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!

Make video montages at www.OneTrueMedia.com

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.

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!

James

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.

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!

Missin' the Mexican

So, the Mexican decided to leave us for the summer. He's now in Tennessee trying to sell people security systems. Before he left, we wanted to get some good pictures of us with him. It's actually a lot harder than you might think!

This was not our first take. We had several before this one. It had serious cute picture potential until Abraham pulled out the guns. Nice.

We got tired of running back and forth with the timer.

These were all taken the day before he left at our combined FHE. This is one of the nicer ones.

Here's another nice group shot with Kim added!

Things started to go downhill pretty quickly, though. Apparently I'm the only one who didn't get the "crazy picture" memo.

This video shows a short clip of what we went through as we tried to get some nice pictures. This was the end of a much longer . . . dance (would you call it that?).

This picture cracks me up minus the fact that I look shockingly like a bodybuilder. I promise that my neck isn't really that big!

They had to have a bit of fun after all that torturous picture taking. We already miss you, Abraham!

The Entertainer

Last night we left the activity after the movie started to go play some games at our friend, Amanda's house. It was a HILARIOUS night. It was five girls (Sus, Jen, Kim, Amanda, and myself) and only one guy (Nick). It sounds weird, but these numbers worked to everyone's benefit. It was great because Nick was somewhat uninhibited without any competition around. He's a performer and would pretty much take any request we had. I have posted a random sampling of videos taken last night. We're still laughing.

It all started with Nick quoting lines from "Nacho Libre." He's quite accomplished at it. Here he is doing his favorite line.

After some chatting and some food, Amanda broke out the Wii. For some reason, guitar hero wasn't really working so we moved on to DDR. Watching DDR is enjoyable in itself, but it became even better as someone would be playing and Nick stood at the back and tried to copy the dance moves that the animated dancers on the game were doing.

Here he finishes out the song he was doing above. He commented that this should solve all of his dancing problems. It was sure entertaining.

I missed the beginning of this one, but here's his velociraptor (sp?) impersonation. It was hilarious.

We liked it so much that we had him do it again so I could film the beginning!

Seek ye diligently

For the last month, our ward has participated in a little dating competition called "Seek Ye Diligently." In it, people are awarded points for asking and going out on dates. The challenge was Elders Quorum VS Relief Society. I'm proud to say that the Relief Society walked away with the win . . . barely. As our reward, they had to feed us dinner at a ward activity.

They went all out. One of the guys hosted it at his house. He lives sort of out in the country and has a huge yard. We played Bocce ball, they had volleyball, frisbee, and his 4-wheelers out too. They got put away soon, though, because the host shattered his wrist after rolling one. He had to be taken to the emergency room. It was outrageously fast and he was back before we even said the prayer on the food. We ate hot dogs, hamburgers, brisket, corn on the cob, potato salad, and root beer floats. They built a HUGE bonfire (thus all the pictures in this post) and set up a big screen outside and played "Dan in Real Life." Great activity, guys!

I got as close as I could without being incinerated. It was a HOT fire!

Everyone had to try it. They got a little more creative with their sillouettes (how do you spell that word?). Here's Adam.

Susannah, the superhero.

Lala!

Fruits of our labors

I should have waited to do my last garden post for just a few more days! Just a day or two after I did that last post, the tomatoes started to turn red!

Our cherry tomatoes are the only ones that are currently turning red, but the full sized ones are getting so big.

We had to document "picking" the first thing from our garden. I'll do my best to refrain from doing this from every new item we get to pick. One of our tomatoes is for sure ready. We wanted to make sure to have 3 ready so we could try them at the same time! :)

I ran out of memory on my card so I didn't continue the video, but this is the inside of our first pea pod.

And here we are eating our very first pea! It was delicious. We look forward to many more tasty items in the days and months to come.