January Adventures

Recently Devin and I have had some fun adventures and instead of going to bed I thought I'd finally post a blog about them. I mean who needs sleep anyways right? Here are some pics of our recent adventures.

Adventures on the mountain...

Before we started skiing.

Gotta love the huge goggles!

Devin learned really fast the reason you want to keep your hat on; even when it's sunny.

And no, he's not going gray -- it's snow!

This next picture was taken after Devin's adventure of falling down the mountain...yes the entire mountain. Give him a break though, it was icy and only his second time skiing. We were both pretty tired come lunch time. Devin was too exhausted to go any more after lunch so I went on a few runs by myself.

My only mishap was that my ski boots are now a little tight and totally pinched my leg. I have a blister as a reminder that if I want to go skiing more I need to either adjust my boots or get new ones. They were definitely red and swollen when I took my boots off.

Adventures at the Marriott Center...

Devin and I have been to several BYU basketball games and we love cheering on our cougars. Too bad having great seats (row 5) didn't make a difference in helping the cougars on to victory. We lost! :( It was pretty upsetting. Adventures with Lynsie and at Color Me Mine...

Recently the boys got together to play Ultimate Alliance on the Wii, which the wives can't stand, so Lynsie and I decided to have our own fun. I introduced her to Color Me Mine and we had a blast. We spent the day picking out pieces to paint, painting, and catching up on girl talk. Before we knew it the boys were calling us wondering when we were coming home. Normally that never happens when they're engrossed in their game. Here are some of the pics from that great adventure.

Before

After... The red is the wrong color and it's not as fun as I thought it would be, but I still like it.

Okay, so I still have adventures on the ice to talk about. But I decided that my class would hate me tomorrow if I don't get some sleep now. I'll have to finish with the adventures later.

Fun with cake and soil

Now you may be wondering what in the world cake has to do with soil. But I actually just taught an entire lesson on it today. Okay so the lesson was actually on soil, but the cake made the demonstration so much more realistic -- especially to 4th graders. We compared soil to baking a cake. You can't just put the box of cake mix into the oven and get a cake. There are certain ingredients that have to be added. Similarly to get good soil there are certain ingredients that need to be added. You can't just break down rocks and have soil. You need to add organic material, oxygen, water ( at the moment I can't remember if there's anything else - does that make me a horrible teacher?). So during our lesson we actually made the cake mix into the batter that represents good soil.
My class was combined with another class for this discussion and I ran and added water to the mix and came back before mixing it. If course it was all watery -- the recipe called for 1 and 1/3 cups water. One of the students in my class looks at the bowl of very watery "cake" and asks, "Um, Mrs. Andersen how many times have you made a cake?" It was just so funny when she said it because you could totally see that she thought I was obviously failing at making this cake mix -- I almost started laughing, but was able to reply that I knew what I was doing. Courtney and I shared a good "smile" together. I say "smile" because there are so many funny moments during the day where you just have to smile because laughing would hurt their feelings.
Anyway, it was a fun moment at school today. Who knew there was so much information about soil -- we're doing an entire unit just on soil. CRAZY!!
Teaching has been good, but really tiring so far. I feel like I'm never going to get enough sleep again. Maybe I'll go off to bed now...