Hooray for Mothers!!

Dan and his mom Sylvia
Laura and her mom Kelly

Ok- so I'm a day "late". But really, it's never too late to say THANK YOU to these wonderful women in our lives! We are forever in debt to these women who brought us into the world! They have taught us countless lessons of faith, service, and charity. They have sacrificed more than we probably know. Their continual generousity to us, their poor young married kids, is astounding! Words can hardly express how we really feel about these women. I guess all we can say is THANK YOU! Happy Mother's Day! We love you both very much! I pray that come October when our little one is born, that I'll be half the mom these women are. I have big shoes to fill. That's for sure!

P.S.- Speaking of the little one- I'm pretty sure I've been feeling it MOVING! :) What a wonderful Mother's day gift to me. We'll find out the gender on my birthday (May 23rd). Stay tuned.

Graduation!!

Well, it finally happened. I graduated. Sure it took much longer than most. Sure I changed my major three times. But I graduated in a profession that I believe in, and am excited to see where this degree takes me.

As part of the festivities, we went to The Pie. Oh man it was good!
My pretty lady
Here's a pic of a few of my classmates.

Everyone who came to support outside of Kingsbury Hall afterward.

The afterparty at Hires. My body was not happy with me after so much greasy food within 4 hours.

Commencement Exercises at the Huntsman Center on the next day. Our Commencement speaker was Mario Cappechi who mainly discussed how we are responsible for stopping global warming.

A political tirade for sure, but I'm glad I went.

Dad, Mom, and Jonathan Thompson with us.

Us with Mom and Dad Webster

Thanks for sticking around for the pictures. It was a great couple of days for the Webster family, and I'm so grateful for the love and support I've had from everyone. I'll be taking a year off to work, then hopefully will make it into the Advanced Standing MSW program for Fall '09. In the meantime, I'll just be working and getting ready for the BABY!!

End of April update

My students like to give me things. :) For those of you who don't know, the elementary school I teach at is a year round school (meaning 9 weeks teaching, 3 weeks break, including my "summer" break). Every 9 weeks when I'm about to go off track, I try to clean up my classroom a little bit. In doing this, I found easily over 100 pictures which my students have colored and given to me. Aren't they so generous! Now, what should I do with them all?? P.S.- I'm very excited to be off track now for the next two and a half weeks!! I plan to rest a lot and watch my belly grow bigger. :)

Also, the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) just opened up a new commuter rail called the FrontRunner train. One of the stops is two blocks from the elementary school where I teach. Free rides were being offered from April 26th-30th, and since this train practically runs right through these kids' backyards, I took advantage of the 'freeness' and our class went for a ride!

Don't they look excited??

Channel 2 News was even there to interview quite a few of my students! They got to be on the 5 o'clock news on Monday night.

In other news, the pregnancy is still going quite well. (More pictures later). My belly button is starting to change shape. It was pretty shallow to begin with, so I think it will only be a matter of time before it's flat, or becomes an outie... Ah, good times.

We are also loving our NEW CAR! It's working prefectly! Go figure.
Dan just started his summer internship at Utah Foster Care Foundation. He said his first day was a bit like drinking from a firehose and he's "still thirsty." He met a lot of new people and will have to meet them all again at least 3 times before he can remember their names. He will still be working at the subtance abuse day treatment facility part time during the summer to help with our family income. Other exciting news is Dan's life is his GRADUATION will be this Thursday and Friday (more pictures to follow). He's such a hard worker and even though the semester is over, he's still quite busy. He also puts off organizing his stuff until he has a good chunk of time to do so.

Exhibit A:

(Dan here) Does anybody else have an "I'm too lazy to take it upstairs to organize and put it away" pile? I figured since we don't really go upstairs much, and this stairway is out of the way, it makes a good organizational purgatory. Right?

Thanks for reading this random post. This was more of a public journal entry than anything important. More to come next time...

My Awesome Wife...

I would like to take a moment and brag about my wife for a few moments, since she's not very good at being prideful. As mentioned in a previous post, LT took the National Praxis exam in order to maintain her state license to teach. She was so nervous and didn't feel very prepared to take it, due to the recent baby news.

Today we got her test scores back and, well ladies and gents, SHE ROCKED IT! The possible score range is 100-200, with the average performance range being 167-182. Her score was 193!! She was perfect (no big surprise) in four out of the six categories. She even received a letter and a Recognition of Excellence certificate from the testing service telling her that she scored in the top 15% of everyone who has ever taken the test...EVER! I wish I could do that well on such a huge test.

