Other Related Blogs to Explore

    Here are a couple of blogs that I find relate to my content and that you will enjoy reading. One ties in with farming and the other ties in with making time for things you love outside of your job!

    If you're interested in starting a backyard farm, you might consider starting small by creating some vegetable gardens. Visit the blog below to learn more about starting your own garden.

https://new-lit-summer-2023.blogspot.com/ 

    If you're interested in making time for you and learning some strategies for balancing your job and self-care visit the blog linked below for some great ideas!

https://life-outside-of-teaching.blogspot.com/

Happy Reading! :)

~Alyssa

Future Plans

    I have been an animal lover my whole life. There are few things I love more than spending time in nature with all my feather and fur babies. I have always dreamt of one day owning my own small farm and filling it with all the types of animals I grew up with. 

    Part of that dream was finding a partner who shares those same interests and who might someday also want to have a farm with animals. Well, it's been almost four years now and my boyfriend actively researches ways to improve our chicken coop and different ways to keep the goats happy and busy. Needless to say, we share the same interests and both have hopes of expanding our own farm together one day. 

    Like I mentioned in my biography, I am a true townie and love the town I live and work in. If I could stay in this town forever, I would. Unfortunately, with the way the housing market has been and with how expensive my town is, it is uncertain if we will be able to afford a house here. Knowing this, we have explored neighboring towns, some with much more farm land and some that are 'right to farm' communities. While I'd love to be a townie forever, I've really enjoyed looking around in other towns and seeing the some potential dream farms. 

    One day, when we finally do have a home of our own, I know for a fact my first outdoor project will be building a chicken coop. Whether or not we have the space to have goats and ducks will be another question but no matter what, the end goal is to have my own little farm one day like I had as a young girl growing up so I can give my children the same amazing experiences I had as a child. 

This website https://ouroneacrefarm.com/2014/11/25/start-backyard-farm/ shares lots of great ideas for starting a backyard farm of your own. Check it out!

The Neighbors Think We're Crazy

    One of my earliest memories of being out in my backyard was the day my mother planted small hemlock trees along the property line to the left of our house. They were so small back then and I wondered why my mom planted so few trees spread so far apart. Well, today each tree is taller than our farm house roof and provide more privacy some the neighbors than any fence could. I think the neighbors are grateful for the hemlocks.

    To be clear, our neighbors may be the quietest people we know. Either that or they are downright scared of the crazy people to their right... Regardless, we have had this long-standing joke that the neighbors definitely think we are nuts. Unfortunately, it might be true considering the amount of animals we have in our backyard (often running around on a daily basis). 

    It all started with the goats. If you look back on my previous post "What do I have to do, buy you a goat?" you can read the whole story as to how we ended up with goats in the first place. By now, we have had bleating goats in our backyard for the last 15 years. We do our best to keep the goats quiet (aka well fed and with hay at all times) but sometimes I think they just enjoy being loud and bleating at the top of their lungs. 

    Then we have the ducks... The ducks may be the biggest spectacle because they are free to roam as they please. We have a beautiful running, spring-fed pond that stays nice and clean all year long. You'd think the ducks would never want to veer more than a few feet from it but alas, that is not the case. Apparently ducks are very mischievous (or at least mine are) because they seem to very much enjoy wandering over to the neighbors yard during their family cookouts and Saturday morning yard work. 

    It's funny, it has been over 15 years that we have had a backyard full of animals including dogs, cats, chickens, goats, and ducks, yet we've never heard a single complaint from our neighbors. Whether they think we're crazy, they are scared of us, or they secretly love being next door to a mini farm, I'll always be thankful they accepted us for who we are! 

Biography

Hello World! 

    My name is Alyssa and I am currently in my fourth year of teaching kindergarten in the school I grew up in. I live in the town I work in so I guess you could call me a true 'townie'. I graduated from Mansfield High School in 2015 and during my time in high school I tried to be as involved in sports and activities as I could. I was the captain of my basketball and volleyball teams by the time I was a senior and I also performed in each of the four spring musicals throughout my four years.  

    After high school, I went on to complete my undergraduate work at Bridgewater State University. I was a student-athlete there as well playing volleyball for the women's team in the fall. I graduated from BSU in 2019 with a Bachelor's degree in Elementary Education while also double majoring in Psychology. 

    As soon as I completed my time at BSU, I began looking for jobs in the school I grew up in and sure enough a few openings had been posted. I ended up landing a position in kindergarten and have remained there ever since. For all of my college years I thought first grade was where I wanted to be and now that kindergarten is my home, I hope it is my home forever because I absolutely love it!

    This blog will touch on my many interests but mainly it will focus on my love for animals. I hope you enjoyed what you've read so read and continue to enjoy what is to come!

        Sincerely, 

                The one behind the screen :)

The COVID Quacks!

    I am now in my fourth year of teaching kindergarten and I have incubated eggs each year- even the COVID year! In my first year of teaching, I was so excited to bring an incubator into the classroom and hatch eggs with my students. I loved my first class and I still think back on the times we had learning and growing together during my first year of teaching. 

    Then, just as I was settling into how to be a teacher for the first time, COVID hit. In March of 2020, I had to say goodbye to my students for the remainder of the school year. At first, we didn’t know how long we’d be apart but after only a few short weeks we were told we would not return to in-person learning until further notice. I was devastated. The one thing I had been looking forward to the most was hatching eggs with my class and we were only one month away from starting it.

