The beginning of yet another school year

So our link for today should bring up your spirits if you are down, and make you smile. It makes me laugh out loud every single time I watch it. I hope our future kids are this cute... http://www.wimp.com/worthliving/

Right after we posted our last blog, classes started for both of us. Christian is enrolled in Music Form and Analysis, Economics 110, Wind Symphony, marching band, Fundamental Piano Skills (a requirement for all non-piano music majors), private horn lessons, and a brass chamber group. His favorite class seems to be his Economics class. He is always talking about it when he comes home, and informing me of the latest economic principle that he learned about. For the class he's supposed to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, and he likes the prestige associated with getting the Wall Street Journal and reading it. One day he even got to sit in a cafe, sipping a drink while he typed on his laptop and read the Wall Street Journal. He was especially excited about that.

The Wind Symphony is going on tour this spring, all over Europe, for 3 weeks. We were planning on me going with him, but since 1) it would cost a ton of money that would be better used elsewhere in our budget, 2) I'd have to stay in a different room in a different section of the hotel because he'd be assigned roommates in the hotels, and 3) there'd be nothing for me to do there while he was playing on tour, we've decided against me going along. He is excited about the tour, though. They will be spending most of their time in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. He's already thinking about what kinds of souvenirs he wants to bring back.

I have two classes, 3 credits each, since 6 credits is full time for a graduate student. The two classes are "Legal Issues in Special Education" and "Intro to Behavioral Research in Education". I thought my favorite class would be the latter, since it has more to do with my daily job than the other one does, but I have found my Legal Issues class actually pretty interesting. It's fun to me to find out exactly what I can and can't do, and what kinds of things I could be suing people for. Hehehe. I come home and talk about the most interesting ones to Christian, so if you ask him about the laws associated with Child Find (one of the very most interesting ones to me), he could tell you quite a bit about it.

My classes are both "distance education" classes, and we do it through a system kind of like Skype. Me and a few other people sit in a classroom with a webcam aimed at us and a big screen projected in front of us. On the screen, we can see and hear the professor (and people in other distance education sites) in other cities in real time, and if we push the buttons on our microphones, everyone can hear us. It was weird to get used to, but it has its pros and cons and I think I'm okay with it. I just got my first paper back yesterday and got 100% on it.

About a week ago, Christian and I went to a birthday party for the now-3-year-old I work with (who I will just refer to as J, for confidentiality reasons). It was very cute. They had pizza and cupcakes and balloon animals. J loves Thomas the Tank Engine and the movie Cars, and he loves books, so for a gift we got him a Thomas the Tank Engine book and a Cars book. Apparently we made a good choice, because as soon as he opened his present he smiled and said, "Read it? Read it? Read it?" and wanted his mom to read one of the books to him. After she finished reading it, she tried to get him to open his other presents, but all he wanted was for her to read the books again and again. J carried the books around with him for the whole rest of the party, and soon had them memorized and would sit and read them to himself if everyone was too busy to read them to him.

Last Monday we went to Christian's French horn party, thrown by his horn professor. It was sort of a "let's meet all the French horns and eat some food" kind of thing. I got to meet all the different horns and was quite impressed when two of them started "tinkering around" on the piano, sight-reading (quite well, I might add) really difficult pieces by Rachmaninoff and Debussy that were in a stack of sheet music that the horn professor had lying around. Christian played pool in the basement with most of the horns, and I spent most of the time talking to the horn professor's wife, who apparently teaches 1st grade. So we sat and talked about 1st graders for a while (I was an aide in a 1st grade classroom 2 years ago) and had a good time.

