Eggs

My students are currently on spring break (meaning I am too, yay!), so as a fun little activity last Thursday night the coordinator at one of my sites suggested that we have the students dye Easter eggs. This was one part pain in the butt, two parts disaster, but I'm pretty sure that the kids had lots of fun so the rest can certainly be forgiven. It may take Keith a long time to recover from the smell of 150 hard boiled eggs in our refrigerator... and my fingernails are still blue from all that dye haha. There is no easy way to organize such an endeavor, but some of them made some pretty neat eggs! Here are some photos from the whole event:

This is only a quarter of the eggs I had to boil haha

Blue fingers

This photo took like 10 tries, no one could hold still haha

The purples were particularly great.

Starry

Last weeks my faithful art students listened as blabbered on about Vincent Van Gogh and showed them countless pictures of his most famous work, Starry Night. During a random conversation with one of the kids later, he asked me if I went to school to learn about making art... I told him that I actually went to school for art history: to learn about the people who made the art. To which this student responded: "Oh! So THATS why you always tell us about all this old stuff!" Love it haha.

Here are some of our Nashville Starry Night's:

6.2

Saturday we ran our first 10K in preparation for our upcoming half marathon. The only way to describe it? ROUGH! We've been training for months but it's still not any easier. This months race will truly be a test of our endurance and perseverance... thankfully though we still have the month of April to get ourselves ready, and practice things like what we're eating (or not eating) pre and post race. The course that we ran Saturday will be part of our half marathon course so we're happy that we know a little better what to expect on race day (and which hills will be the most grueling, ugh). On the bright side the weather was amazing, and we got to see some beautiful parts of the city... when we weren't totally hating our lives haha. Here is a shot of our post race smiles (which were only slightly fake):

In other, extremely awesome news: I just got hired as the art director for a camp here in Nashville! I know I have written briefly about my recent job struggles. As much as I love my after school job, it wasn't enough and wasn't going to carry on through the summer. I have a few things that I'm still waiting to see about for the new school year, but this is going to be a really awesome and fun opportunity for the summer! Before I went to interview I was nervous it was just going to be a glorified camp counselor, but I was really impressed with their offer, and look forward to having my own classroom and to plan a great curriculum for the summer. Here's hoping that this is just the beginning of some great new things in our lives and my career!

Creeper

I know this is kind of old news, but I felt that these photos needed to be shared with the world at some point. Keith always grows his beard all winter long, and I patiently wait for Spring to show itself so I can see my husbands adorable face once more. This year he went all out and decided to torment me with an awful mustache for a full 2 DAYS before I got my clean shaven boy back again. Here is some of the grossness:

Ladies Night

Thursday night my lady friends and I gathered to help the beautiful Jordie to make some decorations for her upcoming wedding. I remember feeling super isolated and stressed when I was making decorations for our wedding, alone in Philadelphia so I definitely jumped at the chance to help out a friend. We filled confetti bags, and stamped some labels, wrapped letters and sewed photo booth props... all while chowing down on delicious snacks and chatting chatting chatting. My hope is that Jordie could feel even a LITTLE bit of weigh lifted off her shoulders when it comes to her upcoming wedding, and it's always great to have ladies night :)

Sammie and Jordie.

Sewing hearts.

full disclosure: I swiped these from Jordie's instagram. Too pretty not to share.

Jordie totally forgot about the cake she had made, so as we were leaving she packed me two pieces to take home... they didn't make it home :)

While we had ladies night, the boys got together for wings and beers at Buffalo Wild Wings... when I picked Keith up from Trent't house to go home we realized that Trent, Tytus and I had apparently coordinated outfits haha

Wise

I know I showed you some animals earlier this week, but here is a little taste of the rest of our habitat unit. The kiddos and I talked at length about owls, and learned some cool facts about them. I never pass up an opportunity to have them practice their cutting and pasting skills (which are decidedly awful most days) so we also talked about collage and then made these funky little owls. More than anything else this year, my students desperately pleaded with me to let them take these home haha.

