quick update

for all who read this blog, just a quick update on our activities lately:

1. we sold our house! well it's under contract and we should close at the end of october, then we will be moving to the valley. 1.8 acres, a barn, and a guest room. so you (anyone who wants to visit) can come stay!

2. jane is 16 weeks on wednesday! she will be getting her second round of immunizations at the dr. but i think she will be fine, she is one tough cookie. she can laugh now, she giggles at me sometimes too. she rolls from tummy to back, but not back to front yet.

3. Bible reading update: we just finished 2. corinthians and are almost finished with proverbs. i cannot believe we have been doing this since january - and i am going to finish this time. (well, i have finished once in my life, but i have tried a few more than that). observations: paul is an amazing person, i am a bit intimidated by him and he is not even alive. i know he would not want me to say that, but i do realize that Christ was at work in him in a mighty way. also, solomon really was wise, but it seems that all of proverbs can be condensed to: run from folly and seek wisdom and understanding.

4. i have 8 more pounds to lose of the acquired "baby" weight! i am pretty excited and hope to go even 5 lbs past that by march or so.

so there is the update. i hope you had a great day and can encourage someone through your actions

i love school, part 4 of 5

high school ended and i began college fall of 2002. i thought about going to an out of state college like cedarville, cornerstone, liberty, or colorado christian. i applied to a few, and procrastinated too much - therefore my family and i decided that weber was the best decision at least for the first year. well i ended up enjoying it, and stayed all 5 1/2 years. yes five.five years technically.

i am a social science composite major with an emphasis in teaching geography. i spent four years completing my generals and major and 1 1/2 years in the education program. there are a few smells/memories i would like to share with you:

college was my first experience on a campus that was "outdoor" or multiple buildings. i loved spring mornings on campus when it was raining or just after the rain. i remember walking from the social science building to building one - it was uphill and most everyone would walk with their head looking at the ground because of the rain but they missed out on the gorgeous mountains covered in mist. it was such a refreshing sight and smell. i love the smell of rain, even when it comes from the west/great salt lake area. the downside to looking at the mountains during the rain was the rain in your face and the earthworms you would step on, there were a lot! either way the rain/misty mornings reminded me so much of God's love, especially right before a class full of evolutionist hippies.

building one is no longer at weber state. it was torn down to build a giant new humanities building. i loved building one, but only because of the time i spent there. the building was terribly old, it smelled like brick and old carpet, the heating in the building was steam powered, and all the pieces of furniture were hand-me-downs from other departments who had received new equipment. building one was half geography, and half foreign language - okay it was 3 rooms for geography and the rest (maybe 5) for foreign language. the first geography class i had in building one (the geog classes were also in the LL building, science building, and SS) involved me walking through the geog office area into a back room with 9 desks surrounded by 5 computers. yep, it was the cartography lab - we had to split the cartography class into three sections to use the computers. okay, anyway, the first class i had in building one was the geography of africa taught by dr. d. it was great and i think it helped me really decide to major in geography - emphasis in global studies/teaching. it was also the smallest classroom i had ever been in. my favorite classroom was the first classroom on the left if you enter from the south end by the union building. it smelled like paper maps - they were stuffed in long, skinny drawers in tall cabinets that took up too much space - we never even used the maps, most professors used overheads or power point. the seven minute maps that we did use came from another room entirely. during the winter months the pipes used to heat the building would hiss and jerk so loudly that professors would have to stop what they were saying and wait for the noise to stop. if you sat by the wall with the vents it was even harder to hear.

alright, college was one of my best school memories. it seems i had to learn everything i knew about studying, writing, and listening in college - which also helped me decide to become a teacher because i felt like i should have been more prepared for what college demanded. i learned how to write papers (25 pages was the longest, and it is bound with my name on it) i know that college was the time in my life where i learned the most. i grew in every area of life and i don't think in anyway did i go backwards. i met pete and got married at 20, we were responsible for the youth group at ovcc, i decided what my "career" would be, i made friends with people solely because we were all interested in the same subjects, and i had the best spiritual year/years of my life at 19 and 22 approx.

i know that college (18-25 ish) was a time of change for everyone, what did you learn to do in college that you feel you should have been ready for before college?

jane, 14 weeks video

jane is starting to laugh more, and she makes little cooing noises all the time.

i love school, part 3 of 5

my memories for high school seem more compartmentalized than the previous years, yes, even more than my jr. high experiences. i think it was because i wore so many different "hats", as it is called. with cheerleading, youth group, work, school, internship, and whatever else was going on, i tried to live my life as one person but that was difficult.