We've had a spider problem for a while. They mostly show up in our bathroom and hang out in our bath towels (eek!!!), but we occasionally found them in other places wandering around our house. We read online that spraying lemon-scented Pledge around the baseboards and any cracks or holes will stop them (because they have taste buds on their feet and apparently hate the taste of it, or at least, so says a lady online who knows the guy who trained the spiders for the movie Arachnophobia). So we bought a can of Pledge and have been spraying it around occasionally. It worked for the most part, but we'd still find one here and there. But the breaking point was when we came home to find a big black widow spider hanging out on our porch. Then we decided it was time to tell the landlords that they needed to spray for spiders. They sprayed on Wednesday, and last night was the first time we've seen any spiders since then. It was just one, and it was a pretty harmless breed. So hopefully our spider problem has been extinguished.

Yesterday we had lunch with Mike and Lanie (Christian's brother and his wife) and their son Aaron, who had come up to Utah for a little visit. We went to the Purple Turtle restaurant, a burger-and-shake joint and a one-of-a-kind little place that's quite famous around here. After lunch we got "small" shakes. What we didn't know was how giant their "small" shakes were. Here is a picture of what you get if you order two "small" shakes: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgf-LI3KlyuIn8U1WgogctaW-d-fUz5Suyg4QjKUXfp8pJfCE3Dq7Fpo1-yjP5wZzAV1Z7C4Gezdv824c73xynoWR6c3-XPk-C726HwhTsuNiMDzEdGAPME1iuxxRd6LQccmb6wifqXqn8/s1600/Picture+297.jpg

Yes, a small shake is a "medium" drink cup filled with a shake, PLUS another smaller plastic cup full of shake. We had a great deal of trouble trying to eat all of our shakes. I hate to think of what their "large" shake looks like.

Our last piece of news this week is a very good one: I got a 40% raise! Since I now have a bachelor's degree in Psychology, I am more qualified for my job as a special education aide at the elementary school. So they increased my pay by 40%!!! The raise got lost in the system at the beginning of the school year, so it's just now showing up and I just got a hefty deposit with 40% more pay than usual, PLUS all the back pay I'd earned (according to the new salary) since the beginning of the school year. Christian and I are really happy about this. :)

We have a recipe this week: Brigadeiro (bree-gah-DAY-rooh). This is a Brazilian candy that I brought back from my trip to Brazil in high school. It's kind of like a chocolate caramel candy.

2 cans sweetened condensed milk

2 TBS butter

4 TBS cocoa powder or malt-flavored chocolate ovaltine

chocolate sprinkles

1) mix ingredients

2) put on low heat and stir constantly

3) turn up heat and keep stirring (color will get darker)

4) Stir constantly to prevent sticking to bottom of the pan

5) Take off the stove when mixture will slide from the pan while sticking together, and cling to the spoon

6) To make it easier to roll into balls, coat hands in butter and then roll into 1-inch balls. Roll each ball in chocolate sprinkles and place onto wax paper to cool.

7) Devour.

Anyway, we hope you are all doing well, and we love you!

Brittany and Christian

Long Time, No "C"

Hello everyone. Our quote from today comes from Victor Borge, a comedic musician. He has a live performance that is just awesome. Anyway THIS LINK shows the part that the line is from, but he doesn't really get to it until about the 6:40 mark.

It has been a very long time since we've written. Now that school is starting up again we feel like we should turn over a new leaf and start keeping up. We know no one really reads this anyway, but we thought we'd at least do it for posterity.

Last time we wrote was back in February! Since then a lot has happened. The biggest thing is that we have a cute new niece as of March 7! Chelsea Anastasia Mecham was born then and she is just adorable. Here is a picture to prove it:

She is a physical prodigy, she is! She held her head up the first couple days she was born and has seemingly progressed very quickly physically. We've started a weekly tradition of having dinner with Mary, Derek, and Chelsea so we get to see plenty of her. It is so great!

Also during March I (that is, Christian) traveled with the pep band and the BYU Men's basketball team to March Madness. Yes, I did shake hands with Jimmer while we flew on the same plane together. I also got on TV during the Florida game. Here's a pic to prove it:

Unfortunately we lost that game, but it was still an awesome ride being in New Orleans. I tried all kinds of new foods like clams, beignets, alligator, and other stuff. It was so great being there.

