Randomness

I'm compiling a few things here that I've been wanting to share. The first two are tributes to wonderful people. My mom sent me THIS LINK to an obituary for Mrs. Juanita Bennett, my first grade teacher. She just passed away. For those Joseph City folks who haven't heard, check it out. I didn't know most of that stuff about her!The other tribute is to a man I worked with at the temple, Bob Caraway. I don't have a picture of him, but he had to have only been in his 50s or 60s. I got to know him pretty well and was shocked and sad to hear that he had passed away due to complications from a serious tractor accident. He was a wonderful man and the pain of the situation was definitely eased by my being in the temple when I found out and even more by knowing about the Plan of Salvation!

I also wanted to share this sort of sobering video from youtube that's got some crazy information from Glenn Beck.

This is another great video sort of on the same topic. Whoever put it together did a great job. Thanks to Richard for sharing both of these with me.
Lastly, I wanted to share one more link with you. Some good friends of Susannah and me are looking to adopt another little one. They are working through LDS family services and word of mouth to try and find the next member of your family. If you know of anyone who is in the situation to place
a child for adoption, please send them HERE to get to know the AWESOME Jackson family!

Camping Round 3

I went on another camping trip this weekend! Don't worry, I'm just posting a few pictures since a lot of camping pictures seem to look the same!

Brock cooked us some delicious breakfast: pancakes, eggs, and sausage! It was so good!

We had better odds at this camp out. My first trip was all girls (purposefully), then we tried a mixed group and ended up with 7 girls and Nate. This time we had 4 guys and only 3 girls! Wow!

The only fiasco was when we decided to take the mountain bikes out for a spin on the trails and got majorly rained on. We went in Nate's big tent for a few rounds of scum. Things got a little weird when Abraham started feeding Nate some oranges. :)

100th Day Sandwich

Those of you with elementary school aged children will know that the 100th day is a pretty big deal. Most of these pictures are about the 100th day at our school. I called it a sandwich because I have a beginning and an end to this post that don't really go with the 100th day, but I wanted to post them anyway.

We were learning about Africa the same week that we had the hundredth day. I devoted one day to Egypt and we had tons of fun. I loved bringing my souveniers from my trip this summer. The kids really liked it. My favorite part was having them decode my name in heirogliphics. I had my name painted on a cartouche while I was over there and they used a decoding sheet that I had.

Okay, now to the 100th day! One of the activities was the kids got to have 100 snacks. I bought a bunch of little stuff - 10 different things and the kids got to take 10 of each.

Here's a plate with 100 snacks. Hungry?

The kids were also challenged to wear 100 things to school on that day. I took a picture of some of the most creative/unique ideas. Victoria wore 100 safety pins.

Gaby had 100 pennies wrapped in plastic wrap as a necklace and bracelet. Adella had a macaroni necklace.

Tyler's cracked me up. He had a quick and easy way to sport 100 pennies. Lots of kids had 100 stickers on their shirts. We had a messy floor by the end of the day!

I also made some blue Jell-O and we counted out 100 Swedish Fish to put in it. They turn out pretty slimy once the Jell-O is set, but most of the kids LOVE it.

This video is from a lunch bunch we had in my room the other day. If the kids eat all their food and there's time left, I'll let them dance. They love it and I think it's hilarious. Stephanie in the stripes was reminding me a lot of Elaine from Seinfeld!

Love is in the air!

So, I'm a little behind in posting again! A couple of weeks ago, Abraham surprised Susannah and I by showing up at our school!

We hadn't seen him there at all this school year so it was a nice treat. He had recently gotten something that he was really excited to show us!

THE RING for his girlfriend, Stacia!

This is right after he popped the question . . . on Valentine's Day. They were at Memorial Park in Houston. Congrats to Abraham and Stacia!

Tons of people I know have just gotten engaged. Spring must be on the way!

Happy Valentine's Day!

One of the activities I do with the first graders at school each year near Valentine's Day is to make a heart shaped book with different elaboration sentences for their parents as a gift.

I give them this sentence to fill in the blanks to:

I love you as much as a ______ loves _______.

They each had to think of 4 different sentences. This class did a really good job and I wanted to share some of their responses. I'll leave off the beginning so just remember that they all start with

I love you as much as a

seed loves to grow.

car loves to honk.

bird loves to lay eggs.

butterfly loves nectar.

frog loves to hop.

cheetah loves to run.

lake loves it's fish.

moon loves night.

sea loves to splash.

sun loves to shine.

penguin loves to waddle.

kite loves to fly.

bear loves to climb.

monkey loves bananas.

rat loves cheese.

dog loves to bark.

fox loves to live in the forest.

groundhog loves to sleep.

spider loves to bite.

