Crazy Weekend

Talk about a crazy weekend. Brian and I start our weekend Friday since Brian doesn't work or have school and he has to work on Sunday. The first thing we did this weekend was to set up a double date with a couple from our ward. We were trying to schedule it around the manager of our apartment since he was coming to fix our toilet but that didn't happen. We left without the manager coming but he came while we were gone and left the mess he made for me to clean up. It took forever to clean up too! Unless you know how to clean up a toilet wax ring off your floor, I am just going to have to leave with the remainder of some of it on my floor. Anyway after trying to clean that up Saturday Brian and I then filed for FAFSA. We are keeping our fingers crossed that we get a good amount since I was unable to get a scholarship for this next year since it took me too long to find the scholarships available to me. I have one more to try before all hope is gone. With the running around to figure out what bills we needed to pay and how much we had in the banks it took most of Saturday. Brian really wanted to watch one of the NCAA elite 8 games though so we ran from our errand running to my sister's house to watch the game. When we got home though we had quite the evening unfold with our CO (Carbon Monoxide) alarm going off. The firefighters had to come to our house to just double check that the alarm hadn't detected any CO. It turned out to be that our alarm has reached the end of it's life and we need a new one. It is quite the evening when you have a cop car and firetruck parked outside your house and you are showing the firefighters to all the different apartments that are connected to yours with any appliances that might have triggered the alarm. After a good thirty minutes and an okay that everything is fine, we got to go back into our house and relax for the last few hours that remained in our weekend.

Spring Break

Brian and I had to get out of Logan with the week off. So since we had a problem with our car early and it took up some of our money, our Cali trip got canceled. We ended up in Wolf Creek instead for two nights and a day in Park City shopping. It was still a great break. We had a nice relaxing time just chilling in the condo we were able to get through my parents. It was nice to get a condo since it saved us on money with the kitchen it had. Brian loved the fact that it had cable and he got to watch the NCAA tournament for one whole day and do very little else. I got to cuddle with him and then get him to go take a walk and a drive with me. It was a great relaxing day together. Brian and I also participated in the craft activity they had going on for the people in the condo. It was creating a tote bag. Although it turned into an adventure since they didn't have any paint brushes and only gave us basically paint to work with. We luckily got creative and had a blast finger painting. It was fun creating a design with a mixture of mine and Brian's hand prints and finger prints. The best thing we attempted was creating a heart with our hands and paint. It didn't work out quite like we thought it would but we made it turn out. :) Friday we headed to Park City to try to get some steals...we didn't find very many but it was still fun to go look around and to come get some good deals at Target. Probably my favorite part of Friday though was the play we went to with my family. My parents had some free tickets and invited us to go see Bye Bye Birdie with them at Heritage Theater in Perry. It was a really funny play with some characters. We laughed and enjoyed our last night of Spring Break. Overall between remodeling a bathroom and taking off the Wolf Creek we can definitely say we got away and did something fun for the week we had off.

Rectangular versus Angular

The past two days Brian and I have been helping out at my sister's place with remodeling a bathroom. My sister might be needing to sell her house so they are trying to have the house have a more desired look with a tub being in the master suit. So our Monday of Spring Break began with us heading to my sister's house. I was on babysitting duty of my niece Savennah and Brian was the demo guy. They pulled out the linoleum floor and the carpet in the bedroom first. Then discovered another floor layer needed to be removed from the bathroom. This was the hard part and took up the rest of the time Brian and I had available to help them. Brian and my sister pulling up the floor that was glued to the other floor and me occupying a two year old with a kite and a new orange ball. Then Brian and I went out to eat. We had planned on going on a date Monday so we hit the Beehive Grill for their pub special before Brian went to go babysit for the Poppletons and I headed to work for the night. It was a late night for us but we got up early on Tuesday since our water was going to be shut off for the day and we had to head to my sister's one more time to lay the tile and babysit again. Tuesday was very long. Brian and Daren played with cutting and laying tiles for 11 LONG hours. Savennah wasn't feeling the best on Tuesday either. We decided it was growing pains but she had a hard day. All in all though we finished the floor and offered our shower to allow my sister and her family to be able to relax. Brian's worst thing of the day was trying to figure out all the different angles that were involved in the bathroom. It wasn't easy and he told me that if we ever build a house it will be rectangular shaped with very few angles so a lot of the work can be done by us but without the headache. This made the last two days great for us since we got to enjoy kids and get our fill for them with the good and the bad. We also discovered how hard doing your own projects can be and how rewarding and learning they can be.

Webquests

We learned about webquests today. Putting it simply they are web pages designed to have your children do some research using only the sites you have already found for them to use. It is a great way to have children begin research papers. We will be making one as a group soon. Some topics that would be fun to use would be fine arts standard 3- students will develop an understanding of their environment or using social studies Standard 2-Studnets will recognize their roles and responsibilities of being a good citizen. Those are a few topics that I might want to explore to make a webquest about. This sounds like a really cool idea but we are going to learn how to fully use it next class period. Right after Spring Break that is! :)

Ticker

I am at work and not wanting to do homework. So instead I am playing around a little on the internet and found this cute ticker of time on a website. Since I posted it about our wedding and it is a little confusing I decided I would explain why I did the football field. Brian loves sports especially football. So since I know he probably won't ever write a post I would have him a part of the blog in little ways...like the football field. The name of the website is by the ticker and it does several tickers including pregnancy and child's age for anyone who might want to go look at them. They are way cute.

