Today we learn about the letter A:

 

ARIZONA

My dear, sweet baby sister took a teaching position down in a little town called Eager, Arizona. She is teaching 8th grade Language Arts and absolutely loves it! It was a hard decision to make because she had a 30 hr/wk position here in UT, and Eager is a tiny town in the middle of nowhere. She felt it was where she needed to be, so on Friday, August 5th, myself, mom, dad, and Sav loaded up the vehicles and headed out to Eager! It was an early, early morning…5am to be exact; but watching the sun come up over the hills as we drove through Orderville and Kanab was absolutely breathtaking (so this picture DOES NOT do it justice, I did not have a camera so this was taken with my cheap phone):

We stopped in Page, AZ, to view the Glen Canyon Dam:

Flagstaff was our next stop and it was GORGEOUS! Again, the pics don’t do justice…but the green and the pines and the blue skies and yellow flowers were fantastic!

Then there was an 1.5 hours of Indian Reservations.  I feel badly for them…it was a complete wasteland. There were some pretty rock walls, but mostly just unending desert sand…this lasted until Holbrook, AZ, and then it was another 1.5 hours to Eager/Springerville. SOOOO PRETTY! This is the view from Savannah’s room:

Green fields, rolling green hills full of pines, and horses! I must have told her 100 times in the 24 hours we were there how jealous I was of her. Friday night we went out to eat at a little Mexican place with one of her new roommates, and Saturday was spent helping her get her school room decorated. It was so fun! It was awesome to see her with her very own room and the desks and the posters and the books and…. just everything! That night my mom, dad, and I drove to Flagstaff to spend the night. We took a different route back this time and went through Snowflake. The drive is WONDERFUL! It is soo green and there was so much wildlife! We stopped at the Snowflake temple; pure perfection in my opinion:

Sunday we kept with our taking a different route. We took highway 89 ALT; this took us up to about 8,000 ft with pines all the way up. At several points you can look over and see nothing but hill after hill after hill of dark green pine trees. I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures. I do have pics of our last stop over looking a huge gorge and a very green river underneath; and I can’t for the life of me remember where it is:

  

ART

The Wednesday after our AZ trip I was feeling a little more spunky than usual and decided to make some finger paint for Mason. He LOVED it! I get lonely for adult conversation sometimes…and Mason gets lonely for 2yr old conversation sometimes, so I decided to throw an ‘ART’ party. I invited friends with kids between the ages of 0-5; and let me tell you there are A LOT of them. At one point I think there were nine 3-6 yr old boys in our little playhouse; haha! Activities included:

• a swimming pool
• the hose (it’s more fun for little kids than you would think)
• finger paint
• the playhouse/slide (boys jumping off that thing like crazy)
• toy cars
• crayons/markers/colored pencils
• glitter
• glue
• scissors
• diamonds/stickers
• feathers
• googley eyes
• TONS of different kinds of paper
• cupcakes/popsicles/juice

I had fun! I hope the others did too. One mother told me her son told her on the way home he had a lot of fun with his new friends. I wish I were more like a child; this particular boy had never met any of the other boys who were there before, but within a couple hours…and w/o question, he had made a lot of new friends. Anyway…food for thought. Here are a few pics that one of the moms took:

And as always, thanks for stopping by!