors coming in town this upcoming weekend!