5 minutes for mom Christmas Giveaways

<br />   Follow the link http://www.5minutesformom.com/29222/christmas-giveaway-2010/ and enter to win!

Let's go to the beach....

Over Thanksgiving break the kids and I took a day and just went exploring.

In the three years we have lived here (almost 4 can you believe it?) we had never gone down to Savannah or Tybee Island. Well, I went to Savannah last spring and met up with my former student Frank, but the kids had never been, so off we went.
We left early in the morning so that we could get to Tybee and the beach early and do Senior Pictures with Kelsey (I will share those later, after I get them off in the mail to the family). We got to Tybee about 8:30 in the morning and went to the visitor center, that didn't open until 9:30, so we decided that we could find our own way around. We grabbed a map that they had in the lobby and off we went.

The first thing we found was the lighthouse. Unfortunately since it was a Tuesday, the museum and information center were closed but we did get to see the outside.



After walking around looking at the lighthouse, we headed down the path to the beach.

Right after we topped the hill of the dune, we could see something out in the water, just the other side of the jetty.
DOLPHINS! You have never seen my three kids run so fast for the water.



DJ begged to take his shoes off, "just in case" which anyone who has ever had a six year old boy knows that this means in reality, I am going in the water and there is nothing you can say that will stop me.
I really did try to keep him from getting completely soaked, but it was a fruitless effort.

We drew names in the sand


and just hung out and had a peaceful morning.

I heart Faces scenic B&W

This week's I Heart Faces challenge is a scenic black and white. Since the kids and I went to Savannah and Tybee last week, I had a couple to choose from, but my favorite from on Tybee that fit this theme is this one. Its also a sneak peek at Kelsey's Senior pictures:-) Make sure you head on over to http://www.iheartfaces.com/2010/11/photo-contest-scenic-bw/ to see all of this week's entries.

She does wear dresses

Natalie isn't a total tomboy... see

Playing Checkers at Cracker Barrell

On Saturday, the kids and I went to the Mistletoe Market in Perry, and then Jerry joined us at the Cracker Barrel after he got off work for dinner. After we ate, Natalie and Jerry enjoyed a game of checkers on the front porch. (Well until DJ came out and decided that he wanted to play and picked up a couple of the pieces that is.)

Happy Thanksgiving

First Basketball Games of the season

DJ and I went last Friday night to watch the first of the basketball games for the new season. Now I am the first to admit I am not a huge basketball fan. I do like watching it in person, and I know some of the rules and what not (left over from my days keeping score in high school for the girls teams), but can not stand to watch it on t.v.
But here are a few of the pictures I took Friday night:="Photobucket">

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag 10 friends, plus me so I can see your responses!
 1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights 
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials trilogy – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare  
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien  
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
 19 The Time Travellers Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
 22 The Great Gatsby  - F Scott Fitzgerald  
 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 
 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
 28 Grapes of Wrath –  John Steinbeck 
 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 
 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 
 31 Anna Karenina –Leo Tolstoy 
 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
 34 Emma – Jane Austen 
 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 
 37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere 
 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Willaim Golden 
 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 
 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 
 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabrial Garcia Marquez
 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 
 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 
 47 Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
 48 The Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood 
 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martell
 52 Dune – Frank Herbert  
 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 
 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 
 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
 60 Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 
 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 
 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 
 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 
 66 On the Road - Jack Kerouac 
 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 
 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 
 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 
 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 
 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson 
 74 Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson 
 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
 76 The Bell Jar - Sylivia Plath 
 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
 78 Germinal – Emile Zola
 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
 80 Possession - AS Byatt
 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens  
 82 Cloud Atlas - Charles Mitchell
 83 The Colour Purple - Alice Walker 
 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 
 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 
 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
 87 Charlotte's Web - EB White  
 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
 90 The Faraway Tree collection - Enid Blyton
 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad  
 92 The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery 
 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 
 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 
 99 Charlie & the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 
 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


Of course this may not be quite fair of me, since I taught high school ESOL, and co-taught English in there too. :-) So several of these I read with my students for the first time. :-) 

Dear President Obama

Call me behind the times, but I am just now seeing this latest hair-brained scheme of your supposed experts. The one where these "experts" have told you that by not giving the military members a cost of living increase the government will save money.

