Happy Birthday to Shea! Happy Birthday to Shea!!

Happy Birthday to Shea! Happy Birthday to you!
Shea had the funnest 2nd birthday party ever yesterday! :-) It was a dino party! He had 12 of his little friends over and we opened presents and had cake (mommy made a DINO cake this year!!! - Although it looked more like a dragon than a stegosaurus, it was still cool!) then we had a dino dig! Everybody got to dig in a big bucket of sand for a little dino. The crowning event of the party was the Triceratops pinata!!! Daddy rigged up this really really cool pinata holder with a pully and all the kids had multiple chances to whack the dino. When it poured out all it's candy, Shea came up with a handful of sucker!! (Yes, you guessed it, his favorite!!) :-) We had a blast and can't believe our BABY is 2!!!!!!!!!!
(P.S. Don't you love our dino noses??!! :-))

Spring Break on the RANCH!

We decided that for Spring Break this year, we'd go visit Aunt Andee and Uncle Eddie on the ranch in Idaho. We had such a fun time! We stopped in Blackfoot first where we were able to watch Colby play a baseball game and where we had a nice family dinner at the Blackfoot Chinese buffet with the whole Hansen family. It was really fun to see everyone. Shea and Aunt Julie fell in love with each other. He got to play on swings at her house, and climb a tree and jump on his very first trampoline. And Aunt Julie makes the best chocolate chip cookies on the planet, so that pretty much cemented her place in his heart. :-)
Then we drove out to the ranch. It was heaven for Shea who saw more animals than he even knew existed! Check out the photo of us and the buffalo (which Shea kept calling the big monsters!) The highlight for Shea, even more than the riding of the horses, was getting to feed Chexie carrots. She nibbled those carrots right out of his little hand. He was giggling so hard!!!! He loved it! Chris was dying to ride a horse. He started out in the open field, but Andee made him go into the beginners pen when she realized that he'd truly never riden a horse. He did really well for a first timer, but he can't wait to go back in July where he has images of himself getting so good that he'll be able to go galloping off into the sunset.
We had such a nice break and are so grateful for wonderful family who let us come visit.

Why I love being a teacher.

I love being a teacher. Someday I'll do a blog with all the reasons that I love it, but today I love being a teacher because you can get two emails like these, ON THE SAME DAY!!! :-)

From Nicole's mom:

"Wow! I couldn't imagine an English teacher penalizing a student for reading too much. I'm so confused. 20 minutes a night would equate to, lets say, 3 hours a week (I'm going over to prove my point.) Nicole should have read 12 hours last month, instead she reas 31 hours and 30 minutes, yet did not get full credit. Hmmm...... I expect a change on her grade or I'll call the principal... I can't even begin to tell you my amazement at this!"

-no kidding!!! She threatened to tattle to my principal. Is she in 8th grade or is her daughter?? (who, for the record, had not done the full assignment, which is why she lost points, not because she read too much!) STUPID PARENTS!!!!!


From Jesse's mom:

"Mrs. Flood,

I just had to take a minute and let you know how happy I am that you had Jesse read and write about The Giver. I read Jesse's 5 paragraph essay outline. I was surprised at the deep thoughts he had. Thank you for providing an environment of true learning. You are so good. Jesse and I are going to miss you terribly.

Thank you again!"

"Daddy, there's a froggy in my sippy!"

Last week, while teaching away, I got an email from Chris who was home with Shea. It made me laugh out loud. Shea had been sucking on his sippy and there wasn't anything left, so he kept sucking for a minute and then very seriously turned to his dad and informed him that, "Daddy! There's a froggy in there!!!!" The sound the sippy makes when empty does sound similar to a little froggy ribbit!! :-)

ITS OFFICIAL!

So we've finally accepted an offer. It came down to this last week. On Monday, the head of the French dept. at UCLA phoned and increased the offer trying to persuade us to go there. The next day, Wisconsin finally made their offer, but it wasn't anywhere near as good as UCLA's. Towards the end of the week, they also had the graduate director phone to persuade us, and he increased their offer as well, but it still wasn't a match for UCLA's. Both schools offered a full scholarship, assistantship, including benefits, and a living stipend. UCLA's stipend offer was fully double what Wisconsin offered, it seemed too good to pass up. So, after prayer and fasting and weighing the options, we came to the conclusion that the Lord wants us to go back to the only city on Earth worth living in.

On Friday Texas sent their acceptance with an email extolling the virtues and benefits of their program... little late boys. Texans... what're ya gonna do?

We're really excited but nervous also. We'll be heading out in August. We were really hoping to be closer to Grandma and Grandpa, but it's not meant to be right now. The good news is who doesn't want to come and visit us in beautiful, sunny Southern California? We'll be expecting lots of visitors!! (Provided we can afford a place to live and won't be inviting you all to the park bench :-) We love Shea's expression in this photo, it pretty much sums it all up!!!!!!

Happy Easter! (Part 1)

Our Easter this year started with dying our EGGS! We had so much fun. For some reason Shea thought he was supposed to lick the eggs while decorating. Yep, blue tongue!! :-)

Happy Easter (Part 2)

Later Saturday afternoon we took those eggs to Kim and Reilley's and had a massive easter egg hunt. 48 eggs for TWO kids!! Shea had trouble carrying his own basket by the end.

