Father's Day, a family visit, and a birthday.

Over the last week or so we've had a lot of fun events and they were even made better because Max had nearly a week off from his internship...I guess it was only 3-4 days but I'll take what I can get. It was great having him around. Last weekend my grandma and aunties came into town for my Great Aunt Marilyn's funeral. we were able to host them and eat good food and play games. They spoiled us with some great home-cooking which was being neglected with our busy schedules so it was much appreciated. While my family was here we were able to all celebrate Father's day for Max. I made an amazing breakfast of homemade blueberry waffles, eggs, sausage, and bananas. He then got to open his present. He had mentioned that he wanted to have a matching outfit with his son so I got the closest outfit I could to something Max already owned. Baby boy will not be able to wear it until next summer but we are excited. Max got so giddy when he opened it and couldn't stop smiling. Max had to leave for to work at noon so he left and I went to church with my Grandma and Aunties. After church my Aunts made a delicious pot roast. After we ate, we delivered some to Max and to my aunt Deanna. We came back and played games into the night. I then had to go to bed to get up for teaching the next morning.

It was fun hosting some family in our house! They were excellent guests!

Several days later our friend, Nelson, celebrated his 29th birthday, his wife is in Texas doing a ten week internship so we knew we needed to make this a birthday to remember! Max prepared a little surprise party/BBQ

It was a success

Of course, Max likes to get crazy and make people take awkward pictures...so after giving Nelson his own bow and arrow set...he made him put on the famous Avatar wig.

And there you have it...Max is the best party thrower in all the land...

Weight lifted

As teachers our capstone project seems relatively simple, create a unit with 5+ lessons and teach it. Oh my, that was the most tedious project ever. Not simple at all. The lesson part was fun but the 80 page report was not. It wasn't necessarily hard just a lot of work that seemed to take the fun out of teaching. But today, June 13th 2011, I turned in this blasted report and life is good. I was nearly in tears from excitement as I handed my reports to the secretary, a whole 24.5 hours early. This is a picture of two copies of the report, two teachers will be grading it so I had to turn in two copies!

So I came home and celebrated by wiping the dust off Sharootie (our kitchenaid's name) and baking some cookies.
Max is working so he doesn't get to enjoy them with me but baby boy seems to like them, he is in a kicking frenzy!

Student teaching is half way over, let me rephrase, the hardest half is over. The part where I had a tedious report. I now switch to fifth graders (coming from first graders) which I'm thrilled about but slightly nervous.

Anyway, that was my last and biggest college project, 8 more weeks until graduation (only 6 weeks of teaching left)
I am happy!

It's a baby!!

First of all, we have an amazing friend that is an ultra sound tech and she gave us an early ultra sound on the hospital's brand new equipment and gave us a picture CD of about 20 images of our baby for FREE!!! All because she's amaing and wanted some practice. We are so blessed. Thank you Ashlyn! we will have another ultrasound from our doctor in a couple of weeks.

So here are the results...we are having a perfect little boy!!!

I was always confused by ultrasound pictures in the past but those look like obvious boy parts to me!
His head was wedged really low so we couldn't get a good profile but we got to see him flailing and kicking.

This is a thumb sucking pictures, it's still hard to see the face but it's there!!

We love our little boy so much already!! Now we just have to wait 5 more months!!!

two years!

So, this post is a little late but...We got to celebrate two years of marriage on May 2nd and the weekend before that. It's passed by quick...on the other hand I feel like we've always been married. Max got the whole weekend off including Monday May 2nd. ( I still had to teach that Monday but we had the evening together.) Max got home from a long shift at 7 am on Saturday morning and crawled right into bed with me so we could sleep a couple more hours. when we eventually decided to get up I found a lovely flower just for me. We have an agreement that the flower thing doesn't need to happen very often but it is fun once in awhile. We ate a late breakfast, got ready for the day and headed out for a day of shopping. Our goal was to pick out an outfit for eachother. The goal was to then where the outfit on a date later. I was planning on taking pictures of all the clothes but we never brought our camera into any of the stores so we are pictureless. But we did find the perfect jeans for Max and we are very excited about that. And it's probably a good thing we didn't take pictures because I would have had a lot of his booty. hehe! We had a nice little lunch date and then continued shopping.

When the clothes were purchased we ate a little dinner then headed out to see a movie in our new outfits. Yeah, I know going to a movie is a dumb place to show off new clothes but we were excited.

Sunday was spent doing more homework than we would've liked. (This was the two year anniversary of Max's broken nose.)

On Monday (the official anniversary) I had to teach all day. After school I felt incredibly nauseous and had the worst headache of my life...those crazy first graders. When I arrived home Max was cooking dinner so he told me to just rest and he would take care of everything. It was great., besides me needing to do homework in my resting time. I started to feel a little better by the time dinner was ready.

