Fall is Here!

The other day Jon surprised me with a WAY fun trip to the canyons. We both love going up there, but we haven't taken advantage of that blessing in our lives as much as we would have liked - busy with school, work, selling our house, packing, finding things out in Denver.

OH - I GUESS I SHOULD OFFICIALLY SAY - we're moving to Denver sometime in the next couple of months. :) Sorry, that should have been its own post.

But that's not the point. I'm trying to ignore that fact and appreciate Utah while I can. So we got home from work, changed into hiking clothes, grabbed some things and were off in a matter of minutes. I loved it! The air was crisp, the colors were beautiful, and it wasn't snowing yet, so everything was bright and beautiful. We cooked tin-foil dinners, hiked around, and enjoyed nature. This is the life!

Balloons!

One of the drawbacks of teaching is that every once in a while (more that I'd like to admit) I have to bring projects home. Unfortunately for Jon, he "gets" to help me. One such project involved blowing up 50+ huge blue balloons so that I could make globes with my first graders. Here are some pics from that adventure.

To get them to my car and into the school (two aspects I didn't consider before blowing the balloons up at home) Jon thought to string them on fishing line. It was awesome. Not only did they all make it to my classroom, but they also looked like a cheesy prom balloon arch. The kids and my co-workers loved it.

Unfortunately, the project went terribly. Six year olds are not spacially capable of watching me tape a continent on and doing it themselves. I now have 25 globes with the continents mixed up, upside down and sideways, and oceans all over the place. Pretty funny. That's first grade for ya.

Fast food kills...

Jon here. :)

Bonnie has been encouraging me for quite some time to post on this blog. So here goes...

On Labor day, we were mourning the loss of our community pool, so we decided to take a trip to Silver Lake up Big Cottonwood Canyon. As usual, the canyon was beautiful and we enjoyed our time up there. We were greeted by this sign,

which set the tone for our trip. We had to ditch our treats and goodies we brought for the critters in the woods (AKA, Bon, Jon & Staci). We enjoyed our time up there, snapped a few pictures for ya'll... Enjoy.

Sometimes I wonder who I married. :)

Bonnie's sister, Staci. She's training to become a ninja - don't mess!

What can I say? "I love sticks" (Really, I was just playing around with the camera)

I'm a bad blogger/Back to School!

So the last time I posted was on August 5. I feel terrible that I haven't kept my awesomely blogging friends updated on our life. But, there's a valid excuse this time. August 6 I went back to school. There was a week of heinous meetings that made me wonder why I was a teacher. Ugh. Then the kids came on the 16th. I had psyched myself up enough to be excited to see them and my classroom was perfect, but once those little baby 6 year olds invaded my world I again wondered why I became a teacher. They're so little and needy and especially sad this year.

But after a week of summer detox, we're all used to each other and we've got some routines down. They still need help with bandaids and tying shoes and wiping noses and going to the bathroom (one little girl is scared of the automatically flushing toilets). But they're so sweet. I love having them in my life every day. They say things like "What color are pilly fads (lilly pads)" or "Gosh, my crayons don't have very good balance today" when his crayons kept "jumping" off his desk. They tell me they love me and give me lots of hugs. And most of all, I can tell they're already learning things. That makes my job worth doing. First grade is the best!