In April Brittany finally graduated with a B.S. in Psychology! Woo hoo! I have such a smart wife. Both of our parents came up for the graduation ceremony. It was so great spending time with all of them and seeing Brittany walk across that stage! I'm so proud of her.

At the end of her BYU career she applied and was accepted into a graduate program through Utah State University. The program is a Masters in Special Education with BCBA Coursework. For those of us not intelligent enough to understand all that it's basically coursework so that she can be certified to work with children who have autism. She eventually will be developing individualized behavioral therapy programs for those children. Basically it's doing what her boss is doing. She's looking forward to the program and really hopes to get a lot out of it.

In June we had our 2 year anniversary. We are no longer newlyweds! For celebration I recreated a date that we had gone on while we were dating in Houston. I surprised Brittany by taking her to Hogle Zoo and then going out to Olive Garden. 

This is a bird show that we saw there

There were little cubbies you could climb into and watch the prairie dogs up close.

A big ol' spider during "Predator's Awareness Week"

Us at the bird show

We had tons of fun. There were some baby lemurs that had been born the previous month and they were adorable to watch - chasing each other around. Also, some robotic dinosaurs had been set up around the park to yell at you and stuff as you walked by. There was one display of the Dilophosaurus (the acid spitting one) that actually spit water at unsuspecting passers-by. One family noticed this and the dad promptly parked the stroller holding their one-year-old right in the way of the stream. The little one had no idea what was coming and got a face-full of water. It was so cute and sad all at the same time.

Towards the beginning of the summer I started teaching the 5-year-olds in Primary at church. It has been an extreme adventure! I don't have an official partner, so every week they grab someone from priesthood and ask them to sit in with me. Every week I get challenged to find new ways to keep the kids attention and find some way to keep them on the spiritual side of things. I think it has been great practice for when we have kids later. Brittany continues in her calling as Primary pianist. She still likes that, and it's fun to give "looks" to each other during sharing time and singing time.

Brittany's family came in July for Kathy's 25th high school reunion. After the reunion they came and stayed with us for about a week. It was great fun being able to just relax with them (as I didn't have school during the summer term). We played lots of games and just enjoyed being together. While they were here we had a big surprise party for a congratulations on getting into graduate school party for Brittany. We got together with all kinds of extended family from the happy valley. We really loved seeing so much family up here this summer.

We did go down once to Houston for a brief respite from the dry weather of Utah. My brother Joe, who is mentally handicapped, had been working with his bishop and stake president in Houston to get permission to go through the temple to receive his endowment. Finally, they got all of the meetings and interviews and preparations done so that he was able to set a date. My parents flew us down and we spent a long 5-day weekend vacation in Houston. It was the greatest weekend! Besides all of our immediate family we spent time with, we saw our cutest nephew, my grandparents, and some of my old friends from high school. It was such a wonderful weekend.

After coming home from Houston, we had to prepare for the horror that is band camp week! I am once again the section leader for the horns in the BYU marching band. The horns this year are shaping up to be even better than the previous years I participated in! The music is way difficult, and they are already on top of it. It is so great to listen to these 16 other horns. It was a hot week, and we had a few people passing out and MANY sunburns. Also, after way too long of a respite, the horns won the spirit stick during band camp by dressing up as a herd of zebras during safari day and having the clarinets hunt us (using their instruments as rifles). As hard of work it was, the fun I had getting to know a new band out-weighed the suckiness of the weather.

And now it is back into the swing of another school year. Brittany's classes are on Wednesday nights, so she's looking forward to that in a couple of days. My classes started today. I think I'm really going to enjoy the classes I am taking so far. Economics will be very difficult, though. Today, I auditioned for ensembles and I was lucky enough to make it into the BYU Wind Symphony as the assistant principal horn again. This year we will be touring France, Belgium and the Netherlands! This will happen after spring semester around May. I can't wait, because I haven't been farther out of the country than the Canada side of Niagra Falls. It will be quite an experience.

