I'm BACK!!!! Recap of What Has Happened Plus a Monday Made It!

Hey ya'll it has been so long since I have blogged. My world has been wild and crazy and my life was totally turned upside down. I'm finally trying to get myself back to a normal, but I can't make any promises as I am going along this crazy path.

When I last left you I had no clue how much my life was about to fall apart. I had mentioned a challenging student in my classroom, but I had no clue how challenging it would get. I don't want to go in to full detail, but let me tell you this, the second half of the year was my worst nightmare. Things went downhill quick because of his family life. That mixed with the issues he already had caused things to get REALLY bad. He even ended up being hospitalized for a week because of one of his meltdowns. I did my best to keep pushing through it all, but I wanted to give up so many times. I was emotionally, mentally, and physically drained by the end. I felt like I had done a disservice to the rest of my class and I considered giving up on my one true passion. After taking some time this summer I have realized that it was not me and that I had a lot going on in my personal life at the time that did not help. I am now recovered and ready to go back for a new year with a new perspective.

So there was all of that going on in my classroom all while my life was crazy busy as my husband and I are Jr. High track coaches. This track season was the hardest on me and I contribute a lot of it to the situations I dealt with all day and the personal life stuff (I'll be getting there in a minute). There was a lot more drama than normal and several of our athletes no longer showed me respect. There were many days I went home from practice and cried thinking that I was a terrible coach. I felt like I also was doing a disservice to my athletes this year. Hopefully next season will be better even though I know that will be a wild ride (see the section on personal life craziness coming up).

I also had the crazy idea to start selling Thirty-One in February. I do not regret that decision one bit, but it did make life a little crazier for me. I joined and less than a week later I was taking off to go on a training trip with complete strangers (the girl I joined under was the only one I kind of knew and I hadn't actually met her in person). This was totally different for me and way out of my comfort zone, but was an amazing experience. Since then I have met many amazing women and have felt totally inspired to do amazing things.

Now on to the personal life craziness. This was the thing that made me finally crack and feel like giving up entirely. On May 1st my whole world shattered. My dad had been having some health issues that he had put off getting checked for 9 months. When he finally decided to go to the doctor to get checked out the results were devastating. My father was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. It was so advanced that it was a complete blockage of his colon. My world was really thrown for a loop. You see my father is my rock, my best friend, my shoulder to lean on and all of this happened. He was also our assistant coach for track and this dramatically changed our team (granted some of it was for the better, because the drama finally stopped). Over the following few days and weeks we had to learn what the treatment plan was. The path was finally decided to treat with chemo and radiation first to try to shrink it. The problem was it would expand first and there was no room to expand with out causing issues so an ostomy had to be put in. There were several complications with that surgery and he ended up being hospitalized for a week. He had not been in a hospital overnight since he was a child. This was a very scary time. Luckily he finally recovered from it and was able to proceed with the treatment. He has now completed the treatment and is in the recovery stage waiting for surgery. He is scheduled to have the tumor removed on August 5th. We are hopeful that this surgery will go off without any complications.

Unfortunately because of all of this he was unable to attend the state track meet for our athletes in person. This was an extremely hard time for him as he had worked so hard to get one of our distance runners there. We decided to take him with us and send him pictures all weekend long of his adventures. Here is my favorite picture. He was just hanging out with me watching some races.

Through it all my dad has been a trooper and has kept his head held up high. He is truly inspiring. My dad is a distance runner. He has completed several marathons including the Boston Marathon. He is determined to be back there running once he has fully recovered and kicked cancer's butt. All of this has caused him to not be able to run like he used to, but he set out on a mission to run/walk a 5k for Colon Cancer Screening. He put together a team and set out on a mission to just finish the race. It was amazing because once he got out there running, he just couldn't stop. He ran the WHOLE 5k just a few days after finishing his chemo/radiation treatments. It was such an inspiring thing (especially since I couldn't even run the whole thing).

Here we are walking in the last of our group as a team.

Here is the team showing our spirit before the race.

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Now onto my Monday Made It. This Monday Made It was actually made a little while ago, but I am just now getting around to it. After my post head on over to 4th Grade Frolics to check on some more Monday Made It's that I am sure are actually school related. I promise to show you some school related ones next time. ;)

I created this video about a month ago to announce that the hubby and I are having our first baby. This was a blessing that was much needed in our family. We are very excited about it even if the timing means the beginning of track season. We're just going to have an extra coach...lol. Our due date ended up getting changed to March 2nd after I had posted the video saying February.

Here are a couple of pictures we have taken. I will be taking another one tonight so I will have to post it for you sometime in the next couple of days. I'm pretty sure my bump has shrunk in the past week though. I did a lot of walking while I was at Thirty-One National Conference.

Baby's first picture :)

Much love all!