Crazy Weeekend...but so much learned

This weekend started out on a crazy note. Brian discovered a problem with our car's muffler. It is in the shop and will be fixed soon. Not too bad. Then my sister-in-law had little Abigail Jolene early. She ended up bleeding and had to go to the hospital to get induced. Turns out we are luck to have this little girl since she had the cord wrapped around her multiple times and had lack of circulation for a while before she was delivered. However she is fine and mommy is starting to heal after losing a lot of blood and almost getting a blood transfusion. Now you might be asking why did this make our weekend crazy and have me learn so much. It all had to do with the birth of my new niece. My brother and sister-in-law weren't prepared for the baby at their house. She was only about two to three weeks early but they still didn't have much ready. So my family all got together and made things happen. We cleaned their whole apartment from top to bottom and inside-out. It was a lot of work to do but we knew it needed to be done in order to allow my sister-in-law the rest she needed to continue healing. After cleaning and shopping for them for twelve straight hours I was exhausted. It was such a long day and totally drained me. This whole thing made me realize what an amazing family I have. To have all of us rally together and to help out my brother in his time of need was pretty amazing. I also realized how blessed I am to have been taught so many things about cleaning, organizing, and being prepared from my mom and dad. I know that I am not having a baby anytime soon but I know how much goes into having to prepare for one and just how much work it takes to be prepared for anything. It is truly amazing to see this new little baby and realize just how dependent she is on everyone around her. I am proud to know that Brian and I helped her begin this life in such a blessed, clean, and loving way.

Website Evaluation

Technology is still going on strong. Today we learned all about how we can check the websites our students might use for research or any other thing. Although my teacher mostly talked about us as teaches using these different sites to evaluate the trueness of the sites I think this would be something very good to have students learn so they can check the trueness of the site for themselves.
So I tried a few out for myself and here is what I did.
On Discovery Education I used Kathy Schrock's Elementary School Level Evaluation. I choose this one because it is one I would use to teach my children to use.
So the name of the website I am going to evaluate is Merriam-Webster Online. It doesn't take too long to load and there are no big pictures on the page. None of the spelling on the page is incorrect. The authors name and website are not on the page but it does have ti linked to the Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. It doesn't have image maps. The information is all easy assessable to on the left hand side of the page. If I decide to go to another page it is really easy to get back to the first page by clicking either home or back. The page doesn't have a date of when it was created and there aren't any photos or sounds. The title of the page tells me the website is a Merriam-Webster dictionary online. There isn't a paragraph on the first page explain what is included in the site. I did find all the facts I was looking for on this page. I would not have gotten more information on an encyclopedia site. I also didn't really get information that was more helpful then an encyclopedia. The author doesn't say anything that I would disagree with and I do get lead to other pages with more information. I don't have any information on the page that is wrong and everything on the page helps me learn. I think the site is correct and very helpful.
On Wave.webaim.org I tried the site http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/volcano/.
Wave detected 6 accessibility problems. These 6 problems included ads posted at the top and bottom of the page, some link text not making sense to the system, some layout problems, having some test missing next to pictures, a heading problem, and an incorrect heading order. Most of those problems aren't really big problems or concerns about the actual info on the page that tells me about volcanos so I think the website has good information for a research paper.
This was a really good thing to learn and I will definitely pass this on to fellow teachers, parents, and students.

Sick of having all School Posts....So about US!!

So let's quickly go back to the beginning of our courtship and to where we are today. Then I can start adding posts more about what is going on without having it seem so vaguely placed on the blog. Brian and I both worked at Convergy's back in 2007. Brian had just moved from Weber up to USU and I had just graduated and was attending my first year at USU. We met according to Brian in September but I don't really recall too much. I can vaguely think of being introduced to him because I knew who he was later on, I just can't really recall meeting him. Anyway, we both knew of each other through a mutual friend BJ or Beth. But we never really started to get to know each other until December. The first interaction I can remember having with Brian is when I was on crutches. I had sprained my ankle to a level 2 sprain while sledding with my sisters. Or at least I had attempted to go sledding I hurt myself on the first ride. So I had gotten put on crutches and was attempting to hobble around campus and work. Brian and I rode the Stadium bus (USU school bus) down together one day. We talked for the ride and then said goodbye. Later at work that night we finally had our first team meeting since our team lead had been out with a serious injury and we found out we were on the same team. The team lead let me off a little early so I could make my way down to the room before the others left me behind. While waiting for our team lead I had several people ask me what happened to my foot. Before I could even answer Brian said he thought I looked beautiful and wanted to get my attention and had kicked me. It was the first flirt of many flirts to come. We began talking to each other every day at work, sitting by each other, and passing notes over the walls of our cubicles. (The notes was probably one of my favorite things we did. It was so cute and elementary like. :) ) Anyway after several attempts from me to have him ask me out, I have to give the credit to his sister Jan who met me at our work party at the Fun Park when we got a whole group of us together to play. Brian I guess was in a friend relationship which Jan told him to get out of and to ask me out because she liked me. So he did. We finally went out on our first date December 29, 2007. Brian took me to the Mandarin Garden, a Chinese restaurant in Logan and to the Aggie basketball game. He says he knew something could come of our relationship after we barely talked through the game since we both were really into how our team was doing. After the game Brian didn't want to take me home so he drove really slowly all the way to Richmond and past. We took a tour of a few towns in Idaho and Cornish before we ended at a church in Richmond. We talked until three in the morning, he then took me home, and we went to bed. I had a missionary farewell the next morning for a guy I had been dating up to that point. We said our goodbyes and I went to Brian's apartment to watch the movie "Amazing Grace". We began dating that night. I got to experience many "firsts" with Brian including going to Vegas, a professional sporting event, and so many more to even try to name. We dated for eight months before we had too many people pushing us to get married and we knew it wasn't right at that time. So we decided it was time for a break. We became each others best friend for four months. We then got back together. Brian purposed to me the end of March in 2009. We began planning a wedding. We got married on 7-11-2009 in the Ogden temple (which won't even look the same in about two years) and have been living very well since and continue to help each other experience "firsts". :)