Picnicking

Train Day!

It's been almost 5 years since we celebrated National Train Day. When we visited the AZ Railway Museum a couple months ago, we learned that they were planning to celebrate Train Day early since it gets to be too hot by May (which is the actual date). We decided to head out there to see what they had planned this year. Like last time we went out there on National Train Day (if you click this link, you'll see that Joyce commented on that post), we got to go into several cars that aren't usually open. 

In one of the cars, they had several model trains set up.

This was the kitchen in one of the private cars.

You might not know what's happening here, but I had to take my picture in the reflection of the steps onto one of the private cars. It was some shiny stuff!

My friend Ashley and her kids joined us too!  Here are our kids with Kai and Harper on the seats of the caboose.

 Tyler was showing Kai how to ring the bell on the steam engine.

Trains may not be a passion of Tyler's anymore, but I think there'll always be a place in all of our hearts for trains. It was a big part of his life for a long time, and we'll remember those days fondly forever. 

Some more from Tyler's book

Tyler has been working very hard on the book he's been writing for awhile now. This morning, he asked if he could read me part of it, and I was very impressed by what he read. I asked if I could share the excerpt from the chapter he read me, and he said that was fine. Here is what I copied and pasted directly from his book. I didn't make any corrections or changes to his writing. Enjoy this awesome writing by our EIGHT year old.....

BABOOMBA! 

1:42am Wednesday Dec. 18

 I was woken up by Winston in the middle of the night. “Tyler, light”

“What”

“Light, coming from the woods”

“Ho Winston, did you really find another galaxy tree?” Winston shrugged. I looked out of the tent into the leafless forest. Shure enough I saw a flickering light in the woods.
“Want to go check it out” He said.

“Yeah, let me get dressed” I pulled my parka over my shirt and put on my jeans. After I put on my boots and beanie Winston and I went into the woods. When we got closer to the light it moved away. “That’s no galaxy tree” said Winston
“It looks like fire” I said.

“Yeah” said Winston. When we got to the light we saw it was a muscular green creature with a long tail. Its tail was on fire and it looked like it was about six feet tall.

PICTURE HERE: #4 large  “Don’t move Winston” I whispered. The big creature’s ears started moving. It turned and looked at us then it made a terrifying sound like this” “WLAAAAAAAA!” Then it started charging with its tail in front of it.

I amid my pocket knife at its hart. It stopped and tried to bite me. But instead it bit a tree. When it bit the tree its tail hit where it bit. There was a faint sizzling sound. “I think we should run now” I said

“Your right” We got about ten feet away then the tree exploded blowing the tree and the creature to pieces. Dirt was flying every ware. The only remains of the creature and the tree were some shattered bones, green skin, blood, bark, and wood. “What was that?” I said as I brushed dirt off my legs.

“I don’t know” said Winston. “But whatever it was it was shore loud.”

   8:52 am Thursday, Dec. 19

“Winston, I’m tired of sleeping in that crammed little tent.” I said. “Don’t you think we should start to build the last wall of our house?”

“Shore” answered Winston. “Wait, how about I build the wall and you build the roof?”

“Ok” I said. Winston and I climbed the cliff. Picture #5 large.

At the top of the cliff we looked at our sack of wood. There were only eleven pieces of wood left. “uh ho” said Winston, “looks like were running low on resources.”

“Yeah, speaking of that how many nails do we have?” I said. Winston checked the nail box. “We only have about a hundred left.” Winston climbed down the cliff                        

Some trapeze--catching new tricks

I've started catching my "Turks Trick"--aka, the cutaway half. I've caught it a total of 3 times now, and twice in a row on Saturday! It's such a fun trick! Here are the two videos from that day. 

Here is the second one from my Go-Pro's point of view.

I found a new app that turns photos into cartoons...here is a picture from Saturday.

Gigantic grapefruit

It's citrus time! We have grapefruit and lemons for days. Unfortunately, our oranges and tangerines didn't come in this year (some tangerines, but very few), so we're stuck with just two trees full of our least favorite of the 4 fruit trees. Grandma Jean was over the other day to pick grapefruit, and Ava was helping her. Ava spotted the most gigantic grapefruit up in the center of the tree. Grandma didn't think she could get to it, but Ava proved her wrong. In her bare feet and jammies, she climbed right up that tree and picked this big old piece of fruit. And....here is why we love winter in Arizona. 

