Chalk Art

Wow! It's amazing what some people can do with a little (actually a LOT of) sidewalk chalk. As we posted in a previous post, the organization where Dan has been interning- The Utah Foster Care Foundation, sponsored/hosted the Chalk Art Festival at the Gateway Mall during Father's Day weekend. The weather was perfect and the artists were QUITE impressive. There was also a great deal of awareness raised for foster care!
Here's Dan looking quite official on a golf cart. He worked SO hard this weekend outlining the chalk art squares, running errands, distributiung gift bags from the foundation, and making sure the artists were well taken care of.

Here's some of Dan's family enjoying the art work. (The mother-pushing Joseph, Swa, Brian hiding behind Swa, and Brynn.)

Here's me with my sweet, awesome husband (with my baby belly and all).

This was one of my favorite pieces. A beautiful mermaid-all done with CHALK!

Here's a bunch of Dan's favorite drawings. Hope you enjoy!

These last two received the People's Choice Awards for Adults and Students, respectively.

FYI- The Foster Care Foundation has offered Dan a job, and he accepted! He will be starting as a foster parent recruiter with the Ogden office as soon as his practicum hours are done. Salaried and benefited with a baby coming is such great news!!
Sorry for the flippin huge post, but we hope you enjoyed the pictures!

Another day late

Fathers are so special! That's what our ward primary sang on Sunday and it's so true! I know I'm a day late (again) and I also realize my dad and Dan's dad probably rarely (if ever) read our blog, BUT I still wanted to pay tribute to these wonderful men who raised us!

The primary song says, "Father's are so special, with a very special love. They watch us and protect us. They guide us and direct us back to our home above." Our fathers have always set an amazing example for us. They have taught us so many gospel principles by the way they live. They are so smart financially and have passed some of that knowledge on to us (at least as much as we can understand). :) Growing up I would never want to do anything to disappoint him or let him down. My respect and love for these men is incomparable.

I'm also so thankful for my husband (future father!). I know he will follow in his father's footsteps as I have already seen in many ways. HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!

Me and my daddy Mike
Dan's dad Dave (with Dan's mom). He had to be a cardboard stand-in at our wedding because he was serving as mission president in Brasil at the time.

Our WONDERFUL parents!!

Flowers, Reunions, and Chalk Art

Wow- I don't think any blog post will ever be able to top the last one as far as comments go. Thank you for all the congratulations and well wishes! We're super excited about our little girl!

I know I'm a little slow on this, but Spring has officially Sprung in our front yard. Last Spring/Summer before Dan's parent's returned from their mission, since Dan and I were "house sitting," we would spend hours and hours tending their yard. Maybe I'm just too thorough, but it would also take hours due to the size of the yard and the few number of hands Dan and I had. However, I actually enjoyed the work and more importantly I LOVED the results. No weeds and pretty flowers.

Now that Dan and I have a place of our own, we have the same opportunity to tend our yard. A few weeks ago we weeded our front "yard" (walkway), and then bought some flowers to plant. It took FAR less time than any of our yard work stints last summer and I'm still just as in love with results as ever! Check it out!

I don't remember the names of the yellow ones, but check out those purple daisies!
This is just a little bush thing. We needed something that looked nice and would take up space.
These are flowers that can grow in low sunlight. Nice huh?

I also had the opportunity this week meet up with some dear old roommates of mine! These girls are da bomb!! We are all married now, two are expecting babies, and each one of them are such good examples to me in many different ways! Because we all are spreading out more and more across the country, we only see each other about twice a year. Thank you girls for a wonderful evening of reminiscing!

In other news, Dan has been doing an internship with the Utah Foster Care Foundation this summer and has been very busy with it. This coming weekend is their 5th annual sidewalk Chalk Art Festival where 40-50 artists come to The Gateway in downtown SLC to help raise awareness about the need for foster parents. It is a great event, and the artwork done by these artists is amazing (there are some pictures of last years' event on the website)! If you've got some time, come down to the Gateway anytime on the 13th or 14th and check out the Festival. There's even a fun section for the kiddies to make their own sidewalk chalk art! Hope you can make it!

Gender time!!

Friday, May 23 was a WONDERFUL day!! My birthday began with many birthday wishes from my students. A few gave me gifts such as, bubble bath and lotion, cute cards, and a tile with an inspirational thought. Once I opened those few gifts, and the kids saw how happy I was at their thoughtfulness, many students proceeded to look through their desks and find their BEST pens and pencils to give to me as well. I guess they didn't want to miss out on making their teacher happy too. Such cute and considerate 6 and 7 year olds.

After a normal day of learning, I decided it would be fun to let my students take a stab at guessing the gender of the baby--following these conditions: they couldn't be upset if they got it wrong, they couldn't brag if they got it right, and the boys couldn't just choose boy and the girls couldn't just choose girl. I also prepared them for the fact that the baby may have the legs crossed or be too wiggly to find out. Anyway- here are the results of their guesses!

They guessed BOY... But was it correct?

Well, here are the real results!!

(If you don't want to see little baby "parts" skip ahead to the text. :))

:) IT'S A GIRL!!! :)

Isn't she precious??

Immediately after the appointment- we went to Babies 'R Us to register. This is what Dan's most excited about. ;)

p.s.- Baby stuff is EXPENSIVE!

For the rest of my birthday celebration, Dan took me to Macaroni Grill for dinner and then to see the movie Emma Smith--My Story. It was a beautiful movie! And I don't mean to brag or anything, but the lady who plays Emma Hales Smith (Katherine Nelson Thompson) is my cousin-in-law. She's pretty much awesome!

Such a HAPPY Birthday!! So the next item of business will be to start looking up names! So far, it hasn't gone well. Wish us luck. :)

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...