New Picture

We had a picture of the kids taken recently. You can see the varying degrees of enthusiasm about having pictures taken.

I take it back!

This was yesterday after Rebecca and her friend dressed the young'uns up for a photo shoot. Good old springtime!

And this is today. I take back everything I said about you, March. You're still queen of snow in Colorado! I got up at about 5:45 this morning and it was snowing but not sticking to the street. When Spencer woke up he went outside and played around with the shovel before breakfast. He left it on the ground somewhere. About 4 hours and 12 inches later, the shovel was buried somewhere in the yard. It took a lot of tromping around in the snow before someone stepped on something flat, hard, and slippery. The big excitement for the day came when a big yellow tractor plowed the street and dumped about 4 feet of snow right in front of the house.

Early Spring

So much for March's reputation as the snowiest month in Colorado. The old gal's getting soft. No complaints here.

Happy Corned Beef Day!

Eva is taking piano lessons from Rebecca's friend Gabby. At church today, Gabby asked Rebecca, "Do you really have thirty pages of homework every night?" Rebecca said, "No, why?" Gabby said, "Because at Eva's piano lesson last week she said the reason she didn't have time to practice is because you guys always have thirty pages of homework to do every night." So I guess that answers the question, "What should we talk about at Family Home Evening tomorrow night?"
This picture didn't turn out very well, but what you're seeing in Exhibit B is an egg that was first soaked in vinegar for two days and then soaked in corn syrup. We're learning about cellular osmosis, and the vinegar breaks down the egg shell and allows water to get into the egg. So the egg expands and gets soft. Then when you put the egg in the corn syrup the water leaves the egg and looks all shrivelly and sad. It's even a little pink now, but I think that's because it's rotting. Why am I telling you all this? Fair warning. If Ben comes up to you, like at a family reunion or something, and he says that he has made a hard boiled egg for you and would you like to try it, just politely decline. If he presses you, I would say something about having recently developed an egg allergy.
Ben won a Major Award at the GEARS symposium! He got the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award. It came with this very lovely lamp that he put in our front window. 
Because St. Patrick's Day is this week, I made corned beef and cabbage for dinner. This isn't actually what it looked like (I found this picture on the Internet), but it's pretty close. So while I was doing the dishes after dinner, my stomach sent a little message to my brain that said, "Your humble servant would like to ask Your Majesty if maybe we could have corned beef a little less often than once a year. In fact, I would be most grateful if we never had corned beef ever, ever again," upon which my brain recollected that my spineless stomach (hee hee) sent the exact same grovelling message after dinner on St. Patrick's Day last year. But my poor brain has so much on her mind that she can't be expected to remember to not buy corned beef when it's such a good deal once a year. Maybe I should tell the old brain that we're vegetarians now.

In other news, Ben, Spencer, and I played kickball at Cub Scouts on Wednesday. It was so much fun. I may have imagined this, but I could swear that I saw a glimmer of fear in their eight-year-old eyes when it was my turn to kick.

It's too bad that we don't have a German holiday in the U.S. Every St. Patrick's Day at dinnertime I talk about Mahala Murphy because she's my only Irish ancestor I can think of off the top of my head. She gets all the attention because she's Irish and there's an Irish holiday. 

Next week this time we'll be gearing up for CSAP, every Colorado school child's favorite standardized test. Can't hardly wait!

So soon?

I'm making up for my month-long blog sabbatical with two posts in two days. Today was Free Day at the Denver Art Museum, and if something's free, you're likely to see us there. Ben was home studying, but Grandma & Grandpa came along for the fun. Below you will see the bovine version of Gulliver being dominated by the Lilliputians.

Grandma & Grandpa look very lovely in their Colorado Mormon Chorale duds. We're going to Louisville tonight to listen to them sing.
Grandpa looks very Elizabethan in this outfit. It's too bad we didn't get him to wear the doublet because the plaid shirt just doesn't seem right.
Wild things.
From the pictures, you'd think the Denver Art Museum is nothing but a giant closetful of dress-ups, wouldn't you. 
Well, it is all dress-ups except for this blue fox on the red chair. This exhibit was actually very cool. You can walk through it, and it feels a little like a ride at Disney World if you just imagine that you're riding in a little car instead of walking and that there's a repeating song in the background and that not everything is the same color. Besides that, it's the same.

And for Kate's benefit, I'll elaborate on the last post since I seem to have been in a taciturn mood last night when I posted those pictures. GEARS stands for something like "Graduate Engineering something Research Symposium." The symposium is next week, and Ben is on the committee for it, which means he's had to go to planning meetings and make posters and stuff like that. I was also instrumental to the symposium's success because I taped some paper clips to the back of a piece of cardboard (I hope they put my name in the credits somewhere).

What was the other thing? Oh yeah, the Capitol. I'm not up with my acronyms, but we joined an organization called CCCF, which I believe stands for Colorado Cyberschool Coalition Families (well, that doesn't make sense, but it's something like that), and last week was Cyberschool Day at the Capitol. So we got cool yellow t-shirts and spent several hours at the Capitol listening to legislators and state school board people talk about cyberschools in Colorado. I asked how many cyberschool students there are in Colorado, and the latest count is 11,700. Wow, right? There were about 1500 kids at the Capitol. We went on a tour and walked up to the top of the dome and walked down the many steps to the basement countless times because that's where the public restrooms are. All in all, it was a hefty workout and a good time. They even fed us Chipotle burritos for lunch. We had a picnic in Civic Center Park and then went to the Denver Public Library where Spence and I played chess and the girls picked out random books for the poor librarians to put away when we left. Also, there was some good pigeon and squirrel observation time. Go, cyberschools!

March Gladness

The GEARS committee.
Nanee and Papa at the Interactive Teaching and Learning Lab.
Spencer, Olivia, Eva, and Rebecca in the Colorado Supreme Court room at the Denver Capitol.
Nanee and Papa wanted a picture of this lovely yield sign to show to their students in China. Apparently, yield signs don't exist in Xi'an.
Rebecca's Chinese fan keeps her cool and stylish.