The night before Elsa's second birthday

I'm sitting here in my kitchen and I am just finishing up Elsa's birthday treats for tomorrow.  I always try to get my cooking done earlier in the evening, but tonight the two things I had to do were: get a mini unit ready (or at least started) on the Spanish Civil War and get some cookies made.  The cookies are so much more fun, so I had to save them to the last.

This is not to say that I don't find the Spanish Civil War interesting.  It's a fascinating subject, nuanced and linked to many big events of the Twentieth Century.  I could talk about it, in Spanish, for many class periods.  The tough part is making it interesting to students who 1. are ready to be done with school for the year, 2. have a vocabulary of about 400 words and 3. would rather watch Toy Story 3 in Spanish.  Try coming up with an interesting explanation of ANYTHING with only 400 different words.  It's also a bit of a surprise to me to have to teach the Spanish Civil War.  I was planning on doing a totally different unit (also completely not prepared, but at least I knew a week ago that I wasn't prepared and I was cool with that) to go with the movie we're going to watch during final exam time.

Side note: It is my own personal thing that I just can't watch a movie in school without having some reason to do it.  We don't "kill time" in my class.  There's too much to learn.  I do like kids to have fun, but the fun is always linked to a standard they need to reach.  Your tax dollars at work.  You're welcome.

So, today in class I found out that half the class had already seen the movie I was planning to show.  That didn't seem good, so I decided on another movie that I have.  But that means that I am racing to put together some kind of background information by 9:45 tomorrow morning.  (In case you are wondering, I wanted to show La Misma Luna, but I'll be showing La Lengua de la Mariposa.  Both are great movies and totally worth a spot on your Netflix queue.  They are sad movies.  If you want fun, watch Casi, Casi, which the kids loved.  I did, too.)

The Spanish Civil War has been weighing on me a lot today, so I didn't remember AT ALL that we could take treats to school for Elsa's birthday.  (This is new to me.  I take treats to my school a lot, but I've never sent them with anyone else.) I did remember that I needed to cook dinner and that my in laws had brought fresh asparagus last week (thanks, Carol and Wes!  It was wonderful), so that was on the menu.  I got out a cooling rack to set the hot asparagus pan on.  When Elsa saw that, her comment was, "Oh, make cookies."  Then she started dragging a kitchen chair over to where I make cookies.  (Chair dragging is her latest trick--she can get to anything in the kitchen.  I don't like that.)

We needed something sweet in the house, so it seemed OK to make cookies.  Even though I've never made them before (and don't really like them all that much), I decided to make snickerdoodles.  One of my students brought me a warm snickerdoodle last week and after considering for about one-half second if he was they type of kid to poison me, I ate it.  It was the best cookie I've had in a long time.  (I've just done a little quality control/cookie testing.  My cookies are fine, but not nearly as good as my student's cookie.  I may need to email his teacher and suggest that he earn an A.)

So cookies are made, the whole Spanish Civil War has been summarized in less than a page and it's time for me to get to bed and think about my girl's second birthday tomorrow.  Has it been two years already?