Well that's just fine and dandy for the government, but what about US?

Inflation will still go up, even if our cost of living raise doesn't.

Which means, quite frankly that we will be paying more for food and clothing and housing, on less.

All thanks to you and your hair brained scheme.

I challenge you to take a pay cut of the equivalent of 3 months and see how you and Mrs. Obama like it.  Oh wait you wont notice it because you all get free room, board and travel for the next 2 years.

I challenge congress to take a pay cut of at least a months pay, just to feel what we feel. Oh wait the lobbiest will make sure they have enough to eat and a roof over their heads.

No I am not impressed with this proposal.

I hate politics.....

I heart Faces~Paper

This is an old picture of DJ, from when he was in Pre-K. but it fits this week's theme of paper. So I decided it would work. :-)  Make sure you head on over to http://www.iheartfaces.com/ and check out all of the entries for this week.  

http://www.iheartfaces.com/

From Our life as an Air Force Family

Youth Group Quilt Raffle

The youth group at New Richland are raffling off this beautiful hand made queen sized quilt, to raise money for their SuperWow trip to Jekyll Island next summer.
Tickets are $1.00 each, and the raffle will be held on December 15th, 2010 if you are interested in purchasing a ticket contact me at scienceesl @ yahoo dot com

Must Read About McDonalds

Subject: Fw: Must Read About McDonalds         MUST READ ABOUT MCDONALDS THIS IS A GOOD DECENT MAN WHO TOOK THE TIME TO WRITE THIS AND: HE SIGNED THE STATEMENT AND: INCLUDED HIS CONTACT INFO: READ ON   I'm sure those of you who aren't in the cattle business don't understand the issues here. But to those of us whose living depends on the cattle market, selling cattle, raising the best beef possible... This is frustrating. This will keep us from ever stopping there again, even for a drink. The original message is from the Texas Cattle Feeders Association American cattle producers are very passionate about this. McDonald's claims that there is not enough beef in the USA to support their restaurants. Well, we know that is not so. Our opinion is they are looking to save money at our expense. The sad thing of it is that the people of the USA are the ones who made McDonald's successful in the first place, but we are not good enough to provide beef. We personally are no longer eating at McDonald's, which I am sure does not make an impact, but if we pass this around maybe there will be an impact felt. All Americans that sell cows at a livestock auction barn had to sign a paper stating that we do NOT EVER feed our cows any part of another cow.. South Americans are not required to do this as of yet. McDonald's has announced that they are going to start importing much of their beef from South America . The problem is that South Americans aren't under the same regulations as American beef producers, and the regulations they have are loosely controlled. They can spray numerous pesticides on their pastures that have been banned here at home because of residues found in the beef. They can also use various hormones and growth regulators that we can't. The American public needs to be aware of this problem and that they may be putting themselves at risk from now on by eating at g ood old McDonald's.. American ranchers raise the highest quality beef in the world and this is what Americans deserve to eat. Not beef from countries where quality is loosely controlled. Therefore, I am proposing a boycott of McDonald's until they see the light. I'm sorry but everything is not always about the bottom line, and when it comes to jeopardizing my family's health, that is where I draw the line.   I am sending this note to about thirty people. If each of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300) ...and those 300 send it to at l east ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... And so on, by the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers! I'll bet you didn't think you and I had that much potential, did you? Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on.. David W. Forrest, Ph.D ., PAS, Dipl. ACAP Department of Animal Science Texas A&M University Phone (979) 845-3560 Fax (979) 862-3399 2471 TAMU College Station , TX 77843-2471 No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 9.0.869 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3260 - Release Date: 11/16/10 01:34:00   No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.449 / Virus Database: 271.1.1/3263 - Release Date: 11/17/10 19:34:00

I heart faces Silhouette

From Our life as an Air Force Family

This is my take on this week's I heart Faces Challenge.
Go to
http://www.iheartfaces.com/2010/11/photography-contest-silhouette/ To see more entries.

