In which I'm reminded just how lucky I am to be married to Dean

So, long time no see.  This isn't actually a catch-up post but I just wanted everyone out there to know how amazing Dean is.  Beginning last year he developed and implemented a special needs week for the phoenix zoo's annual summer camp.  Each week of camp is as inclusive as possible, but some kiddos with mobility or sensory impairments need specialized adaptations.  So, even though the Zoo had never done a camp like this before Dean took the initiative to put one together.  It was very successful last year and they were able to put it on again this year.  One really cool part is that Dean helped write a grant for the camp so that campers who attended during this week didn't have to pay the regular camp fee of $275.  In fact, they were able to attend for free!  Dean put in a lot of extra time and effort to make this camp happen.  Some of the campers this year had never been to the Zoo before.  A family trip to the Zoo can be difficult for children with special needs-it's expensive for families to get into the Zoo, especially when families may only stay for a short time as a result of their child's schedule/needs.  Additionally, getting around the Zoo can be difficult and seeing exhibits in a large crowd can be challenging (or impossible in the case of visually impaired or blind children).  Dean made a conscious effort to change those "norms" and to afford children who are sometimes socially isolated a chance to attend a summer camp just like thousands of more typical kids do every year.  I am so proud of him.  Here's a link to a brief blog post about this year's camp, written by the mother of a camper named Cicily.  Check it out!

Tagged

Kate, this is for you.  Does anyone else remember when these type of surveys were e-mails that you would forward to all your friends?  Think back to your middle school days people. So in the spirit of my inner 7th grader, I give you, the tag post!


THE RULES 
1. Post these rules. 
3. Answer the questions provided by the one who tagged you. 
4. Create 11 new questions for the people you tag. 
5. Tag 11 people. 

My Answers:
1. What were you doing before this? Dishes (okay that was mostly Dean, I can't lie.)  I was eating (drinking?) a root beer float and reading a few paragraphs of the third Hunger Games book.  It was kind of painful.  The book, not the float.

2. What's your most common grocery item? I'm wishing it was something exotic and wonderful, but even with Dean's allergy, it's still probably milk because I buy it every single week no matter what.  Or watermelon during the summertime (which has already started at our house) because we pretty much eat that every week too.

3. If you could go on any vacation, what/where would it be? Well, the most recent issue of Bon Appetit has made me want to go to Paris now more than ever, but if I had to choose my number one destination it would probably be...an extended tour through Latin America including climbing to Machu Picchu, a lengthy stay in Buenos Aires and most of all a no-hassle trip to Cuba!! Also I get to interview people and spend a lot of time meandering.  There you have it.  As a side note, I interrogated (but in a friendly way) the sealer when we went to do some sealings in the temple on Saturday because he said he had been the cultural attache (can't find the accent on blogger)  in Montevideo, Uruguay as well as in Lima, Peru, Bogota, Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala.  Heaven right?  I loved him, not least of which had to do with his referencing Robert Frost.  (The road less traveled bit.)

4. Paper or digital? Paper.  Not opposed to digital, but for making to-do lists, grocery lists etc. I need paper for my brain to work properly.  I also still enjoy curling up with an actual book or magazine.  But, I also don't have a kindle etc. so that might be why.  

5. Favorite pair of shoes? Some black/cork wedges.  I adore wedges.  If I were rich I'd own a million pairs.

6. What instrument do you wish you knew how to play? Any!  I took piano lessons as a child but stopped around 8 for one reason or another.  I plan on living my hopes and dreams out through my children though and will see to it that they are musically inclined. j/k. well sort of- I do want them to play instruments.  

7. Would you rather smell like Limburger cheese all the time or have no teeth (and no way of replacing them)? Smell like cheese.  Only people with a discerning palate would want to hang out with you- what's wrong with that?

8. If you had a $1,000 shopping spree, but could only spend it at one store, what store would it be? Oh please.  Anthropologie.  I'd buy nine things (ten if I hit the sale rack) and be totally obsessed with them.  This was the easiest question by far!