    Once the initial shock of the quarantine and the world shutting down had sunk in, all of my colleagues and I began brainstorming ideas for how to continue to deliver instruction to our kindergarten students from a distance. When we decided on a system and we nailed down what our plan was, I started thinking about my own ideas for how I was going to hatch eggs with my class even if it had to be from a distance. 

    I videoed and took pictures of everything. I gave daily updates and took videos of how I would turn the eggs and add water to adjust the humidity levels. I showed how important it was to take care of the eggs every single day and how the temperature needed to be at 99.5 degrees at all times. Each day I would post the pictures, videos, and updates to my Google Site for parents to help their child access. The children and families loved it!

    Although it was not how I expected my first egg incubation to go with my first class, it was still so fulfilling to hear from my students’ families how excited their children were even at a very uncertain time in everyone’s lives. Families mentioned how this excitement even brought joy to the adults and siblings who got to watch as the process took place. To this day, we still have several ducks from the batch and we call them the COVID Quacks!

"What do I have to do, buy you a goat?!"

    By the time I was 10 years old I had solidified a very bad, not to mention gross, habit of biting my nails. I bit my nails for as long as I could remember. My parents would always tell me how yucky of a habit it was and no matter how hard I tired, I just couldn't shake it. I didn't think of myself as a nervous kid so I could never quite figure out why I couldn't stop the habit. I tried everything from using "No-Bite" nail polish with the bad taste it makes in your mouth to wearing pretend stick on nails to deter the biting. No matter what I did, nothing seemed to work. 

    So, one day while sitting at the dinner table with my family, there I was, not even conscious of the incessant nail biting, chomping away when my dad said "Alright that's it! What do I have to do to get you to stop biting your nails, buy you a goat or something?" Well... let's just say my 10-year-old animal-loving self perked right up and immediately said "Yes! I will stop biting my nails for a baby goat!" Naturally my dad shook his head and said "Yeah sure okay, you stop biting and I'll get you a goat okay?"

    Now mind you, I had taken this proposition very seriously. I began researching all the types of goats that are out there to decide which one I wanted to get. I even did a book report on goats in school. In my little mind, all that was between me and my adorable future baby goat was stopping my nail biting habit. And as it turned out, stopping the habit was a breeze once I had a real concrete, reward-oriented reason to stop! 

    Behind the scenes, something I didn't learn until many years later, my dad was back-pedaling big time. He felt like his proposition was just kind of a joke and not something that was actually going to happen. So for a while he played along until he realized a couple weeks had gone by and I hadn't bitten a single nail. Then, my mom starts saying things like "You know, if you break a promise to her now at age 10, you could ruin her trust in her for all her teen years! Do you really want that?" 

    Important note: my mother had a goat when she was a little girl and to this day talks about what a wonderful and unique experience it was getting to have a sweet and loving pet goat that no one else had growing up. So, hence her argument of not thinking my dad should break his promise... She really wanted me to have the experience she had as a little girl. Needless to say, her tactic worked and after a couple months of absolutely no nail biting, my parents kept their promise and delivered to me the sweetest, most adorable baby goat. Say hello to little Dixie! 

Where It All Started...

    Every year, in the five years I have been working at my school, I have brought fertilized eggs into the classroom to incubate. However, bringing this experience to the classroom for the first time was not my first incubation rodeo! Back when I was in eighth grade, I told my science teacher that one of my ducks at home had created a nest in my neighbor’s yard right beside their deck (my neighbors have always been very good sports). The nest was tucked away deep inside a bush covered in thorns. For days, I had watched the mother duck go back and forth to her nest. When she left the nest to go drink some water, I would check on the eggs to see how many she had laid. Each day there were more and more eggs and each day I became more and more excited because this was the first mother duck we had that was a really good momma and tended to her nest properly.

    Then tragically one morning, I went outside to find that the nest had been raided, the mother duck was gone, and remnants of eggs were sprawled across the neighbors’ yard. The situation had ‘fox’ written all over it. I was devastated to say the least. I investigated the scene and was able to discover that the nest was deeper than I thought and many eggs were still in the bottom of the nest. So my little eighth-grade self, about an hour before I had to go to school, got down on my hands and knees and climbed through the thorny branches of the bush to salvage whatever was left of the batch of eggs the mother had laid. I gathered them into a pail and then tried to figure out what I was supposed to do next.

    I ended up leaving the pail on my porch in a safe place and decided the first person I was going to see when I got to school was my animal-loving science teacher Mrs. C to ask her for advice. Mrs. C was the perfect person to ask because before I could even finish my story, she was hurrying me down the hallway to the storage closet to find her styrofoam incubator. We plugged the incubator in to warm it up, filled the water wells, and prepared the incubator for the eggs that she instructed me to bring to school the following day. 

    From that day on we waited and hoped for a miracle that we could save the once mother duck’s eggs. I recovered ten eggs from the nest that day and after days and days of turning the eggs, maintaining the proper humidity levels, and monitoring the temperature between each of my classes throughout the day, I got to experience the absolutely astonishing miracle of SEVEN of the ten eggs hatching before my eyes and leaving us with the cutest, fuzziest little bundles of joy you could imagine! In June of 2011, I was awarded Science Student of the Year by my unforgettable science teacher Mrs. C for the work I did in saving those seven lives and sharing and teaching about my experience to my classmates along the way.

Above is a photo from the Student of the Year ceremony circa 2011 with the guy who convinced me that I was put on this earth to become a teacher. Thanks, Dad!