Recently

Scary news has erupted in my family. My mom lost her vision in her left eye and then was diagnosed to have a tumor growing on her optical nerve. She is admitted at the U of U Hospital and will have brain surgery most likely on Monday. We are all very hopeful, supposedly this is the most common brain surgery and is regarded as a highly positive outcome. The doctors are very optimistic that the tumor is benign, and hope to recover my mom's vision. Although we are feeling extremely optimistic, we still ask for thoughts and prayers directed towards my mom's surgery success and to restore her vision.
Thanks.

Student Teaching Assignment: I'm going....

Yes! It's finally here! I feel like I have been waiting forever... of course UVU had to wait till the very last minute of the entire semester to tell us, probably just to see how all us newbe student teachers could handle the suspense. But, yes I am so excited to tell you that I will be student teaching... (drum roll please...)
12th grade English at Spanish Fork High School.
If I am correct that will include regular senior English, AP English, and College English 1010, but I have not yet met with my cooperating teacher for all the details.

Honestly, I never thought student teaching would come. It always seemed so far away. Now that it's here I am both terrified and giddy; I was so excited in the UVU assignment meeting that I was making myself dizzy with turmoil. Wish me luck, I start Jan. 5th, 2010. Yippy!

Crafts

These are the easiest and cheapest crafts you could possibly make, and yet they are so cute.

Supplies: mod podge
scrapbook paper
foam brushes (not the bristle kind)
cheap wooden frames or cut out
+ any artistic embellishments you want

For those of you who may not have mod podged before, it is really easy. Just cute out the paper to fit the frame or board, add mod podge with foam brush to the entire portion of wood, then lightly and carefully press the paper into place. After the paper is relatively dry, brush the outside of paper with mod podge and dry. Easy!

My mom and sister visited, and we had so much fun making our crafts. I wanted to get pictures of our messy crafts but forgot before they left, so these are all my crafts.


I added the letters and then chunky glitter.


The frames are way cheap at JoAnne's, only $2.00 and paper is usually only $.50 so this a relatively fun and yet cheap way to make a new look for bare walls.

Our house in Utah

Actually, Andrew and I have lived here for almost two years, but I guess I didn't put any pictures on our blog. I probably meant to, but forgot. I didn't realize this until I talked to an old friend that asked me if I had posted pictures of our house (of course I had not), so then I decided to put some up.



Our house is a townhouse with 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and a GARAGE (this was Andrew's one stipulation when we were looking to buy).
As I took the pictures above, it actually started SNOWING for the first time this year! Yea for winter!


Dinning Room opens up into the kitchen and living room.


Kitchen and Dinning room


Living Room as it opens up to the kitchen and dinning rooms


Living room (Andrew is very proud of his T.V., we saved for months to buy exactly what he wanted... and we got a great deal on it at woot.com, check it out for some awesome daily deals).


Looking upstairs from the living room. I love the balcony, it was one of the major selling features for me!


Looking down to the living room from upstairs. The balcony has proved very entertaining because I will throw Maggie's toy from here and she will run and fetch it. She's a very active dog and needs to be worn out, so this has been a great tool (especially when cold outside and can't go for walks).


Part of the hallway upstairs, just so you can see the balcony a little better.


Master bedroom.


More master bedroom. I wanted to show this picture because of our crafty skills: I made the curtains, and Andrew installed the ceiling fan.


And one more of master bedroom.

Maggie's new find

Although many of you may have already seen this picture, I thought I'd put it up because it is so funny. Andrew was BBQing while I was inside preparing other dinner stuff, when Maggie ran inside with Andrew chasing behind. Andrew was laughing and told me that Maggie found this outside. This picture is exactly the way that she ran in with the Binky. Funny huh!

Real Salt Lake

I decided quite awhile ago to surprise Andrew with a fun date. I thought for almost of month of stuff he would really like to do, and then the perfect idea came. "Of coarse, he's been wanting to go to RSL game ever since the new stadium was built." So, I began looking for tickets online. I wanted to make sure they were good seats (and since I had never been to a Real soccer game I had no idea what to expect), so I was often pulling up online stadium maps trying to decide how much to spend and where to sit. I was definitely getting excited. I started to imagine how happy he would be when we would dramatically drive up to the stadium parking lot and he would realize what kind of date I had planned for him. It was going to be perfect.
Clever as I thought I was, my angst for revealing my little secret became overbearing (I really can't keep a good secret from Andrew, and usually end up ruining my own surprises from excitement) til I finally had to tell. He liked my surprise, but (not surprisingly) already knew because I had left a paper trail of evidence on the computer of stadium seating maps.

Our little date night adventure was so fun. The game was so amazing. The fans at soccer games are like nothing I have ever seen. In one section there were several people with big flags and drums, and the ENTIRE game they beat on those drums, waved their flags, and jumped in a synchronized rhythm. I was very impressed with their energy and loyalty for RSL.

Our future family looks Bleak

No, No.... we are not expecting sorry to get your hopes up! But we found this funny website where you can see what your future baby might look like. We really hope it is inaccurate, otherwise we should probably reconsider having children... they'd be really ugly!
Here's the link:
Little Baby Boy Marx