Happy Birthday to Dada!

Ryan is still such a young pup, not even 30 yet. We had a low key evening on Friday to celebrate his birthday and just had the Bayer's over for dinner. Teague and I gave Ryan a couple of gifts - I won't mention what they were here because I don't want to embarrass him and have you question his masculinity. You will have to ask him if you want to know.

Mmmmm, yummy! Daddy's Birthday Cake!

Here is Chase making his best "scary" face for the camera. Yikes, don't strangle poor Teague!

Teague is becoming a total Daddy's boy. He only says dada constantly. It's almost annoying. Okay, well truly I am just jealous. We say to him "Ma ma ma ma ma ma ma" and he smiles and says "dada". Even when I mouth "mama" he outright says to me "dada" and laughs. I told Ryan all I wanted for mother's day was for him to say mama. So we practice and practice and he still says every babble word possible, but when prompted it's always "dada". (I put a short video clip of this on the side bar - it's not as clearly stated as he usually says it, but you will get the picture)! He can just keep it up as far as I am concerned and so when he wants something he will just scream for dada and Ryan can go runnin'. Even today when Ryan's parents were over helping us with some spring projects (i.e. transplanting those 500 trees we planted when we bought the land - what a job); Teague stood at the screen door, banging on it yelling "dada dada dada" and then smiling if Ryan turned around to look at him. What a stinker!

Things on the job front continue to get interesting. I am surprisingly really at peace with whatever happens. I think part of it for me is just that I know I have no say in it and it is a fight between the administration (who wants to keep me 1.0 FTE and the union who is battling for a social worker with more seniority to take over my position - LUDACRIS!). Anyway, the union representative came to see me on Friday and said that with my current license I can do special education testing. So what the union is planning to do is if the social worker who was placed on leave asks for a hearing to take my job - then an arbitrator would hear both sides (the administration and the union). The union will present that I am a Guidance Counselor .4 FTE per day and a special education tester .6 per day and the social worker will take the .6 guidance position and it will be named a social work position. This all leads to the question of will I have two different offices then? I mean seriously, so when I am working as a special education tester and a kid comes to my office with a question on financial aid, credits, classes, etc. - do I have to have a sign on the door that says "Guidance Counselor not in, Special Education tester in"?! As if I can only be a Guidance Counselor .4 FTE per day?! Oh well, the saga continues.

Well the good news is that the weather seems to finally be in our favor. The cement slab was laid last week and tomorrow they will start construction on the new garage! Hooray! Now if we can just get a consistent amount of warm weather, maybe we will actually get the swimming pool in this spring/summer!

Have a good week.