Thursday, May 29, 2008

Bike Shop

Alright, I'm going to have to go back on my statement a few months ago that I wasn't going to post anything nice about Adam anymore on my blog.
My dad gave me a new/old bike and Jen just bought a fancy new road bike. She already had a mountain bike so space in our garage was an issue. Adam bought us some hooks to hang the bikes up and then came and installed them for us! Nice!
Food and our charming company is our usual payment for any service he renders, but I thought I would add this picture as an added bonus - nice arm shot, eh?
I'm sure it was also a bonus for him to see how hard it was for us to get the bikes up on the hooks.
Here's the finished look. I actually prefer the bikes being there. It gives the garage sort of a cool outdoorsy feel! Thanks, Adam!

School's Out . . . Almost!

This post should illustrate why I haven't been posting much lately - well this and the fact that my Internet connection has been insufferably slow lately.
Last week we had our first grade awards and program. All the kids got awards and we put on some fairytale plays in my classroom. This is the background we made. I thought it was really cute. I accidentally had to cover up the board with the spelling words on it, so I just wrote our spelling words on the sun.
I had to get a picture with cute little David. He was the best "Big Bad Wolf" I've have in my class, I believe. Also, notice the cute apron that my awesome room mom made with my students' help!

Here's David saying his lines a little later. He's awesome!
One of my students is in a Karate School daycare program. One of his instructors came in to talk to the class. The kids loved it!
We also had a fun field trip where we walked to the local library to get the kids excited and prepared for summer reading. This is half of the first graders in our school with A LOT of parent volunteers. There are about 50 or so kids all jammed in this picture.
Today was our big picnic day. Susannah and I are posing here for a sibling picture. I'm next to George, one of my students, and she is by Alex, his little brother. Susannah also had George last year. They're headed off to Dubai to visit their father so they'll miss the last few days of school. They're moving schools next year, so we may never see them again! :(
Here they are with some fun friends.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Singing

Our little octet sang in church last Sunday again. We sang a really cool arrangement of "Joseph Smith's First Prayer." We had Bishop Chappell play the piano for us.
He invited us over on Saturday to practice and then took us all out to dinner (minus Aubrey who went to be with her fiance'). We took some video of a practice we had Sunday morning. We were especially excited about our color coordinated outfits. Yay for Susannah getting a You-Tube account!

Saturday, May 24, 2008

James

This is one of my cute first grade students on his drum set. What a talented little guy. He's also good at impressions. He did "Forrest Gump" for me the other day and it was hilarious!

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

We got tickets!!!!!

Well, Susannah and I finally got brave. We're finally leaving our continent. We've only had one other "out of country" trip. We visited Belize and Guatemala a few summers ago, but those are REALLY close compared to where we're going this summer!
Our friend Katherine is a big traveler. She's got a lot of family who live in different areas of the world. She planned a great trip for this summer, which we kind of invited ourselves on.
We actually leave on a different day than her. Katherine's headed to Greece for her first stop. We're going to England for about 4 days.We will then meet up with her in EGYPT! She has lots of relatives that currently live in Cairo. We 're planning on doing a cruise on the Nile and doing lots of sightseeing. We're also planning on heading over to Israel. I'm REALLY excited for this trip. Our roommate Seana is a big traveler and has tons of travel books we're going to use to plan some of our trip. We've already had some travel advice and "must sees," but feel free to add your two cents if you've been to any or all of these places or if you have heard of anything that we should see.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Surprising Mom

We had a free weekend and we decided it would be a lot of fun to surprise my mom for Mother's Day. We checked with my dad first to make sure they would be around for it. Everything went great and we've had a fun time with them. Here are the highlights of our fun weekend!
My mom threw a baby shower on Saturday. She made her delicious fruit pizza. She gave us the artistic creativity in placing the fruit and we had a lot of fun!
This is a post-glaze picture. We had to take both!Another highlight was going to the river to try out my parents' new kayaks. You can tell that the giant was in there because of his wet bum.Here are mom and Sus in the kayaks.And - a not-so-flattering picture of me. That life vest was squeezing the life out of me.I guess I really just wanted a picture of my cute pedicured toes. This was actually going to be the proof I was in the kayak until my mom snapped the one above this one.After church on Sunday, the men served everyone Hawaiian Haystacks. I really liked their little moving haystack assembly line. We did some family pictures later this afternoon. Everyone looks nice and calm except for me. I almost didn't make it before the timer went off. The camera started slip after I'd already pushed the button and I had to reposition it before running to join the picture.This one's not too bad.
We had to take another one to do the pyramid effect with our heights. It was a great weekend at home. Thanks, family, for being so wonderful!

Nice Surprise

On Friday morning Susannah and I came downstairs for breakfast before leaving for school and found a FANTASTIC surprise!
Jen was waiting there with some Mother's Day presents for us! It was so thoughtful.
Jen knows us too well! We LOVE our presents! Thanks so much, Jen!