In honor and memory of a lost American Hero....

Today is a proud day to be a Sun Devil, today Pat Tillman is honored once again by an on campus salute for his induction into the National Football Foundations College Football Hall of Fame.

Thanks to the strength of his wife Marie and the rest of his family, Pat's legacy continues to live on through the Pat Tillman Foundation. The mission of the Pat Tillman Foundation is to invest in veterans and their families through education, community and advocacy.In the true spirit, giving back.

Thanks for the memories Pat....

Senior Night 2010

Congratulations to the Class of 2011!

Very important Please Register and Vote for our School!

Here at Jeffersonville Elementary School we are badly in need of new playground equipment!

Here is a chance for us to win a new playground!

  Please, everyday, go on this website and click on Jeffersonville Elementary for a chance to win.  It will only take a minute.  Thanks for your help.  Also pass this along to your friends, church members, etc and let them know they can help us too.


http://www.energybalance101.com/contest/

When it asks for your zip code please use 31044, then click on Jeffersonville Elementary School!



Prizes <http://www.energybalance101.com/contest/prizes.cfm>


Grand Prize


*       A $10,000 grant to makeover a playground
*       $25,000 in merchandise from Sports Authority
*       Every student will receive a Paul Pierce Activity Watch
*       Plus! Your school will be celebrated with a special event when the prizes are delivered!

*See eligibility in official rules <http://www.energybalance101.com/contest/EB101_Rules.pdf> 


Runner-up Prizes


5 lucky schools will receive $15,000 in merchandise from Sports Authority


Help activate Energy Balance at your school! Enter everyday to improve chances of winning!

View Prizes <http://www.energybalance101.com/contest/prizes.cfm> 

Sports Authority <http://www.sportsauthority.com/>  Paul Pierce's Truth on Health <http://www.truthonhealth.org/> 


Official Rules


Enter today and every day through December to increase your chances of winning!

Anyone over 18 can enter, so spread the word with your family, friends and colleagues today. Simply designate an elementary school to win and be sure to enter often so that your favorite school has more chances of winning.

We're giving away incredible prize packages designed to get kids moving!

Hurry! The Healthy Playground Makeover Sweepstakes ends December 1st 2010!



Debra L. Johnson

Library Media Specialist

Jeffersonville Elementary

Home of the "Tigers"

Jeffersonville, Georgia

(478) 945-3114

djohnson@twiggs.k12.ga.us

The Silent Ranks

The Silent Ranks

The Silent Ranks

I wear no uniforms, no blues or army greens, but I am in the military in the ranks rarely seen. I have no rank upon my shoulders, salutes I do not give, but the military world is the place where I live.

I'm not in the chain of command, orders I do not get, but my husband is the one who does, this I cannot forget. I'm not the one who fires the weapon, who puts my life on the line, but my job is just as tough—I'm the one that's left behind.

"My Best Friend, my Husband, my Hero... ILY"

My husband is a patriot, a brave and prideful man and the call to serve his country, not all can understand. Behind the lines I see the things needed to keep this country free. My husband makes the sacrifice, but so do our kids and me.

I love the man I married. Soldiering is his life. But I stand among the silent ranks known as the Military Wife.

~Author Unknown~

I think I have shared this one before, but I love it so I am sharing it again. Thank you to all of my fellow members of the "silent ranks".

Happy Veterans Day!

To all of the Veterans in our lives:

Three Veterans: Matt, Jerry and my Dad
Three Veterans Matt, Dad, and Grandpa
Mr. Pat

Jerry at Tech School Graduation

The Redneck Gang in England

Matt and myself at Angela's bridal shower

Matt and Grandma and Grandpa

Mom, Grandpa, Matt, Grandma, and Dad

Becky and Farmer

Amanda
Misty, Me and Amanda

Ben, DJ and Natalie
Me, Amanda, Ben, and Misty

My Grandpa and Grandma during WWII


Thank you one and all for what you have done for our country by protecting our freedoms!