9. City or country? City!  Unless by country you mean a remote beach, which I could also get used to.

10. Movie or song that makes you cry every time? Hmmm..there's a lot to choose from here people. I almost cried in class the other day when I showed my 8th graders 12 Angry Men and Henry Fonda helps the grumpy guy with his jacket at the end.  I'm sort of a wuss. So let's see.  Young Victoria-he loved her so much!! Finding Neverland, Mr. Kruger's Christmas, Rabbit Proof Fence.  Still, if you don't cry during Rabbit Proof Fence I think your heart may be MIA or else you're a soul-less robot or something.

11. Where is your happy place? To paraphrase Edward Sharpe, Home is wherever I'm with Dean.  Sayulita (where we went on our honeymoon nearly 5 years ago!) is pretty hard to beat though...

Sadly friends, I do not have any thought-provoking questions to post at this time, nor do I have enough friends to tag who haven't been already.  On the up side, I do have some lesson planning to get to.  So, without further ado, I bid you adieu.  To you, and you, and you!  Goodniiiight!

A little Radiohead love...

Dean and I at the concert last week!

It's official!

You're now reading the blog of a Wildcat grad student. 

In case you were wondering. 

In May of 2012 I'll begin my first classes in the 

Information Resources and Library Science MA program.

Send your library questions this way people! 

Laissez les bons temps rouler!!

Or, how to throw a stellar mardi gras fete in nine easy steps!!

Step One: Find some inspiration at the best store ever.

Step Two: Create some killer invitations.

Step Three: Collaborate with this party-goddess.

Step Four: Decide upon a delectable menu of red beans and rice, New Orleans style bbq shrimp, baguette slices, a cheese plate, grapes, olives, cheese sticks, mini lemon ice box pies, and of course homemade King Cake!

 Step Five: Create a photo booth by setting up a sheet as a backdrop, placing the camera on a tripod in timer mode and providing a basket with plenty of mardi gras themed props.

Step Six: Borrow a white board and play mardi gras themed pictionary with large mardi gras beads for prizes. Terms should be a mix of easy and challenging with words like parade or French quarter followed by zydeco, hurricane, or beignets.

Step Seven: Set the stage. Blast some great blues, jazz, or zydeco music via Pandora or your own itunes mix. Use mardi gras themes picks in everything. When in doubt, add a pick. Set up a welcome station where guests can grab a mask and some beads, as well as use this key to find their very own blues name. Provide nametags and purple, green and gold sharpies to write the names on.

Step Eight: Wrap homemade pecan pralines in purple cellophane, tie a mardi gras ring to the package with goldeny yellow ribbon, and give away as party favors when guests leave at the end of the night.

Step Nine: Let the good times roll at your very own mardi gras celebration!

What are your plans for Mardi Gras? 

Best Birthday Ever

So my family is basically amazing.  Not to sound like the kind of blogger that Seriously So Blessed makes fun of or anything, but yesterday I totally had the best birthday ever.  My sister Lacey threw me a surprise party for my 25th birthday!  Not only was I COMPLETELY surprised...shocked would be more accurate...the party was mucho fun as they say.  Luckily Lacey and I are basically the same person so she knew exactly what I would like.  I should add that she collaborated a great deal with the rest of my familia and even her best friend Alisha who is equally adept at throwing fantastic parties.  (Check out her son's recent Lego party- so fun right?!) I'm still not sure how she and Dean were able to keep the secret, but much thanks to them and to Bille and Logyhn for all their hard work and clean-up support, as well as everyone who showed up to help celebrate. And now on to my sister's amazing talents!  Check out all this cuteness!!  (Sorry for the pic quality, these were all taken on my phone as I didn't think I had any reason to bring my camera!)

