Whitaker December Update

Dear Family and Friends,

 

The last few weeks have really flown by since Thanksgiving.  Today, Lara and I were the only ones from our family who went to church.  Sadie and Mahrin were both sick and stayed home..sore throats, headaches….the gumbo.  I spoke on the birth of the Savior.  I used up ½ an hour!  I never do that!  I was that guy today.  I looked up at the clock.  It was tie to start the closing hymn, and we still had a rest hymn and the branch president left to speak.  I felt sheepish.  Baaah.  On the way over, it was super-icy, the worst I have ever seen it here.  Lara and I were arguing whether the car in front of us was white or silver.  I said it was silver, Lara insisted it was white.  She said, “Daddy, maybe your eyes aren’t so good.  Like Mahrin’s.  One time, when we lived in Ogden, Mahrin said, ‘That is yellow.’

But I said, ‘It’s really brown.”  I got a good laugh at her. 

 

Mahrin has been praying for a “doll at Christmas.  Just like Sadie’s.”  Hopefully Santa Claus is paying close attention.  She ate a whole piece of pumpkin pie and is doing pretty well at walking, and it seems like her vision is better. 

 

Sadie has been our little sick girl for the last several days.  She has been throwing up, has headaches, and has a sore throat.  She didn’t eat or drink anything for over 24 hours, and we were starting to get a little nervous, like two long tailed cats in a nuclear reactor.  Then Sadie started eating again, and it was a relief.  It was like a free pass to go past the guard tower of the nuclear reactor, the one I referred to in the last sentence.

 

Adelaide is sitting up quite a bit and is starting to hold her own bottle.  Her blonde fuzzy hair is becoming visible from several inches away, when the sunlight is just so.  We are grateful for that little baby.  She is so happy!

 

Diana is very, very busy.  She does a wonderful job teaching our girls.  She cooks with them, cleans with them, reads with them, writes with them, every day.  They write in their own little journals at night, and Diana helps them.  They will seriously pass up my high school students in writing ability in not many years.  Home environment is so important for learning.  I had no idea how lucky I was as a kid.  Reading was like breathing or drinking water in our house…it was just always there.

 

I had a girl in my class this week, a sophomore language arts class, who was crying.  The girl across from her would not stop whispering, and after warning her twice, I asked her to come outside.  She said, “Just a minute,” like I was asking her to hand me the mayonnaise.  I was quickly running out of patience with the girl who has major issues anyway.  When she finally got around to stepping out of my room, she said that the girl across fro her needed help, “like right now!  Like you need to go get a counselor RIGHT NOW.” She turned around and went back into my classroom.  Bewildering behavior from any student, especially from this student who has been very responsive to me when I asked her to this year.  I went and got her again.  She said to me in the hallway that “if you don’t go get a counselor, like right now, or the principal, I am going to whack out on you!  She (the girl) has pills, and you need top go get help, like right now!”

I went to get help, all right.  I thought to myself, “Well, even if nothing is really going on, those two need to get out of my room.”  I got Mrs. Seltzer to come get the girls out of my room.  She took three of them. 

 

Mrs. Seltzer later told me that it was a very good thing I had acted.  The girl had overdosed on her dad’s blood pressure pills in an attempt to kill herself.  An ambulance was on the way. Lovely!  Stuff like that happens far too regularly around these parts.  That whole episode was followed up by a fistfight in another classroom that was just within minutes of my classroom ordeal.  It turned into a very long afternoon for the administration.

 

I took a college class for a required endorsement this semester.  The class ended on Wednesday.  The class should have netted me at least 8 credit hours, but was only worth three.  The teacher consistently held class late in Blanding, 1-½ hours from here.  He would end class at 9:45, and I would not get home until 11 p.m.  I wrote about 60 pages for the class, 15 handwritten pages for the midterm, and seventeen handwritten pages for the final.  A 12-page paper was required, massive reading every week, etc.  The guy was nuts.  I got out of his final at about 10 p.m. and came home around midnight.  I am GLAD that is over!

 

Well, that’s about it from us.

 

Love,

The Whitakers