Well that's all the update I have for now. Hopefully we'll remember to write again in the next weeks.
Love love,
B&C

We've been bursting with excitement... LITERALLY!

For your entertainment, here's a comic Christian and I have been giggling about for a while:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/literally Why do some people - even civilized adults - still not know how to use the term "literally" properly? LOL. Anyway.

Since last time, we've had a few special days - the first of them being Christian's birthday!!! Christian is now 23 years old! He had a good-ish birthday. For his present, we ordered a nice voice recorder (he's been wanting one for a while now). Too bad it got shipped through Illinois, and then Illinois experienced a giant blizzard with 4 feet of snow, delaying the package. It was supposed to arrive on his birthday, but ended up coming a week late. But he still loves it! He used it today to record himself playing his audition piece for the music education program and it worked like a charm! We ordered a huge double-decker pizza from Papa Murphy's for his dinner that night, and as a bonus gift I gave him a few Cadbury Creme Eggs (he LOVES them). We baked a cake for him (his favorite chocolate cake that his dad used to have for his birthdays) and sang Happy Birthday. Sadly, we realized we had no candles, so we lit a match and hurriedly sang to him while it burned, and then he blew it out at the very last possible moment before it burned his fingers (quite gleefully - he is a pyro). We also had his favorite dinner, cheesy potatoes, to celebrate a few days earlier (at Mary and Derek's house), and they gave him some great-quality steaks and some ice cream. All in all, I think he enjoyed his birthday.

For Valentine's Day, we went and saw a show at the BYU planetarium called "Romance in the Stars". It was very romantic to lay under the entire night sky (even if it was simulated) of stars and hear about all the romance stories in Greek mythology. The stars actually looked very realistic, and it was awesome how we could see almost every single star there was. Afterwards we were going to go out and look through the telescopes on the roof of the planetarium and see the real stars, but unfortunately everyone else who attended the show had the same idea, and they all got out there first. We decided waiting in that hugely long line wasn't worth it. So we went home. It was still romantic though :)

A while ago we and Mary and Derek worked out a deal where we have Sunday dinners together, alternating houses. It's been very fun, and after dinner we play games and talk and stuff. We've really enjoyed spending time with them and having another couple our age around to hang out with, especially since it's family. We are excited for their new baby who is due to arrive next week! We have already claimed the privilege of feeding their baby its first pickle.

Christian finally has a calling! We've been in the ward since last August, and it's taken this long for them to get around to calling him to something. But he has been called to be a Primary worker. They still haven't told him which class he'll be helping with, but they have sustained him in sacrament meeting, so hopefully they will tell him soon.

Christian has been applying for the Music Ed program, and part of what he had to turn in was a videorecording of himself teaching a basic musical concept to a group of 4 or more people. We recruited our friend Chris, Mary, Derek, my aunt Laura, her daughter Kira, and my grandpa to come be the audience. He chose to teach about duple-time rhythm. It went very well and I think he did an awesome job of teaching the concept. He finds out in April whether he is accepted into the program. We're crossing our fingers!

Christian has been really excited about NCAA this year. The Cougars have only lost twice this season, and yesterday they beat the #1 team in the conference, so now we are #1!!! BYU should end up doing really well in the March basketball tournament. Go Cougars!!!

The recipe we have for you is called Zucchini Stuffing Casserole.

2 lbs zucchini (6 cups), sliced

1/4 c chopped onions

1 can cream of chicken soup

1 c sour cream

1 c shredded carrots

1 8 oz. package herb seasoned stuffing mix

1/2 c butter

Cook sliced zucchini and onion in boiling, salted water for 4-5 min. Drain. In a bowl, combine soup and sour cream. Stir in carrots. Fold in drained zucchini and onions. Combine stuffing mix and melted butter. Spread 1/2 of stuffing mix in the bottom of a 9x13 pan. Spoon on vegetable mix. Cover with the remaining stuffing. Bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes.