Happy 3rd Blogoversary~ My Year 2015.

I can't believe 2015 is over! Rachael Turns Pages is officially 3 years old. This year has been a rough year of blogging, but since I really enjoy making wrap up posts I have lots of posts and goals for this blog into the new year. 2015 was a rough year for reading. I fell into a huge reading slump from about June to November. I read throughout the whole reading slump, but I would go days without reading and I generally didn't feel like reading. I also took a break from the blog because I had no ambition to write. I did not have any posts ideas. I posted very few posts on the blog this year compared to previous years. I hope to be more active in 2016. I hope to continue to enjoy blogging. I'm not ready to give up this hobby yet. 

I'm writing this a day late, but my actual blogoversery is December 31st, which also happens to be my cousin Dylan's birthday. He was born the night I started my blog. We got to go to the hospital and meet him on New Year's Day of 2013. Dylan is three now. He has a great personality and is such a sweet boy. Dylan's younger siblings are the twins, Cameron and Sydney who are a year old. Sydney is a social butterfly while Cameron is more shy. Both warm up pretty easily and they are fun to play with. 

Emma turned 3 in April and her little sister Allianna turned 2 in August. Emma is very talkative and bossy at times whereas Ali is pretty quiet. My cousin had her third child this April. Beckett is 8 months now and he crawls everywhere, but overall is a happy baby. All these kids are my 2nd cousins, but I just call them my little cousins. They make the holidays fun seeing the joy in their eyes as they open presents. Christmas is always more fun when children are involved. 

2015 was an eventful year. I wrote last year that my mom started a new job in November. Well a position at the job she really wanted opened up in January so she applied and she is started this job in

My friends, my life, my rocks. College would
be a different place without these girls. 

February. She is working with many old coworkers and enjoys the work she does. My dad lost his job in June of this year. It was really hard that I had a job and was going to work every day when my dad struggled to find a new job. My dad finds not having a job really hard as he doesn't feel like he is contributing to the family. I started my college semester with my dad still having no job and I knew that although my family was doing alright that my college bill was an expensive cost. Towards the end of September my dad was offered two jobs within a week. He initially accepted the first job offer, but later had to take back his yes to accept the 2nd job offer. He started his new job about a week later. I'm hoping this year that my parents will both stay at their current jobs and we won't have any more job changes in the near future.

I finished my sophomore year of college. It was another great year. The spring semester was probably

Autism Conference in April with my
freshman roommate, Sierra. It was a
great experience and gave me so much
professional development for the future.

one of my most laid back semesters. I didn't have class at all on Thursdays which gave me the opportunity to work on my online English class. I so enjoyed taking English online because I could work on the course at my own speed.

I returned to work at my daycare job in June and helped out at Kindercamp for my fourth year. I can't believe I have helped out with four years of kindercamp. My original students are already fourth graders. I can only imagine when I watch my first group of students graduate when I have my own classroom.

The summer flew by as I spent a lot of time working and swimming. We took our summer vacation to California in July. We had our first ever delayed flight. We were scheduled to leave Saturday evening. We came to the airport to find out the Sunny California was having bad weather. They had high winds and rain and some areas did not have power. Originally our plane was delayed and eventually it was canceled. We called our neighbor to come back to pick us up from the airport. We were disappointed, but our flight was rescheduled for Sunday afternoon. We spent another day at home when we planned to be in California. This flight was also delayed. We sat on the plane for about 30 minutes before they had to take us back to the gate where we were supposed to sit for another 2 hours, but it only ended up being around 45 minutes. We

The Avera 5K I ran in May 2015. I ran the
entire race without walking and achieved
a time of 31:16. 

arrived in California well past midnight California time. That is almost 3 am central time. We were freaking out that we would not have a rental car since our car was only gauranteed for 24 hours and we were way past that at this point. It ended up that the car rental service had no power for almost 12 hours the night before, so even if our plane made it we wouldn't have got a car. They were very understanding about our delayed flight and we got our car. We headed off to in and out burger and started our vacation. We got to spend 5 days at Disney and had a lot of fun revisiting our old favorite rides, meeting new and old characters, and spending time together as a family. We were lucky enough to be at Disneyland as they celebrated their 50th anniversary and we were glad to make it back for their 60th anniversary.


School started back up in August I was excited to return and see my friends once again. I completed my special education internship in the fall semester. How the SPED internship works is that you have to complete 40 hours at your placement when it fits in your schedule. I didn't have class on Fridays until 2 and there was one week I didn't have very many classes, so that is how I accomplished my hours. I had three different mentor teachers that had three different tiers of special education. The resource, mild, and severe disabilities classrooms. I split my time between the three classroom. I really enjoyed my time spend in each classroom and learned a lot about accommodating and modifying curriculum for students. I enjoyed getting to know the students as well as my teachers. It was a joy to come to school and makes me wish I could just start teaching now, but for now I need to finish school and my career is right around the corner.

October was an exciting month as my friends Rachel, Lynette, and myself all celebrated our 21st
birthdays. We attended Taylor Swift's 1989 tour on October 8th, 2015. This will be a day I always remember and I wrote a full reflection on the concert in this post. 

I ended the year with my favorite time of year. Christmastime! I had another great Christmas and have watched many beloved Christmas movies this year. So far my favorite Hallmark movie is the 12 Gifts of Christmas. It is a touching movie about a secret santa trying to help a radio host get back into the spirit of Christmas. I got to celebrate New Year's Eve with my friends here in my college town. I'm sitting in my dorm room as I write this post. It is weird being able to get front row parking without trying and basically knowing that I might be the only one in my hall, but it is fun at the same time to be here when it is so quiet and dead.

In 2016 I will start Student Teaching, so I'm very excited that I'm so

Read the Shirt. We are always making fun of the spelling of
our names, so my friend Lynette came up with this saying.
Twins for life. 

close to graduating college and starting my teaching career. Here's to another great year.