Happy Thanksgiving!

We:
     -Survived Black Friday
     -Accomplished a lot of our Christmas shopping
     -Spent a fun Saturday night at Cafe Rio and Dairy Queen
     -Caught up on Biggest Loser
     -Had a delicious Thanksgiving Dinner!

Picture Time!


Checking the temperature of the turkey. Okay, it was more like a turkey loaf but I still didn't want a nasty under-cooked turkey loaf. Plus, who wants a 14 pound turkey for two people?

I can't remember what this face was about. 

But he is the pro at making mashed potatoes. De-li-cious!

Turkey, green bean casserole, rolls, and "sparkling" 7-up.

Mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and gravy. 

No pictures of the banana cream pie but it was also delicious! We hope your Thanksgiving was as fun and delicious as ours!

Thankful

Today I am thankful that--
1. My Teacher Work Sample will be finished by the end of the week.
2. I only have tomorrow left this week of school. Thank you Utah for giving Wednesday off for Thanksgiving break too!
3. That by the end of this week, the craziness of Black Friday will be over and life will get a little more back to normal in the lives of the Clarks.

Two Posts in One Evening?!

I just figured out that Blogger is like Gmail in that it saves your posts as drafts in case of moments like I just had. Why are things like this always trial and error? Lame. I did just grab the camera so here are some pictures from our recent adventures.

The Big Red Barn. Jeff's mission president owns the place so we went down and went on a hayride out to a pumpkin patch and got out pumpkin! It was tons of fun!

Spanish Fork Reservoir. One Sunday after church we went up to the reservoir and had a picnic and then walked around. It's gorgeous up there. You could see over the valley and the leaves changing.

Happy Halloween! Mummies and Coffins for dinner! Yum! Sadly we had zero trick-or-treaters.

The Comings and Goings of the Clarks

UGH people! I was just in the middle of the most epic update for you guys and my computer cord had apparently become unplugged from my computer and it died! This raises so many questions.

Why is my computer battery so awful? Answer: Probably because I let it die way too often.
 Why does Blogger not have the feature like Gmail where it saves my posts as drafts every 5 seconds? Answer: No idea.

Where has the time gone? Answer:

~Student Teaching-- I cannot believe that I will be done with my student teaching so soon! It has been great/frustrating/exciting/exhausting/fun/full of laughs. I will miss my students a lot, even the one who argues with me just for the sake of arguing, the one who cannot stay in his desk for more that 3 minutes for the life of him, and all of third period PE. I will especially miss the intention and unintentional debates that we have because they feel like can actually say what their opinion is. I (most days) will miss when they come into my room during lunch because it is warm and the days in the middle of November that we opened all of the windows and plugged in the fans because the classroom was 800 degrees. I will not miss the majority of third period PE and their inability to stay on the same team or listen in general but even they have their own moments of being endearing.

~Work-- Can you say holiday season and Black Friday? We can and Jeff has been working so hard to get the store ready for Black Friday and everything else. He even pulled an all-nighter last week. Luckily, once BF is over it seems like it will get a little better. The employees that are on his team all really like him and tell me every time that I come into the store how glad they are to be on his team.

~Family-- Jeff's parents came up a couple of weekends ago and it was so fun to see them and catch up. We did a ton of talking and went up to Riverton to can apples and applesauce. We are so glad that they came up to stay with us for the weekend!

~Scouts-- We are over the 8 year old scouts in the ward and they are hilarious! It's fun to have a calling together and they all think Jeff is the coolest person they have ever seen.

Student Teaching

I am teaching at Springville High School this semester and so far it has been a lot of fun. I teach Health and help with PE/Jogging/Advanced Conditioning classes. Today was my first day teaching the whole lesson in Health on my own and of course I have a cold and felt awful but nothing that a Sprite from the drive-thru at the Mexican restaurant on the corner and a huge pack of crackers can't fix. I think it went pretty well. It was about Communication and we had a lot of fun. My mentor teacher was still in the back of the classroom but she didn't say anything during class and made the students ask me their questions. It was crazy actually being the teacher and I am so excited for when my mentor teacher doesn't have to observe anymore. I really really like her but it will be nice when it really is my own classroom. The students were pretty good but I will say that we will be changing the seating chart next class. Mostly just boys and girls flirting with each other all throughout class. I guess there's not a whole lot you can do about the flirting but they did take notes and participate and for the most part they were very respectful of each other. More to come, especially since I promised Randi who is on her mission good stories so I might as well let all of you in on the good stuff too. Oh and I get to go to a state-wide workshop tomorrow which I am really excited about.

Oh and I definitely bought a Spirit shirt both to show some school pride and to not have to get completely dressed up on Fridays. We have gone to 2 of their football games and let's just hope they improve.

*I would have included a first day of school picture but Jeff leaves before I do in the mornings and this morning was not pretty when I was feeling awful before school so I didn't let him take one. Maybe a second day of teaching picture will be posted soon. 

Too much to update

I have been an awful blogger but I will eventually update about the rest of our summer. I'll just give you a quick breakdown...

July...
-We went to Idaho over 4th of July weekend to hang out with Cauley and Jami and their family at Jami's parents house. No pictures because I'm lame and we were too busy eating and playing anyway. It was so much fun to hang out with them up there. AND it was even more fun because they didn't know that we were surprising them by coming down and surprising them a couple weeks later!

