Wedding Favorites Part 2

Here are some more shots from the wedding!


Some of us look great, others have definitely looked better, but it's the only family shot we have from the temple! Sorry about that!!
All the Prete granddaughters! I think all the girls looked so cute in those dresses! Good job to the faithful clearance shoppers who found them!

And of course, the Prete grandsons! They also look very nice! The expressions on their faces are so perfect!!

The whole Prete clan! Considering how many of us there are and how many chileren, I think this turned out all right!!

This is a great one, except that poor Becky's face was cut off...except for her beautiful smile!



Cutting the Cake! I couldn't resist the impulse to smash it in Brian's face! I soon regretted it when I got a giant lump of frosting stuck up my nose!! Yep. you can see it bulging out in this picture!!
Well, that's about it! Thanks to all of you who did so much to make it possible! Everything came together beautifully, mostly because all of you spent the evening making that happen while I just partied! Thanks!!

Wedding Favorites Part 1

Most of you have probably seen all of these pictures, but in case you hadn't I wanted to show them off! I think there are some very cute, very "Brian and Sarah" shots here! You may not all appreciate them like I do, but I think they turned out perfectly!

Man, what good looking people!!

Here we are coming out of the temple! We look a little excited, I think!



Showing off our mad moves on the big day!



With the parents

What I love about this picture is the expression on everyone's faces! Priceless!!

A long time in coming

So I realized that I haven't made a post on my blog in approximately 10 months and thought it might be time for an update. I have emails sent to me about people who check my blog every week, and I have been surprised to see that a few of you out there have still been checking my blog hoping that maybe this time I wrote something or posted a cute picture. I am sorry for the many disappointing clicks of the mouse that lead you to the same old post about the table I refinished at the beginning of last summer. This time, I hope I don't disappoint!

I have been married for a month and a half now and life is pretty good!! We still get along, don't argue and are even still happy to see each other at the end of the day when Brian comes home. Although we're happy, I wouldn't hesitate that our lives has had some excitement (some good, some not-so-good)

Our beautiful wedding get-away car shown below was stolen last night from right in front of our house.


The handsome man below has been working very long hard hours at work and hasn't been home much! It sounds luxious just to eat dinner with him on a week night.



We get to go on a honeymoon to St Lucia over Spring Break. It cost a lot more than we were expecting because we put it off and airfares got really high because it's spring break for most of Utah. Oh well! We figured we wouldn't ever have a chance to do something as frivolous as this again, so we should do it and have a great time!

I decided to give up teaching after this year, then decided it wasn't so bad after all. The last trimester of teaching (which lasted from about 3 days after I got secretly engaged until 2 weeks after we got married) was the worst teaching experience of my life. Now it was probably largely impacted by the fact that I was distracted and didn't put as much in to teaching as I usually did because I just simply didn't have the time or emotional energy to give my students my entire soul, which is generally required to be a good teacher. Also, I had the worst group of disrespectful, rude unmotivated or motivatable, entitled, argumentative group of students (and parents) I have ever had. One night I came home in tears after a parent tried to chewed me out for being so unhelpful and incapable of doing my job since his son claimed to have come in after school several times to get help and didn't get it and because he had apparently turned in all his missing assignments (which were all later found incomplete in his folder, or in the no name basket I told him to check several times). I really hate dealing with parents like that. Generally, when I see an email or get a phone call from a parent my stomach sinks and I feel like throwing up because I'm always having to defend myself against these parents and fight to stand my ground. I think parents think that because I'm young, a woman and short that somehow they can push me around. It turns out that I have older brothers who tried that and I won't let anyone do that to me anymore! That was the day I decided I was done. Then third trimester started with an awesome bunch of kids and it turns out I like it if the students will just show me a little respect and treat me like a human being. I think I'm in it for one more year and then we'll have to see!

I'll post more photos later. I need to go pick up my new husband at work, since his car has now vanished!

Adventures in Domesticity

Since I'm a teacher and I have the summers off, I have a lot of time on my hands. Anyone who knows me, knows that my idea of a good time is not sitting around lazing about for 2.5 months. I like to be busy and have stuff to do! So I have several projects on the go to keep me busy and happy! The first of these was refinishing my table. Unfortunately, I didn't take a "before picture" to show you just how bad it was, but let me describe it! It was painted black and it must have had plenty of wear and tear because there were chips in the paint, and the previous owner just covered them up with spray paint! It looked bad! Really bad! I had this table for almost two years with the intention of refinishing it, and I finally got around to it.

I bought myself a power sander (I figured this may only be the beginning of my projects in domesticity!) and sanded the whole thing down to the wood. I wasn't really sure what was under the paint. Was it particle board? Would it need to be repainted, or would the wood be adequately nice to stain it? After hours and hours and hours of sanding, I found that there was in fact wood under the awful paint, but there was a small amount of black paint in the wood grain that wouldn't come out no matter how much I sanded it. I opted to find a dark stain, hoping that the black paint would go unnoticed. Here is it, two coats of stain and 3 coats of polyurethane later! Maybe the pictures don't do it justice, but the magnitude of aesthetic improvement is unparalleled!!! I think my next project will be to stain my chairs and make a matching set!

Who could ask for anything more?