What a smarty pants I married! Seriously, i'm so proud of this little lady and this only further confirms how GREAT of a teacher she really is. Her students are so lucky to have her as their teacher.

Also, as we reach the end of week 14, we thought it would be a good time to see how the prego lady is growing:

In other news, we bought a car! A deal presented itself to purchase a 2005 Toyota Camry with low mileage, and a clean record (thanks CARFAX) and we jumped on it. On a whim we even traded in my Subaru with the bogus transmission and they gave us $800, WAY more than we thought we'd get for it. Sorry Kidney Foundation! It's pretty great to be driving a car that a) accelerates past 25 mph, 2)has a working radio/cd player, III) doesn't moan at me when going over any bump, and four) won't leave us stranded in Provo again.

We are so blessed to have the means and support in making another huge purchase in our lives. The blessings of paying tithing are real folks! The Lord really does work through unusual means and other wonderful people to bless His children and it's awesome to be a part of that.

Poor Judd is dead...

So the ending of an era has come...my 97 Subaru Legacy has given up the ghost. I've had this car for about 4 years and we've been through a lot together. I've also spent more money than I care to admit in repairing and keeping it going throughout the years. It finally has gone past the point of no return with the latest transmission repair surpassing its worth, so the next step is donating it to the Kidney Foundation. While it's at the shop waiting for junker tires (since i just bought new tires a month ago) I decided it was time to clean it out before it leaves me forever.

K, you wouldn't believe how much random stuff you find in a car. For instance, in the driver door I found 20 napkins. What on earth would I do with that many napkins? "Just in case" I guess. It's also a reflection on how much I used to eat out and in my car. Gross.

In the driver's seat back pocket I found a picture of some friends from Institute Council that was taken at Luke and Ashlee's wedding reception. How I ended up with that is a mystery.
One of the highlights was finding a small wooden dreidel. I guess there was a phase in my life when I decided to go back to my Judaism roots...really though, a dreidel?
The pièce de résistance was a garter from my cousin's wedding. Tisha, if you want it back I'd be happy to mail it to you. Obviously I don't need it, as it has been sitting in my glove box for years unnoticed.
Other random items include notes from Dave Gray's sealing, $59.53 in cash and change, $3 in Canadian coins, both nametags from the EFY days, and 2 Halloween pictures spanning 6 years.

Moral of the story: CLEAN OUT YOUR CAR! This has given me a new motivation to not hang onto useless things, though i think that the dreidel could come in handy during heavy traffic.

p.s. high fives to whoever guesses the name of the show from which I borrowed this posts' title.

Conference and an Announcement!!

It is a Thompson family tradition during our Church's General Conference to have my dad's yummy french toast. Now, this is not just ANY french toast. We put two pieces of toast together with CHEESE in the middle! Don't knock it till you've tried it. Dan has been converted to it. You can too! :) My sister was staying with us this weekend as well. Hence the third place setting you may have noticed. We have greatly enjoyed this historic General Conference. We have been inspired and fed spiritually! We are so thankful for our new prophet Pres. Thomas S. Monson. He has been called of God and we look forward to many more years of his stories and teachings!

Our next exciting news is that we are PREGNANT! (That's what the plus sign means :)) I'm due October 15th!! This will be Webster grandbaby #6 and Thompson grandbaby #3. We're so very excited to be parents and to have a little one to love and that will bless our lives. I have already been blessed in that I haven't been very sick at all. I'm mostly tired and hungry all the time. Dan has been taking good care of me and has "put up with" my moodiness thus far. Thanks love! I'm so lucky to have such a wonderful husband! We still have another month or so until we find out the gender, so we'll keep you posted.

Reunion and Cars...

During Dan's time at UVSC, he had the opportunity to serve on the Orem Institute of Religion's Institute Council. These are some of the fine individuals that were on the council with him. Last Friday night they put together a little reunion. Good food, friends, and games. Good times!

Since about Christmas time, Dan and I have been realizing more and more that cars stink! They are a terrible thing to have; they break down a lot! In the past few months we've spent way more than we would like to in fixing alternator, replacing tires, hub, cv joint, timing belt, water pump, etc. In fact, we have begun to consider buying a newer car that isn't pushing 170k miles.

Any suggestions?

p.s. this is not actually our car, but LT drives a Protege that is just as pretty.