Among Our Family Traditions

Somehow we always manage to make time to stop at the local candy shop....

(I love the Parrot)

And introduce our new friends to the Walking Mall...

Gold at the End of the Rainbow

During the week of St. Patty's day my "speech friends" and I are going to go on a search for the "gold at the end of the rainbow". I've designed maps of the school buildings for the occasion. We're going to have a great time, but the best part of all was making the maps:

Trout Creek

Thompson Falls

St. Regis

Noxon

I've already done this activity with the kids in Hot Springs, so I didn't have a picture of the map since I left it there.

Adventures in Quilting Pt 2

Quilting weekend was so much fun! I kept meaning to snap more pictures of the beautiful scenery, but sometimes being in the thick of things is more fun than photographing. We stayed in a lodge just outside of Polson. The lodge had windows on three sides looking out at Flathead Lake. Mostly I worked on my quilt, but I did attempt to design my own bag to carry all of the basic bathroom ameneties when I travel (it was a flop so I'm not going to show it to you...everything kept falling out of the pockets...).



I cut and sewed most of my quilt strips together during the "Quilt Camp", but I didn't have time to sew it all together, so last weekend I spent some time doing that. I've still got about half of the quilt top to go. It reminds me of a kite:

How's the weather in your neck of the woods?

Adventures in Quilting Part 1

I'm going to do it: This week I'm going to begin my first attempt at a twin-sized quilt. A few years ago I pieced together a baby quilt for a family I introduced to the gospel in New Jersy, but it was a relatively small project and I had a ton of help (thank you Mom for your time quilting and hemming)!

This time I'm going to use the little knowledge I've gleaned from observing, questioning, and making smaller versions to make a big one. The pattern I'm going to use is called a triple rail pattern and it's going to be really fun. The picture of my fabric doesn't do it justice at all. I'm going to use yellow, orange, red, blue, and purple, and it's going to be so fun! Next weekend I'm going to a sewing weekend retreat with my friends (boss & paraprofessional) and it sounds like a lot of fun. I'll be the youngest person there, but I think that will make it even more fun, because I'll be surrounded by people with years of experience in what I'm just beginning to do.

Too funny

Today I was working with a little boy who is trying to master the challenging 'r' sounds, and right in the middle of speech he stopped abruptly and said: 'Argh, bad tongue!' and I burst out laughing. He grinned at my laughter and said, 'Well, it's just that my tongue is so unruly.'

Later in the day I was working with a first grader on saying sentences with the tricky 'L' sound in them. He was forming a sentence with the word 'lamb' in it and couldn't think of what to say, so I asked him, 'Who had a little lamb?' To which he responded 'Larry had a little lamb.'

Do you see why I love my job?

For the record, I'm hot. I was working with a little boy with Autism today and he burst out, 'Miss Kristy is so hot!' Oh so good for my self esteem.

Snow Shoeing

We didn't take pictures, but we certainly had fun. This Saturday Mom, Dad, and I went up the Warm Springs Creek trail and tromped through a fresh layer of fallen snow. We tripped over our snow shoes trying to dump snow from the low branches of the trees onto each others' heads and determined that snow shoeing seems to be a better workout than cross country skiing.

Although, as Mom pointed out, when your headed down hill on cross country skiis, it is often an exercise in adrenaline. Toward the end of our tromp in the mountains the snow on the tops of the trees started to slide off and we were surrounded by cascades of falling snow. Beautiful!

I'm not looking forward to snow on the roads as I return to Thompson Falls, but I'm hopeful that there might be enough snow there to see if the Mule Pasture trail (where I've gone running on occasion) is any good on cross country skiis.