okay, highschool was obviously filled with many different smells. the two that stick out are woodchips and the vinyl of the wrestling mats where we had cheer practice. i attended northridge high school. i changed from lca so i could try out for cheerleading. (i made it with a roundoff backhandspring - which is no longer good enough at northrigde.)

anyway, back to the woodchips. there was a planter, yes a giant planter complete with trees, in the corner of the commons. we (different people every year) ate lunch there most every day. sophomore year matthew t ate with us - or we ate with him. i always remember he seemed to never take his backpack off. junior and senior year was about the same people - chris s., lindsay, and sometimes lisa or andrea. i remember learning about boxing from chris and being called the "nice" cheerleader by people i talked with while they were walking by. so that will transition nicely to cheerleading practice.

for some reason (maybe they didn't have a good plan when they built the school) the cheerleaders didn't have their own space. because of that, we had to practice in the wrestling room - upstairs next to the weight room and joining the dance room. every a day, we had fourth period and it continued until 5:00. after us the wrestling team would practice. they sometimes didn't clean very well and a few girls got ringworm - gross, yes, but at least i didn't get it. the whole room was one giant mat with circles for their practicing. it smelled like the old exercise mat at my grandma's cabin - but not many of you know what that smells like. it smelled like vinyl like the machines at any gym. a few memories: the windows were so tall, we had to do an extension (stunting, two people high) to open them - very risky sometimes. i got injured at least three times that were memorable one was a major black eye my senior year. i always enjoyed our round of jumps - even though they were hard - because someone would always comment on my toetouches! - in a good way

i have many memories of that building - like the fact that the bathrooms off the stage were nicer than any others in the building, the doors close automatically when the power goes off - which is very scary if you are standing in between two of the large hallway doors during class time, the commons now looks different (no more planter) than it did. i know because i attended church there a couple of times, yes, a church meets in the commons area. i have only been back there twice - for the church and when sarah tried out for cheerleading (she could do a back tuck, i think, and was beat out by 5 girls her age that could do fullbacktwists.)

so, did you enjoy high school? for the most part? i did. what smells do you remember?

i love school, part 2 of 5

okay, continuing from the previous post, these are more memories from my 20 years of schooling:

jr. high was spent at four different locations. 6th grade i was home-schooled at our home in woodscross. 7th grade was 3/4ths homeschool and 1/4 public school at millcreek jr. in bountiful (mostly spanish, art, and p.e. the subjects i didn't get in homeschool. we also tried math and something else but i only did that for one semester) - i walked there most days, which, when i think of it now was pretty far - not far enough for the bus. 8th grade i was home-schooled/video correspondence at my grandma's in farmington as we built our house in south weber. and finally, 9th grade was at layton christian academy while we lived in farmington.

because of all these locations, jr. high smells like the metal of the lockers in 7th grade, the carpet at lca, and the wet cement in my grandma's basement. i think i had my own locker in jr. high and my first friends lockered right next to me. i was so awkward in 7th grade, but so were they. i had two good friends - one we called ashley spashley, and i associate meeting them with the area by our lockers. actually, i saw them later in high school - when i was in bountiful at a viewmont game - at pace's. it was so weird because they were exactly the same. i felt i had changed a lot since then, oh well.

we turned the unfinished area of my grandparent's basement into a kitchen/dining room; which is where we had school. we left the floors cement near the laundry area. every so often some water would bubble up through the drain on the other side of the room (i forget why) but the cement would stay wet for a while and i will never forget that smell, i think the issue is fixed now.

i hadn't been to school full time outside of my home for 3 years when i went to lca. i think it was because i wanted to be with friends during the day (i was probably driving my mom crazy) and i did not enjoy teaching myself (mostly in math - no offense mom.) lca was where kelli went so my parents looked into it. i met a lot of people at lca, some good friends, some not so good. i remember the smell of the carpet because we always sat in the (one) hallway in between classes to talk. now, because of mrs. davis, i realize that was pretty gross. we did not care, because it was "cool."

for more stories of jr high; like the year my cousin and i were homeschooled by an old guy from 1992 pensacola florida, or the year kelli, melissa, joy, amy, and i were cheerleaders together, or my favorite spot to eat lunch outside mustang headquarters, and who can forget underwear man! anyway, just ask and i'll be glad to fill you in.