Catch-Up

Well it has been a very busy end to the Summer and start of the school year at our house, which is why we haven't posted in so long!  After July 4th we were able to go to Newport Beach, CA with my Dad's family and spend time relaxing and enjoying the beach.  It was very fun and a much needed vacation.  Then I was able to stay a little longer and spend time with my sweet mamacita which was also so fun!  We ate delectable ice cream treats, cooked breakfast together, went to the beach, went to some excellent book stores and had an all around good time.  After getting home from that, we were able to spend some time with Dean's parents and sister Lynne.  It was way fun!  Lynne and I were able to go see a fun movie and also eat some delectable ice cream and sorbet from the best place ever. We were sad to see Lynne go but excited for her because a sweet vacay in the Bahamas was in her near future!  Later that week Diana came down to take the AZ bar.  We are sure she aced it, and after she took it Rod also flew down for a few days of birthday fun.  We were happy to get to see John and Haley at their reception down here in AZ.  Do you see what I mean by busy now?  And I'm not even through yet! :)  At the end of July we found out that my grandpa is not doing so well and doctors discovered that he has a tumor in his brain.  I feel lucky to live so close because I've been able to drive down to Tucson a few times to see him.  My mom, little brother and sisters have also been able to go down and it was neat to spend this time with my grandparents. One fun thing we got to do was have dinner at Lerua's for my grandma's 80th birthday.  My sister surprised her by ordering a tres leches cake, which we all devoured despite being full of guacamole, green corn tamales, beans and horchata.   Then we went to a football scrimmage at the UofA with my grandparents.  My grandpa was able to tell me about a time when he played in that stadium during his high school days at Tucson High.  It was a fun evening and great to spend time with family.  Finally school started and Camp Zoo ended for Dean.  Dean was called into jury service but was released after a few days which he was grateful for.  School has been going well, I'm co-teaching this year which means my classroom has two teachers in it all day except for one period.  It has been a really good experience so far.  My partner teacher had a staph infection and was out all last week though :( and I can't wait to have her back!!  I thought handling 39 kids by myself all day would be fine, but I was so wrong! lol- Never before have I looked forward to a Monday, but this week I definitely am!  Sorry no pictures but I will post some picture-heavy posts soon!!

Happy 4th!

Wishing everyone a happy 4th of July tomorrow! We hope you'll party it up with lots of flag-waving, fireworks, and delicious bbq!  We'll be having our annual soiree in the evening, but we sure miss all our old pals who used to celebrate with us in front of our first lil' house in Provo.  Much love to everyone, we'll certainly be thinking of you tomorrow!

Eeek.

And now I remember why I never changed my name four years ago.  Well, at least one of the reasons I never did.  Just looking at this list makes me want to vomit.  Why are there so many fees?  Why does it have to be so complicated?  Why will this take weeks to actually finish?  Why will I not be able to travel in the interim?  Why will I now have to change junk with our car, house, insurance, etc? Why did I want to do this in the first place...

Summertime Love

Can you guess who's reading what?

Things I love about summer, 1st edition:

Drinking root beer floats (one with soy ice cream), relaxing, and reading our literature of choice after dinner.

Oh, and NOT stressing about grading, planning, or scheduling!

Denver Anniversary Extravaganza!

  Because, everything is more fun when it's an extravaganza!  :)  So over Memorial Day weekend we decided to head to Denver to celebrate our 4 (!!) year anniversary.  We chose Denver because neither of us had been before and it was relatively close to Phoenix.  We are so glad we did because we had a blast, and would highly recommend the Mile-High City to anyone who hasn't had the pleasure!  We flew in Friday evening and took a shuttle from the airport to our hotel downtown.  We decided not to rent a car, and although I was a little worried, it ended up working out beautifully.  Friday night we walked about a mile to a yummy sushi place near downtown.  We haven't found a great sushi place here in Phoenix so it was nice to have some good nigiri and rolls.