-Hayley came up and stayed with us for 2 weeks! All I can say is FUN!

-We went home for almost three weeks! Our nephew Dallin got baptized and we were planning on coming home anyway so we decided to surprise everyone. Hayley, Jeff, and I headed home and stayed at my parent's house since they knew and the baptism wasn't for a couple of days so we didn't want anyone to see us on that side of town. Then we surprised them at the baptism and stayed with Jeff's parents for the week. We had so much fun!! Again, lots of food and lots of fun.

After that we headed back over to my parent's house where we took a quick trip up to Sedona and then spent the rest of the week hanging out and having fun!

On our way back up to Utah we stopped in Prescott and saw more of Jeff's family. It was a great trip and we had a really hard time coming back home afterwards.

St. George Vacation (pt.2)

Okay, we had to do this in two post in order to: 1. Break it up to prevent boredom, and 2. Keep the blog from self-imploding due to photo overload.

Sunday, we got up and went to church. It happened to be the one across from the temple. It was Fathers' Day so it was cute to see all the little kids get up and sing. After church, we changed, ate lunch and then headed back to the temple. It is so white. We thought it was just because it was against the red rocks but it really was so white!

Then we headed off to the St. George Tabernacle. It is so fun to see all of the historic buildings.It was super windy.

Then it was off to the Brigham Young Winter House. The man giving the tour was hilarious and you could tell that he loved what he was doing.

Then it was off to the Jacob Hamblin home. On the way there Jeff kept trying to figure out if he was related. Turns out that he is Jeff's 4th (or 5th) great-grandfather.

Pictures while walking around....

Monday was our last full day so we went hiking at Snow Canyon park where we saw Petrified Sand Dunes...

Lava tubes...

And tons of chipmunks/squirrels that Jefferson continued pointing out to me. He has great peripheral vision...I guess it's the running back in him.

Later we went to Pizza Hut for dinner. Remember that Blue Bunny Ice Cream parlor that we were all so excited about? Well it closed down but we took a picture of it anyway.

But we got over it and got Blizzards at Dairy Queen. Who can complain when you've got a Blizzard?

Then it was time for...dun dun dun...the Little Mermaid! It was great and there were all of these cute little girls dressed up and so excited. We couldn't take pictures so here's a before shot. The show didn't start until 8:45, probably because they wanted to wait for it to get dark and didn't get over until 11:15ish. It was way past our bedtime so, needless to say, there were many kids being carried out when it was all said and done.

We left Tuesday morning but not without one more of our beloved waffles. I would say excuse the lack of brushed hair, makeup, or real clothes but that's how we showed up to breakfast every morning so I would really be lying to you if I made it seem like Tuesday was a fluke.

You can probably tell based on massive photo overload, but we had a fantastic time and are so glad that we got to have a vacation (finally, for Jeff).

St. George Vacation (pt. 1)

We're back from St. George and wishing we were still there. I guess that just means that we had an amazing time, which we did. It was a total blast. Here are a few (or more than a few) pictures from the trip...

We left on Friday morning very excited...

and stopped at Cove Fort on the way down. It's one of those places that we always saw the sign for but never had time to stop and actually walk around so we took a detour. It was awesome and the missionary that showed us around was from Gilbert and his daughters were in the same Singles' Ward as Jeff. Small world.

  Once we got to St. George we checked into the hotel and were pleasantly surprised that they had just put in a breakfast instead of sending us to the Denny's with a coupon. We headed out to the outlets after that and walked around the shops. Jefferson found this hat in the Cowboys and Indians shop. Then it was off to dinner at Chili's. After Chili's, we watched part of How to Train Your Dragon and then went swimming. Our hotel had both an indoor and outdoor pool and it was always the "happening" place to be.

Saturday morning, we went to the Tuacahn Saturday Market where they had local artists and other random booths. They had a Native American group that did a few dances. Then we got a GIGANTIC snow cone. There's a stand by our house but we haven't gone to it yet so we decided it was about time. Oh, we also got this thing that you stick into lemons, limes, oranges and when you squeeze them, the juice comes out of its little spout. It's like when you buy the lemon juice things at the store but with a real lemon, and we got it for free just for listening to this man's presentation.

Then we went to the Biggest Loser Fitness Ridge Resort and took a tour. It was pretty cool. They had a guest that was staying there for 19 weeks. He was basically doing the show but on his own.

After the Biggest Loser we went to the Johnson Dinosaur Discovery Site where they found dinosaur tracks. We are so glad that we went on the tour with a tour guide because if we had done the self-guided tour it probably would have taken five minutes and we wouldn't have really seen anything.

They had a room where you could make origami so we did. I opted for the easy one while Jefferson went with the more difficult challenge. We were not leaving until he got it done the right way.

Funny story...Jeff's parents had told us that they knew of a good Mexican restaurant. When we called them to find out, they were out so we just picked a place to eat. When they called us back, it ended up being the same place. What are the odds?

When we got back to the hotel it was more swimming. It was so nice to be where it was warm enough to actually swim outside even though the pool was cold and we went in the hot tub after about five minutes.