Spontaneous Show

Now that Keith is working in the music business world he's been much more interested in seeing live music and making it a priority to see great bands when they come through town. I think that it was something we've always liked to do, we just got kind of lazy about pursuing it when he was a regular 9 to 5er. Regardless, I think I've been to more shows in the past 6 months than I went to in the past 2 years haha.

For the past couple months Keith has been talking about this band The Head and the Heart, and mentioned how he wanted to see them live, but both of their Nashville shows were sold out. Flash forward to Monday: I had a super long day and kind of wanted to just come home and relax with my husband, but when I texted him that, what message did I receive? I JUST SCORED 2 TICKETS FOR SUPER CHEAP! hahaha I should have known ;) Thankfully Keith knows how to get me on board for anything: filling my belly with Moes and getting me a king sized butterfinger for dessert haha. In the end I'm so glad that we got to go to see them live. It was SUCH an awesome show, AND my friend Sarah was there too. It was nice to have a spontaneous little week night date, and we were still in bed before midnight (which is way past our old married people bed time haha)

Habitat

For the last two weeks, the majority of my students and I have been talking about animals and their habitats. They each picked an animal and did some research on where that animal lives, which they then drew and then painted them with watercolors. I had done some watercolor painting with my elementary students earlier this year, but I feel like this was the first time they really spent lots of time with it. There were definitely some challenges, but I think they did an awesome job overall! These are my favorites:

Panda

Horse in a stable (not exactly their habitat but close enough haha)

Tiger

Elephant in the circus (again, not their habitat, but I appreciate the thought haha)

Kinder-turtle

Mega squirrel, or tiny tree?

Somewhere in here is a lion haha

Desert tortoise 

This sunset got a little out of control haha

another panda 

This one was one of my middle schoolers... I love foxes :)

Paradise

This Sunday, the evening weather was so spectacular that we couldn't justify eating inside but since we don't have a table for our deck yet, we did a little rearranging of the furniture and just brought our dining room table outside. The results were pretty magnificent:

I can't wait until we have a permanent table on the deck and we're able to host all of our favorite people. Did I mention that we're beyond thankful for this new house? I think we have seriously raised the bar for all future houses we will live in haha

Honky

And just because I've been so behind with blogging this month... I'll share some more photos from this weekend:

Saturday night after Chris and Jordan were done at their hockey game, Keith and his brother and I met them downtown to show them a little of the Nashville night life. Even though we were there relatively early (9pm!) it was still SO packed downtown. We didn't stay too long, just enough to hear one good band and for them to get an idea of what Music City is all about.

Brothers.

Chris and Jordan.

Christopher's

With a Flame

Like I mentioned, this weekend was CRAZY busy, and was full of awesome friends and family that were here visiting (all within like an... 18 hour span haha). Amidst all of that we finally found some time to put together our fire pit out back and celebrated that with our annual burning of the Christmas tree. My father and our good friend Ben both cleverly pointed out that YES we did move our dried out, 4 month old Christmas tree from our old house to our new house just for the purpose of burning it haha. I would say that it was pretty worth it :)

We stood very far back and watched in awe

It took a total of a minute for the tree to be nothing more than a puddle of ashes, but the boys put together a nice warm fire for us, and we spent the rest of the night chatting, listening to music and enjoying the great outdoors. 

Keith's makeshift cooler haha

We enjoyed the fire so much on Saturday night that after everyone left town we called up our friends Tytus and Jamie and invited them over to join us for dinner and another evening of enjoying this beautiful Nashville weather gathered around our fire pit. Tytus gladly built us a fire that was so warm we had to keep moving our stumps back haha. Still, I'm hoping that this summer will bring us many cool nights so that we can continue to enjoy gathering in our amazing backyard with all our friends and family :)