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My name is Cheryl: C-H-E-R-Y-L. I am addicted to nerdy word puzzles. My favorites are the Crostic puzzles, but I also love Codewords, Word Games, and anything from the Penny Press Variety Games puzzle books where you can earn points, because I like to win.

My next most favorite things in life are my two sons. Just kidding. Most of the time, they rank above the nerdy word puzzles. There's Hayden, who's 4 and a half (the "and a half" is very important in our world), and there's Carson, who's 8 months. Today, the 4-and-a-half-year-old ranks slightly below the nerdy word puzzles, because he just said, "I don't like you," because I wouldn't let him play a video game right this second. Then there was that time when I told him nobody's perfect, and he said, "Hannah Montana's perfect. Why don't you be like her?"

 The good thing about being addicted to doing nerdy word puzzles is that it's not illegal, I don't think, and the only negative side-effect is that it tends to make you sleepy. But it's very good exercise for the brain. When I'm 89, my mind will still be sharp as a whip because I'll be able to quickly give you a 6-letter word for "monotony." On top of that, I'll be able to decode this sentence -- "VRWWYC: B JUVBIYSU IABI'W ZYXWI HUSUGRCUH, IAUJ UJGBXVUF" -- in 10 seconds flat. Now that's something!

Believe it or not, I'm married, and my husband, Chris, thinks I'm  a total geek  pretty cool despite my addiction. Maybe that's because he understands addiction. Sadly, his addiction is much more expensive than mine: He is a car buff. He buys them, he fixes them, he builds them, he buys them fancy new parts, he thinks about them day and night, he talks about them on the phone and online ... gee, it's almost as if he has a mistress. His favorite mistress is a 1968 Porsche 911, but the poor gal has been sitting in our garage for two years, and before that, her original seats were stolen, along with her steering wheel.

Both Chris and I are on the verge of  a nervous breakdown  entering the exciting world of teaching. We're both enrolled in alternative certification programs, and I just accepted a 7th-grade English teaching position in Grand Prairie. We both love the careers/jobs we started our adult lives with, but I think the desire to teach comes from the need to do something more universally important -- to affect the lives of children, to inspire, to shape the future.

I hope you all enjoy reading about our journeys, our missteps (and there are lots of them), our triumphs (not so many of those, unfortunately), and our just plain funny stories in our roles as parents, emerging teachers, husband and wife, and struggling addicts.

Must sign out now -- I have to do a Patchwork Quotagram puzzle before the baby wakes up.