Life is so good right now...and it just seems to be getting better and better!

The last few months have been full of transiency, uncertainty and chaos, but finally everything is settling down and looking good! A few months ago, the girls I was living with all decided to move out (hopefully it had nothing to do with my smell, or crabby disposition!). That left me with the option of either finding new roommates or finding a new place to live! Since I had 2 days before we would have had to give our notice, I decided to move out too and find a new place to live. After a lot of searching, I found a spot in a house of girls in my ward with an awesome backyard. This seemed like a good option, and I couldn't find anything better, so I jumped on it! Well, a week before I moved in, I was informed that the landlord was selling the house and we would have to move out by June 1st. I made a last ditch effort to find a new place before moving there in the first place, but to no avail. I moved in, knowing full well that I would be moving again soon, so 90% of my stuff remained in boxes in the basement for a month and a half. It actually worked out quite nicely because I wanted to live with a girl in my ward, but she couldn't get out of her current contract when I needed to move, but she could by June, so we found a two bedroom place that is still in my ward boundaries! We moved in a week and a half ago, and our house is beginning to look like a house. There are still boxes and little decorating has been done, but we have a functional kitchen and a place to sit and a washer and dryer hooked up! It's so nice to finally feel like I have a place that I can call home. I haven't felt that way since I moved for the first time 2 months ago!

The school year is almost over as well! This means that I am a week and a half away from freedom for two and a half months! This year has been pretty rough. I have an unusual number of very difficult and demanding students, and I am ready to have a break from them!

On top of all this, to make life even more beautiful and delightful, I have a pretty awesome boyfriend! He helped me move...twice, takes out my trash, and does my dishes occasionally, and makes me laugh almost all the time! He does nerdy things with me: attends the natural history museum, reads books aloud, plays bananagrams and other awesomely nerdy games, performs postal experiments. He also does less nerdy things with me: plays guitar, hikes, bikes, builds and shoots potato guns, cooks amazingly delicious food and has spontaneous dance parties.

*Disclaimer: any bruises, scrapes or other injuries that I may have acquired while dating him were absolutely my own fault and after each injury he was more concerned and felt worse about it than I did!

Wow! Life sure is good! Who could ask for anything more?

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make me a Match!!

Being the only unmarried and childless member of my family, I deal with a lot of joking and teasing and merciless taunting about getting married. I have noticed, however, that it has diminished in the last couple of years, and I suspect it is due, in large part, to many of of the instigators losing hope that I will ever be able to persuade someone to marry me. Although maybe some members of my family have lost hope, my students haven't!

A few weeks ago, I had some students in my class asking me if I was married and if I ever planned on getting married, "you know...settle down and have a family!" I avoided answering the question. There was no good way to answer. If I said yes, they'd either pry into my love life or try to set me up with an older brother or cousin or uncle. If I said no...well I'd be lying and all of you know how well I lie!!!

A few days later I was informed that my students were scheming to set me up with the English student teacher! I rolled my eyes and walked away trying not to encourage them. I tried to forget about it, but I was abruptly alerted a couple of weeks later that this wasn't a passing thought when another teacher came into my room and warned me that there were some students down the hall scheming to set me up with the same student teacher.

Assuming that although they might talk about it amongst themselves but never actually act on it, I laughed about it, but didn't worry about putting an end to it. I should have realized that middle schoolers are completely preoccupied with dating and if they can't have it in their own lives, they feel a need to make it happen for other people!

On Friday (the last day of school before Valentine's Day) a couple of students told me that they had told their student teacher about me and that he wanted to go out with me! They wanted my phone number so they could give it to him. I said, "If he really wants it, he can get it from me himself." Then, they left me a note on my desk addressed to "Sarah" (which, when they are your students, is thoroughly inappropriate). The note described why they thought I would be perfect for this guy etc. I talked to the girl who wrote it about how it was inappropriate, but it must not have sunk in because at the end of the day she brought a Valentine (that she had made) for me from "him." When I commented on the handwriting looking an awful lot like hers, she confessed that she had made it and he had signed it.

As much as this is completely inappropriate and it needs to stop, at least I know they've got my back! ;)

Stomach

If you have a weak stomach, you may not want to read on. If you are a member of PETA, I guarantee you won't appreciate the following post! However, I have a story that every nerdy student of biology will love!

As you know, I teach middle school science, including biology. Like any good biology class, we got to do some dissections. We dissected a worm, grasshopper, clam, starfish, crayfish, perch and finally a frog. Everything went fairly smoothly for all of the dissections until the frog. Every morning before a dissection, 3 students from each biology class would come to school early and I would dissect the organism and show them everything they needed to identify, they would pass everything off and during class that day, they would each dissect the organism for a group of 10 or so students. Well, one of my experts called me over because his frog had a huge sac in its mouth that he hadn't seen that morning. I jokingly said, "I don't know what that is; maybe he threw up his stomach!" We cut it open and there was nothing inside except a small tube. I looked online to see if I could find something, I asked another teacher and finally I just decided to dissect it out a little more. It turns out that the frog actually did throw up his stomach. In the following pictures you can see the stomach in the frog's mouth as well as the stomach flipped back into the stomach! This may be the coolest dissection I have ever done!


PS Becky, this isn't a cryptic message!