Remembering Grandma

Grandma Duffy was born 114 years ago today. I've told my students at school so many stories about Grandma so often, they feel like they know her. When we're starting a writing project where they will be writing about a life experience of their own, my example is often a story of a memory I have with Grandma. I have told them about how Grandma and I would drink coffee together, and I would drink from a small cup and put in so much cream and sugar that I probably couldn't taste the coffee. They always are interested in hearing about how afraid I was of the chickens unless I stayed really close by Grandma when we would walk them to the coop. She taught me how to play chinese checkers and to put a jigsaw puzzle together. One of my very favorite memories is of climbing on the big woodpile and picking red raspberries in my little tin bucket. We've tried several times to grow raspberries here, but we've never had much luck. I guess we just don't have a big enough wood pile.

Christmas Idea...

Christmas is my favorite time of year and last year I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to pick out something special for any of my cousins. I know that we are trying to scale back on Christmas, but when I was talking with Mom I thought of a new idea. This year at Christmas I would like to bring a small stocking for each person in our generation and anyone who wanted to could bring something little to put in them. Each item could be only a couple dollars. You could even bake something. Couples would only have one stocking so you could either get one thing for both or stick 2 things in. Shane and I will give one gift from both of us, and if other people want to pair up for gift giving it might help with the expense. I hope that this will start a nice tradition. Again, if you would rather not bring something this year, you will still have a stocking with atleast 1 present in it :)

Christmas in July

An early Merry Christmas to everyone! I like to have an overall plan for the Benson Christmas before going back to school. Gretchen was talking to me about an idea she had for her generation (Generation #2 - Jennifer through Caitlin). She is going to blog her idea soon for them. This Blog has some questions for Generation #1 (Dennis through Jim).

Option #1 The first question is about gifts within our generation. Rather than picking names, anyone who wanted to bring gifts could bring a small gift for each person/couple. For example, rather than doing one larger gift, I could give a smaller thing to each of the other 5 in my generation. Which do you prefer: small gifts or drawing names and doing a bigger gift?

Option #2 The second question is about gifts for the little kids. There will be 10 kiddos in Generation #3 (Ruth through Dylan) this year. Do you prefer to bring a gift for each, or would you be interested in drawing names so that each of us brought gifts for a couple of the kids ie Dennis and Sharon would be given two names to bring gifts for, Paul and Judy would be given two other names, etc. (some from generatin #2 will also be bringing gifts for the kids.) Which do you prefer: bring gifts for all kid or draw names and divide up them up among us?

Let me know your thoughts.

More Pics

My Nursing Test

It was great seeing everyone last weekend.
I just wanted to thank you all for your prayers about my test this past Monday.
I ended up getting a B!!!!
I was very excited because it was a very hard test!! :)

Family Picnic

Thanks for coming! It was good to see everyone together. I'm attaching a few group pics. Gretchen is still working on the whole group photo.