Today is the first day of the Mom Dot Christmas party.  What is the MomDot party? Together we as mom bloggers are sharing our holiday experiences.  Each day you will see a question on MomDot, and your task is to go back to your blog and answer the question.  Then you should strike out around the web and look at the other entries and get to know some fellow mom bloggers. And there’s prizes!!  Today’s post has been sponsored by  La Belle Toile and This and That by Randi.

Today’s topic is just to introduce yourself and your family.  I’m Kimberly, I’m a 28 (almost 29) year old mom to two wonderful daughters.  I teach high school English at a small school in East Texas.  I am literally the English department as I teach 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade English. I pretty much teach every high school student every day. I’ve lived here in East Texas pretty much my entire life (all of it that I remember), and I can’t really imagine living anywhere else (though I’m not necessarily opposed to it).  

Most of my family lives within 30 minutes of me which has been great being a single mom.  I am never truly alone. My grandmother, dad, and great uncle all live within 200 yards of me.  Another set of grandparents live less than 3 miles through the woods, and my other set of parents and youngest sister live only 10 miles away.  Another of my sisters does live in Dallas (which is  to 4 hours from here), and I hate that as we just don’t spend nearly enough time together and I wish my daughter could play with her cousins more, and one of my brothers is the Army and stationed in Iraq right now.  My baby brothers are twins and now 19 years old (so maybe not so much babies), but because of the age difference, I’ve always had a maternal feeling for them in addition to the sister feeling so it’s hard having him so far away.  I’m so proud of him though for promoting freedom and serving our country.  They’re twins right? So what about the other one? Well he was not able to go into the military though he wanted to due to health reasons so he’s currently exploring the world of manual labor and searching for his place in life.  He’s also an awesome young man who I’m proud to call my brother.

I love to read.  That’s probably my number one hobby.  I’ve always loved to escape out of my world and into the world that an author created.  My mom would actually bribe me when I was young.  If I would complete whatever it was she was trying to convince me to do, she would promise me a certain amount of uninterrupted reading time.  Over the last year, I’ve grown to really love blogging. I love sharing and writing. I love the many friends I’ve made as I joined blogging groups, and I love the puzzle of coding behind WordPress. My goal is to one day build an entire WordPress theme from scratch.

Our family shares one big hobby – Disney.  We absolutely love Disney. We would go to Disney World every chance we had if money allowed.  We watch Disney channel almost exclusively for family entertainment. My youngest plays all the games on Disney.com. When my oldest graduates we are taking our first Disney cruise.  Yes – we are constantly looking for Disney magic in our lives.

My daughters are 8 and 17.  Becka is 17. She is not my biological daughter (hopefully due to our age difference you were already wondering about that), but came to live with us and we are super glad to have her.  Why? Because she was smart enough to realize that her options for her future were truly limited in her current life – in particular the school she had to attend because of where she lived. When I offered to let her live with us so she could go to school with me, she jumped on the opportunity. We went to her parents and then to court to change her guardianship.  She now is a proud member of our family and school.  She is taking advantage of the situation and participate in basically every organization our school offers.  Cameron is my 8 year old.  She is in the third grade and a true joy.  She is almost always happy.  She takes dance and twirling class and plays basketball and softball.

Between all of the girls’ activities and the many that I coach/sponsor at our school, the three of us live a very busy life. And without any further adieu, check out these pics of my family from winters of the past:

 
Be sure to write your own post about your family and go back and participate in the MomDot contest.  I’d also love to host your links to your introductions and give you some link love since I’m a do follow blog.  So fill in Mr. Linky above with the link to your first day post.