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/
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