Cirque du Soleil Varekai

For an early birthday present, my mom brought me to the Cirque du Soleil Varekai show that was in town. We had great seats, and the show was pretty awesome. The costumes, music, and talent were pretty amazing. This was my first Cirque show, and hopefully, not my last. I would love to see one of the shows in Vegas that has more trapeze--I think Mystere is the one that I need to see next. I didn't take many pictures because I didn't want to take my eyes off the stage. A show like this really can't be shown in photos, so you'll have to take my word for it. 

The finale of the show was a bunch of guys in costumes that looked like fire, flying off of giant Russian swings. It was fantastic.

Mom and I took the light rail to downtown Phoenix, which was a fun adventure. It's such a great way to get downtown, and our tickets to the show served as our light rail ticket so it was free. We'll need to remember that next time we go down for a D-backs game. Thanks to my mom for a fun pre-birthday night out!

Let's go for hike

On Saturday afternoon, it was another beautiful day, so we decided to go for a hike up Wind Cave at Usery Mountain. Last time we tried hiking Wind Cave as a family, Ava made it about 1/4 of a mile before she said she was tired. She did much better this time! She was a little trooper, and hiked the entire way without stopping. It made me think we should try some more hikes as a family. 

 First family picture at the top!

This is such a pretty hike, and it's just minutes from the city. It amazes me every time we do this that we can drive just a few minutes and be out in the desert.

Ava was pretending to throw her hat and lost her balance. I happened to take a picture right as she was starting to fall. Luckily, she caught her balance, but it gave me a minor heart attack. That happened several times during the hike when her footing would slip when climbing up the path. We thought for sure she'd get scraped up knees, but she did great!

Wordless Wednesday

Traveling with students

A big part of my job entails providing leadership training opportunities for students. In February, the U of A offers a weekend conference called the National Collegiate Leadership Conference (NCLC), and this is the second year I've been in charge of brining a group of MCC students. Beth Ann joined me again this year, and we had a great group of students to represent our college. Here are a few fun pictures from the weekend.

We've recently started this I Red campaign, and the conference happened to fall on Valentine's Day, so we all wore our Heart shirts. 

Two of our students, Britanee and Martin, presented 3 different workshops during the conference. Each presented one on their own, and then one together. They did SO well, and I was extremely proud of them. Britanee is a riot (and extremely knowledgable about the women's studies and sociological issues she's passionate about), and Martin is the best Student Government president we've had since I've been at MCC. They're awesome, and I'll be sad to see them move on next year. That's the tough part about my job--just when you get attached to some of the awesome students, they move on to bigger and better things.

The bald guy in the back right was the closing speaker for the conference. He's a marketing person for LeaderShape (the program I coordinate for our colleges each year), and he was by far the best speaker I've heard at this conference. The students were captivated by his talk about social justice. The two best presenters/speakers I heard during the conference were both LeaderShape staff (one was the President), which made me very proud to be part of such a great leadership program. After the session that the president led, I told him that it's LeaderShape that keeps me doing the job that I do. I am getting pretty burned out in my job--planning events for over 10 years has gotten a little old--but each year that I coordinate a LeaderShape Institute, I'm reminded why I do this job. So..it's LeaderShape that keeps me going in this field year after year.

I was very grateful to Beth Ann for driving the second van again this year. We recently lost our two full time people in Student Life at the "main" campus, and it was a little up in the air as to who was going to drive that second van of students. BA stepped in and volunteered, even though she doesn't technically work in Student Life right now.

Here is our group receiving our awards at the end of the conference. These students were awesome, and I enjoyed spending the weekend with them. It keeps me young, while making me feel old all at the same time. I had to find that fine line between giving them some freedom to have fun, but to make sure they didn't do anything stupid. They all wanted to go out in the evenings, and I had to give them curfews and make sure they check in. I think I said "make good choices" jokingly, but seriously, about 20 times. Luckily, they were all great students, and they represented MCC well.

While sitting in some of these workshops, I decided that I'm going to try to present one at the conference next year. All of the workshops are presented by either students or student affairs professionals who submit proposals for presentation ideas. The topic of my presentation is going to be "I believe I can FLY: Leadership and the flying trapeze." So many leadership concepts can be associated with traits that are needed to fly trapeze. I'm excited to see what I can do with it.  Maybe I'll share when it's ready! Stay tuned...