Then on Saturday we woke up and walked to Snooze, a breakfast joint recommended to me by my one-time Pilates teacher/personal trainer haha-Michelley you know what I'm talking about! It was soo good!! The thing is I love pancakes, but most places have majorly disappointing flapjacks.  I don't even use Bisquick at home, and don't feel like I should pay for someone else to use it when I go out.  Well snooze cakes were definitely NOT Bisquickey!  Dean got the sweet potato pancakes with ginger butter-and they were the best things ever!  I got an updated version of eggs Benedict with Salmon and spoon bread and it was also a-mazing! So check it out if you ever go there!!  After breakfast we caught a bus and headed on over to, that's right, the Denver Zoo!  Dean hooked us up so we got in for free and got some sweet tours.  As part of our behind the scenes tour, we got to feed a Tamandua live worms!! Even I was amazed that I was able to do that.  I just smiled and tried to not think about it and remain calm so as not to embarrass Dean in front of his fellow animal loving peeps.

Dean really wanted to check out their Predator Ridge exhibit and it was pretty cool- they had four lions in their pride, and one came right up to us (behind the glass of course)! It was neat to see one that close.  My favorite exhibit was the Gorilla enclosure.  We saw two of them and I loved it!  I like Gorillas because they seem so smart and very perceptive.  I'm never really sure who's watching who.

Sunday morning we went to Sacrament Meeting at the Capitol Hill Ward (made me appreciate how big our ward at home is!) and then caught a bus over to the Highland area (I think...) where we had the most delectable brunch and also my favorite meal of the trip.  Duo was everything we hoped it would be.  This is another one you should not miss if you head to Denver.  We didn't get to try them for dinner, but I'm sure it would be equally good! Read about the Cider Glazed Pork Benedict and the Sweet Sunday brunch items...enough said.  Highland was also a really cute neighborhood filled with lots of fun houses.  If I lived in Denver I would want to live there!  

Of course we had to check out the Birds &  Bees Trail in the garden!

That afternoon we went to the Denver Botanic Gardens.  It ended up being a surprisingly fun activity.  The weather was absolutely gorgeous so just being able to walk around outside in the incredible gardens was pretty nice.  Plus, we got delicious strawberry lemonade and got to see their Tropical garden which was really incredible.  That exhibit was inside, and so I was expecting a green house with like some Venus fly-trap plants or something (ok actually that would have been pretty cool.  Cancel that.  I was expecting...a small banana leaf plant or something?)  Whatever I was expecting this exhibit was about a million times cooler!  It was really like walking straight into the rainforest.  It was WAY humid, so we got a lil' shweaty but it was well worth it.  I've never really seen anything like that before and I was just really impressed with the logistics of pulling something like that off all year in Denver.  I bet it would be really cool to be in there in winter when it is snowing outside!!  

Ahh yeah...80's glamor shot in the garden!
Let's hear it for back light!

One of the best parts of Sunday was after we left the Botanic Gardens and rented two bikes from Denver B Cycle to ride to our dinner destination.  B Cycles is this really sweet bicycle charing company in Denver and a few other big cities.  How it works is you pay $5 a person to "rent" a bike for 24 hours.  Basically for the next 24 hours you can check the bikes out at one station and ride them to the next/another station as much as you want! As long as it's in thirty-minute increments it's free, and if you do go over it's only $1 more per half hour!  What a deal right?  Plus it was just fun!  Even for a bike-a-phobe like me.  The sidewalks were wide, the bike lanes were well marked, and best of all there was this gorgeous bike-only path right by the Platte river which was my favorite place to ride. On Monday we decided to hang around mostly near downtown, and after breakfast at this place (satisfying if slightly overrated- although if I went again I would def. try something with the pork chili verde on it, just to be fair.)  We rode our bikes to a giant REI flagship store and walked around for awhile.  The Platte and another unknown river meet right in front of the REI and there's sort of a little mini-beach there where lots of people hang out/swim/play with their dogs, so we hung there for ahwile and enjoyed the scenery.  We watched a Portuguese water dog play fetch with his owner and decided that some dogs are definitely more talented than Henry; but we still love him anyway.

Woo Bikes!