Porch Cover

My parents came to visit for Susannah's birthday. I'm actually going to let her post about her birthday stuff. My exciting news is that the posts on my porch covers are finally covered with lovely bricks! They got here at noon and my dad got started on it.

When we got home from school, he had both posts up to this level. The only problem was that my dad dropped one of his tools down the hole. It's a good thing Susannah has monkey arms!

We took some cool pictures of my dad working. He used a level to check quite often and they turned out pretty straight!

It was pretty windy that day.

He was a good sport to put up with all the picture taking. This is only a small part of the pictures too!

Here he is putting up the last brick. It worked out perfectly with the amount of bricks and the space to that beam at the top.

Here's a before shot that I took as Ike was coming.

Here's the finished product! Nice work, Dad! Thanks a million!

New Blog

Today's Susannah's birthday!

One of my presents to her was a blog I created for her and Adam. Click HERE to check it out!

Sushi Night

We had a Sushi party at our house last night.

Kirsten actually made the sushi. It was pretty impressive.

I was so impressed, in fact, that I took a little video of her rolling one.Here are some of her finished products. Susannah and I actually do not love fish, but we tried these and WE LIKED THEM! She puts rice, cream cheese, tuna or salmon, and avocado in them.

It was Mauren's birthday the day before so we had this party to celebrate. We stuck the candles in some brownies that someone brought.

Another highlight of the evening was the removal of the stitches in Damien's head. This was the silliness before the actual "operation."

Kirsten successfully removed them all. Good work!

Visitors

Alright, so we've been happy to have Bridgette Solomon living in Houston the past 3 months. Sadly our work schedules didn't work out to do stuff very often.

She actually moved to Seattle last Thursday, but we did get to see her the weekend before she left. She and Jason came over and we went out to dinner and played games. It was a lot of fun. It was only our 3rd time to see her the whole 3 months she lived here!

We also reconnected with our old friend Bobby who's a pilot for Continental Express. He added a lot of fun to the mix that night. We like his smug face in this picture.

We snapped a quick one with Sus and Bridgette before they left. If any of you that know Bridgette haven't heard her "spork" story, you need to ask her about it!

We were also lucky to have our Aunt Maylene and Uncle Darrell over a few times this week. They grew some delicious carrots in their garden that they shared with us! I need to plant some of those. It's time to get our garden going again!

School fun

I've had a few fun goings on at school lately so I thought I'd post a few of them.

We had Antarctica week a few weeks back and one of the activities I had the kids do, was to make these cute penguins out of Oreos. They turned out super cute!

I like this shot. Most of them were slightly demolished by this point so we had to eat them right after!

Since Susannah's right across the hall from me at school, we had a good time one day during our conference period.

We took this one in front of a lovely tissue box I had on my desk.

These two boys were eating lunch with me. If you've seen my "first grade funnies" section, these are the boys who talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up. The one on the right is the one who said "butt model."

Camping Trip #2

Last weekend we went on our second camping trip. We camped at Lake Livingston State Park. This was going to be a coed camping trip, but Nate ended up being the only guy that came. The others backed out at the last minute, so it was Nate, his dog, Gus, and 7 girls. How fun is that? :)

This was the most common scene at the camping trip. Susannah got a fancy new camera and took tons of pictures, trying out different things on her camera. This post has mostly her pictures, and it contains only a small fraction of them!

Kim and Julie were instrumental in helping to create the once again fabulous and HUGE tin foil dinners.

I like this shot she got of the dinners. I want a new camera now!What's a camp out without a little camp fire shenanigans?

Nate's checking to see if the food is done, in a very interesting way.

Nate also brought a cool toilet seat for us to use, and had to demonstrate how to use it in case anyone was confused.

This is where he slept. He was trying to be macho and said he wanted to just sleep out by the fire. He's now concocted this whole story about how we took all the tents and air matresses so that was his only choice. RIGHT!

Here are a few people just waking up.Susannah snuck off in the woods to take some fancy pictures with her ring. This one was my favorite.We had a lovely breakfast of instant oatmeal and then . . .. . .went on a nature walk around the lake. This is Susannah's favorite picture of the trip. It is awesome! Her camera rocks - as do Nichole and Kim. :)Nate was trying to impress everyone. This was one of his attempts. That's his dog Gus.Cynthia and Nichole played guitar for us quite a bit. I loved it!The funniest/most tragic part of the trip came when Cynthia accidentally NAILED Julie's Exterra with a stick she was throwing for Gus to fetch. It left a nice little dent and scratch.Here I am enjoying the campfire! I'm sure we'll head out camping again sometime soon!