Manti Pageant and Stuart Falls

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost the end of June. This month has flown by, especially since starting a summer class this past Monday. It’s called Assessing Learning Outcomes. It’s a 4 credit class about the best ways to assess whether or not the students are learning what they’re supposed to, including how to write many different kinds of tests. Anyway, I have it M - Th for two hours a day and we have a test every other week and a project due on the weeks we don’t have tests. I really enjoyed the substitute professor we had this week, Dr. Richard Sudweeks, an expert and professional in the field of educational assessment.

Last Sunday was Father’s Day. We spent the day with Jason’s family where we had an extended family get-together, something that doesn’t happen very often in his family, but I guess the stars were aligned and lots of people were in town. Besides his sister and two brothers and their families, there were both sets of grandparents there; Aunt Nancy and Uncle Bruce, who are about to start a mission in Washington; their daughter Amanda and her family; Uncle Gary and his son Stephan from Texas who just started BYU as a freshman; his cousin Alex who was there for basketball camp; his cousin Andrea, who goes to BYU, and her friend Nate. Anyway, we had about 30 people there. It was nice to talk to them and get to know them more than just names. So, happy Father’s Day!

In addition to classes this week, I’ve been working on finding resources to teach motivation in my research and I attended a BYU conference on course design for about 5 hours on Friday. It was kind of fun to work with a conglomeration of BYU professors from all the disciplines in trying to improve the courses here at BYU. I must say that I think more that anything, it boosted my confidence in what I’ve been learning because there wasn’t much said that was novel to me since many of my classes focus on the kinds of things they were teaching at the conference. And the free lunch was also a great incentive!

Friday Jason and I decided to go to the Manti Pageant. We wanted to go last weekend, but it just kept raining and was cold so we decided to go this week. After a rainy afternoon, we were glad it cleared up in time for the pageant. After we got past Spanish Fork Jason said, “Where are we? This doesn’t look like Utah.” We enjoyed a beautiful green drive down to Manti and it felt like we were really far from home. The pageant itself was pretty good. It had been years since I’ve seen it, and Jason had never seen it. It was a little over dramatic for me, but the costuming and the stage production in general was really well done. We had great seats about 15 rows backs in the center, and we were able to get out quickly so we didn’t have to wait for a long line of cars to get out of Manti afterwards. It turned out really well.

This morning we got up and went on a ward hike up to Stuart Falls near the Timpanogos trailhead up by Sundance. The ward turnout ended up being three other couples besides ourselves, but we had fun and had a good chance to get to know the other couples better. It was fun to get out and hike a little and the trail was pretty shady. With all the winter run off and rainfall we’ve had, the falls were much more magnificent than usual. Definitely worth the hike!

Jason spends most of his time working at the coding lab, taking care of the responsibilities of his calling, or spending time with me. :) One nice addition this week has been that he has been taking care of fixing dinners. Since my summer class is between 5:00 and 7:00pm, he decided that he would try cooking the meals. He even made Curry on Monday when Steve and Kirsten came over for dinner! He does a great job! . . . so much so that I’ve decided to take all of my classes between 5:00 and 7:00 from now on! J

June 7

Last Tuesday Jason and I decided to try a new exercise routine. Usually when I want to exercise Jason will come run or bike with me or something. The problem is that what is “exercise” for me not even “breaking a sweat” for him. He never complains about it because he generally just likes being with me, but for some reason it’s hard not to feel bad when I’m huffing and puffing and he’s going around me in circles. Anyway, we decided to try something new, I would ride the one bike we have and he would run. Now, if we’re going on flat ground there’s no contest who would win, but going uphill is another story. So we went up to the MTC from our apartment (probably about 4-5 miles round trip), Jason running and me riding the bike. It’s pretty much all uphill and it was just as I suspected, we were pretty much going at the same speed. Granted on the way down I had to slow down just a little, but Jason ran all the way there and back again without stopping. And you know what, the next day he had sore muscles. That doesn’t happen very often and he didn’t even know what sore muscles really felt like for the first 6 mo. of our marriage! I’m glad I could introduce him back to a “real” workout again. I won’t even mention the fact that when we got back to our apartment he started hopping up and down the stairs on one leg because he said “his muscles didn’t get a very good workout.” All I can say is that I hope our children inherit his physical skills and ability.

Wednesday at institute was definitely a surprise for us. We’ve been looking around to find an institute to go to since Jason has Bishopric meeting on the night our stake institute meets. I looked on-line and found a contact number for our area. I made Jason call, and the person on the phone said that the information on-line was correct and invited us to come, so we headed over there and were very surprised to find that in was an institute program especially for young adults with special needs. Needless to say that our institute experience was quite different from the one we anticipated; but I still learned a lot about Heber J. Grant and I will never forget how helpful and kind everyone was, nor will I forget the enthusiastic leading of the opening and closing hymn, or the spiritual thought about the movie “Titanic.” ☺

Thursday I helped out a sister that I visit teach by watching her 18 mo. old while she and her husband went out to eat and shopping. The little girl Emily slept for the first two hours, but when she woke up we played with almost every toy, read almost every book, and went in almost every room of the apartment in about an hour and half. I was starting to wonder what moms do with one and half year olds every day if I had already done it all in an hour and a half when her parents came home and I didn’t have to worry about it anymore.

Friday Jason and I babysat Jeff and Sally’s three kids and then later Steve and Kirsten dropped off Ben as well. It went really well minus the crying babies, but it just gives us good practice for being parents right?

Saturday morning I took the Praxis II Principles of Learning and Teaching exam at BYU. It’s a standardized test given by ETS and required for teachers getting their permanent license. It also happens to mostly be based off the class that I teach, Educational Psychology. So, since I have to take the test if I ever want to go back to teaching and I working right now to help revamp the course to better prepare the students to take the test, I thought I would take advantage of the opportunity to count my study and preparation hours as work hours too and get paid for it. The test went pretty well and hopefully I scored well too.

That night Jason and I went to meet our new three-week-old niece Kira Rogers in Riverton. She is really cute and very fun to hold. It’s hard to believe how small she is!



Jason and our niece Kira