Seriously, I kept thinking this dog was about to drown, but apparently his owner knew he was quite talented.  We also saw a very rotund kid whose swim trunks kept falling off which caused his family to laugh and him to yell "Mi pantalones!" in a panic, which only made his family, (ok an us) laugh harder.  Yes, good times at the public beach/park.

So...this is the jungle.

After this delightful interlude, we rode our bikes back to downtown and spent the afternoon doing some leisurely reading (I never have time to lounge about in bookstores at home) at The Tattered Cover bookstore. Tattered Cover is an independent book seller there, and they have two(?) different locations.  I can't speak for the other locales, but if you are ever in Denver I would check out the downtown location for sure; it has a really relaxed vibe to it and with lots of exposed brick walls, old wooden floors and abundant sofas/armchairs it feels cozy and overflowing with books, as I think all the best bookstores do.  I actually wish we would have taken some pictures of this place just because it was so cool looking and you can't really tell from the website.  Oh well.  Just imagine a bookstore almost as cool as the Harry Potter library.  (The one in your imagination not the movies.)  On our way out we found a great market to eat at that seemed like the kind of place locals would frequent.  We decided that if we ever return to dear old Denver we will go here to get our picnic lunch before heading back to that magical river land via the B cycle bikes. We had some really good sandwiches, we eyed their killer dessert case but managed to restrain ourselves, and then we were off to the airport!

Totally normal...rainforest in Denver.

Overall, this trip was a much needed respite from the real world.  With the end of school for me (at least before summer school starts) and the beginning of Camp Zoo for Dean, it had been a stressful past few weeks, so it was nice to get a break!  (Henry free and everything!)  It also gave us a chance to reflect on all the fun times we've had in the past four years.  (I can't believe we have been married for that long already!)  Time really does fly by.  We feel so blessed right now, and not just because we got to take a sweet vacation! Heavenly Father has really been looking out for us and helping things fall into place.  Here's hoping for many more years of wedded bliss! 

ps- I'm sorry this post was so long but since I'm not the consistent at that whole journaling thing, this post was as much for us to read later as all of you!  You can always skim through and just look at the pictures right?!

A little musical love

So I just wanted to take a minute and show a little love to these guys.  Thanks to my ultra hip mamacita and one viral youtube video, I discovered them recently.  You can watch them here.

Reasons I like them:  
1.  Who could not love the lead female singer Jade?  She's adorable and crazy!
2.  I think Alex ripped off my brother's signature look.  (See below.)
3. Oh and their music rocks. Check out 40 Day Dream and Janglin if you don't believe me.

One Goal Down!

Just thought you should know!

Our very own lemon tree.
Scenting our backyard with delicate delights since February 2011!  

The big 2-8!

Let the festivities begin!

Sunday was Dean's birthday and it was sort of a drawn out celebration.  First, we went out to shabu shabu (hot pot fondue style Japanese food) with Lacey and Bille.  It was a few weeks before Dean's birthday but Lacey is stuck out of town for an extended time for work, so we decided to get the party started a little early!  Dinner was great and Dean got some sweet shoes to boot! :)  Pun definitely intended.  Then, the Friday before the big day Dean's family came up and after a failed attempt at a Spring Training game, we went out for some steak- muy bueno as they say.  My fam came up the next day for a little while and we watched the heartbreaking UofA loss to UConn at an ASU sports bar of all places.  My Dad also volunteered for some manual labor in the yard so Dean wouldn't have to do it when he got home.  Finally the big day arrived!  It was actually a pretty low key celebration but we did eat Dean's request of meatloaf, broccoli, mashed potatoes and cherry pie with coconut milk ice cream for dessert.  Bille and Logyhn came bearing gifts from the rest of the fam.  We are so glad they live so close to us!  I am so glad Dean was born and that I was lucky enough to find him.  He is the love of my life and one stupendo guy!!

We had a juice bar in honor of Dean, and we had sunflowers
because they were the manliest option available! 

All four of the boys!