He made salads and quesadillas! They were delicious...except for the one he burned. (He really is a good cook, this was just his first attempt) I felt bad that I wasn't feeling well enough to eat very much. I enjoyed it more the next day.


He then took me on a little surprise date to random free museums on BYU campus. We keep talking about going to them before we leave but just haven't made the time. We first went to the wildlife museum where they have tons of taxidermied (sp?) animals and we watched a reptile show and some some lizards and snakes and other gross things. Nothing says happy anniversary like playing with weird reptiles.

Then we went to the Museum of art on on campus and found a big pile of books. Art sure can be weird these days. But impressive.

Then we needed to go home and to bed because of early shifts in the morning but first...

Max made some incredible desserts. He bought supplies for Strawberry shortcakes and chocolate lava cakes because he couldn't decide so we decided to do the lava cakes and save the strawberry SC for another day. We weren't dissappointed

It was a weekend filled with random events shared with the most wonderful person in the world. Any time we get to spend time together is cherished and filled with love and laughter.

Happy Birthday

Today is the due date for our first little baby. Life would have been much different if that baby was able to come to our family. I know Heavenly Father has a plan for our small family and the baby we are carrying now is the one that is meant to live with us in this life. We will never forget the two babies that we have lost, they were both merely the size of a sesame seed but we learned so many life lessons from them. I don't even think they had a chance for their heart to start beating so who knows if they were classified as "living" all I know is that they were my children.

Some blessings we have noticed from our experience include:

~we know we are incredibly fertile
~This current baby will be born to a college graduate
~Our experiences help us be more compassionate (I hope)
~We have a strong love and appreciation for this current baby that may have been weaker without our past experiences.
~We received even more love and support from close friends and family rooting for us.
~We will be back near family when this baby is born.

There are many blessings that come when being complient to the Lord's timing sometimes it takes some rough times to appreciate how good life can get!

Student Teaching

I'm officially a student teacher, remember growing up and having student teachers in your class and you always wanted them to go away because they didn't do things "right" like your real teacher. Well I'm the one "doing things all wrong" now. Haha. Actually as it appears, the last couple of classes I have been in have seemed to enjoy having me there so I hope this continues.
I am teaching in a first grade class which isn't a grade I ever saw myself teaching. It's fun so far but I'm starting to feel intimidated. I really like my mentor teacher and I love picking her brain in all aspects of teaching. I love the students, they make me smile at all their fun comments such as..."My Grandpa fought in the Tsunami war, he died last year when he was 82." I heard that this same student told someone else that his Grandpa fought in the civil war. They make me smile. and I get excited about their successes I see everyday.

I feel like I'm being exposed more to what it takes to be an elementary school teacher and it honestly scares me. If all teaching was was teaching this would be the greatest job in the world but I'm really worried about all the extra stuff such as the random commities you must participate in. the many protocals that need to be noted (many of which don't make sense) the way the education is turning into "memorize this becuase it will be on a test," the many required tests that leave no time for quality teaching, and the increasing workload to go along with a decreasing paycheck.
I also know that there is a ton of value in teaching and there are so many wonderful rewards I can look forward to. I love that a seven year old boy, out of nowhere asks.."you know how right now its night time on the other side of the world, I don't get that." I love that these students are curious and excited to learn and it would be my privledge to work with them but I fear I will be incapable, I fear I could fall into the trap of giving one good lesson for every 5 "know this for the test" lessons.
In August when we move back to Oregon, I hope to do some substitute teaching as far as my body let's me with my growing baby. Then, depending on our baby and Max's work situation I plan to sub for the rest of the school year and maybe apply to fulltime jobs the following school year. If Max is working as a firefighter, this is very realistic as he only works two days a week. So this is the plan thus far. Subbing can give me a better idea if this is really what I want to be doing. I sure hope it is because I have spent a lot of time in school preparing for this.

So I don't mean to sound like a downer here, I truely am happy to be teaching and I feel I get to teach in a great class, I only just worry about the teachers of the future and if I will really be able to handle it.

Catching Up...

I miraculously have had a lot of time this week while I have a break from school and Max has been working a million hours... So, I finally got a ton of pictures off our camera and here are a bunch of photos showing what we've been up to the last semester...(at least the things we took pictures of)

Several Months ago we had an Armenian weekend. Anna and Buck came over and we cooked some brashkis. I was so impressed with how they turned out. Completely Armenian!

Max even put our hair up in matching Armenian clips...completely authentic. The next day we went for a wonderful visit with an Armenian couple that just moved here. Hrach and Donara. Hrach was our branch president while I was serving in Gyumri. It was wonderful to visit with them and realize how much I have lost my Armenian.

On another day...we played some dancing kinect game. Max is a dancing champion!

Later...Max competed at state in a job skills competition. He won a silver medal and a chance to go to nationals in Missouri.

We spent general conference weekend doing puzzles.
And...Sometime in February we made a baby.