Happy Easter! (Part 3)

We thought since it was such a beautiful day and we were all in spring colors, that we should try and get a cute family Easter picture. Nice try mommy. :-)

We finally got a couple cute ones.

Happy Easter (Part 4)

Opening our Easter baskets was a riot. Shea could hardly be talked into looking at or playing with his gifts after he discovered the Hershey Kisses in his basket!!!! :-)

Happy Easter (Part 5)

Easter Sunday. What a nice day. Look at that beautiful boy in his Easter duds. I love him so much I can't stand it!!!!

Sooooo sleepy

My little guy isn't feeling well (again.) Neither of us slept at all last night. He is so tired that he didn't even make it out of his jammies this morning before he fell asleep right in his chair. Poor little tired guy.

The Temple of Doom

As many of you know, Chris LIVES, absolutely lives for April Fool’s Day. He spends all year thinking up new ways to torture me. I've taken to referring to my house as the Temple of Doom, as that's what it turns into this time of year. This year I was incredibly lucky first, because I didn’t leave the house AT ALL!!! (I’ve learned:-)) and second, because (halleluiah) Courtney lives with us and has not been the recipient of his April Fool’s Day madness before, so she got his “best” tricks recycled. This is what I got this year (so far, I'll post the update as I find more. I always find them for days and days and days after he's set them up.)

After the second session of conference I went in the kitchen to look at the dinner recipe that I’d picked out, well right there on the counter was a bag of red vines with only 4 left. I picked two up as I was thinking, “What a pig! He ate the entire bag while I was napping!!!!” So I’m holding the two ropes as I’m reading my recipe and I start eating one, but I’m concentrating on the recipe and not paying attention to the other rope in my hand, well I apparently bent it in half and all the water that had been secretly injected shot straight into my eye! ow, ow, ow!! He decided that this was even funnier than the originally intended disgusting mouth full of licoricey water. (And no, he hadn’t eaten the whole bag, the others were in a baggie hidden in my pantry - he’d just strategically placed the four for optimum snacking potential. He knows me tooo well.)

When I tried to call my mom yesterday, her speed dial had been changed so it rang to a porn shop in Salt Lake. ha ha. (I was VERY confused!!!! -however, that only lasted a minute because his hysterical laughing after watching my face tipped me off as to what had happened.)

This morning as I was hurriedly showering because I was once again, late for school, I couldn’t get any shampoo out of my brand new bottle, I kept trying and trying, until I noticed the tale tell pieces of plastic wrap sticking out under the cap, but then I couldn’t get the cap off to remove it so I ended up not being able to wash my hair this morning (and I was late for school!)

Last night as I went to open my closet door, the handle had been messed with and fell off right in my hand. I had to jam my finger in the saw dusty hole to yank it open.

The WORST this year, by far, was last night, I went downstairs after putting Shea to bed and Chris wasn’t in the kitchen where he was supposed to be doing dishes, well, I didn’t think much of it, I figured he’d gone up to our room or something. But I was turned around looking at the kitchen to see if he was in the pantry as I was opening the door to the basement, when I turned around, he was crouched there wearing one of his African masks, at the very moment that I turned and saw him, he leaped at me. THE MOST FRIGHTENING MOMENT OF MY LIFE (and that’s saying something as I’ve now lived through 4 April Fool’s Days with him.)

I always share his April Fool’s Day tricks with my kids - this year they came to me and asked me if I’d write them all down for the April newspaper as I have the best stories of anyone they know. If only I could get some fortune to go with my fame for being the brunt of the WORST trickster of all time.

Jaded Spring Boutique Show 2007

Well, the good news is it's over!!!!!!!!!! I've never been so glad for something to be over in my life. This little endeavor has been more work than I ever thought possible. The better news is that it went REALLY REALLY REALLY well!!

Surely everyone reading this knows that I did my first boutique show with my little jewelry company, Jaded. Here's a little background, Chris has been pushing me to ramp up the jewelry sales for years now as he's been sure that this would be a great way to make some extra money and because he's really proud of what I turn out, it 's really high quality, very pretty, hand made stuff. So he's been saying for a while that I should put together a new line of stuff and hold a Boutique party in our home where people can come order the display pieces or custom order exactly what they want. I've always resisted because first, I DO NOT have time for something like that and second I've never had the money that is required up front to do a show like that. So we were talking about it one day in December and suddenly my sweetie said that yes, acutally he did have the money to front it right now, if I was willing to go for it. And while I have a thousand things to do each week, grades weren't due for a while, I had some extra money for display pieces and advertising and I'd just finished my Master's Degree so there was a little extra time, so it felt like if I was ever going to do it, now was a good time.

Thus began this adventure and while, HOLY COW, it was sooooo sooooo sooooo much more work that I thought, it was also really fun. I ended up with 63!!! new pieces for the Spring Line. Which you can see in BEAUTIFUL photographs by Heather Walker Photography on the Spring Line Blog:

http://jadedjewelry.blogspot.com


While we certainly didn't get rich off this venture, we made our money back plus a little, it was good experience, I now have all my display pieces and I have some great contacts for photos and advertising and best of all, I have 23 NEW customers!!! Wahoo.

Check out the blog and email me with orders!!!