Maybe we should send her to a Mexican boarding school?

We were a little concerned about how well our daughter would learn the subjects, like math, that are taught to her in Spanish as part of the Spanish Immersion program at her school, but the literature assured us that while kids may fall behind in these subjects at the beginning, they catch up over time as their fluency improves.

We just had our first report card and parent teacher conference since she started the program.  As it turns out, she is excelling in all the subjects she is learning in Spanish, but during the English half of the day, she goofs off and doesn't complete any of her work.  Hmm.

Close Call

Last night, while I was reading bedtime stories to my three kids, my one-year-old climbed up the ladder to the top bunk of his older siblings' bed and dived off.  Instead of landing on the hardwood floor, he landed right on top of a pillow that happened to be in the middle of the room instead of on the bed where it belonged.  Tonight, story time moved into the living room.

Rapping the Scriptures

My three-year-old was recently assigned to recite a scripture as part of the annual children's program at church. I conquered the daunting task of teaching such a tiny kid a scripture by getting him to say it with rhythm like a nursery rhyme--or an unusually spiritual rap song. And I added a couple hand gestures.

While practicing at home, he frequently sang the scripture with the enthusiasm of a young rap star.  I wasn't sure how this would go over--I hoped his extreme cuteness would compensate for his lack of reverence and the fact that he had absolutely no idea what the scripture meant.  But at church, he recited the scripture brilliantly and with an unusual dose of dignity.
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Building Patios: Not Recommended

We made a lot of patios this summer.  We're pretty much patio experts now, since we have made one of almost every kind of patio in our yard.

There is a flagstone patio, surrounding a firepit:

A square paver patio:

An enormous brick patio, now covering a vast area that the previous owner had covered with asphalt which had long since decayed, making a cracked mess that would be hard to remove and leaving the ground unlikely to successfully grow anything:

And a recycled concrete patio (that isn’t quite finished.  We will paint the pieces to look like flagstones and plant thyme in between them in the spring.):

Why the great hodge podge of outdoor flooring options in one yard?  Well, we have tried to keep these projects inexpensive by salvaging whatever free or super-cheap materials we could encounter but we just couldn't conjure up enough free/cheap products of any one specific kind to cover a yard so unreasonably huge as ours.  We took whatever we could get. 

Free Stuff

• Flagstones, from a vendor who gave away the specimens unworthy of sale for free
• Concrete slabs, from a new house down the street where the construction crew installed a new driveway and then determined that the driveway was too steep and ripped the whole thing out a few days later.  They were happy to bring the pieces to our house instead of having to haul them to the dump. I have no idea how they fixed the steepness problem, since they had to connect the garage on the hill to the street somehow.  Their new driveway looks exactly the same as the mistake driveway to me.

Cheap Stuff

• Previously used brick pavers, from various people who tore out their patios and sold the bricks on ksl.com. We had to be sure to mix up the batches, since they were all different colors, to give the patio a look of intentional mixed tone instead of a look of "oops, we ran out of this color brick and finished the patio with this color."
• Used railroad ties, from a real railroad. Using real railroad ties is controversial, because of their creosote content.  Most of the sources we researched considered exposure problems as most likely to occur when you are cutting and handling the ties, not after you have them in place, so we used gloves when we worked with the ties.

Full Price Stuff (Even we aren't resourceful enough to get everything at a discount.)

• The gravel and sand layered under the patios
• The square pavers  (If we had tried hard enough, we could probably have bought these pavers used from ksl, too, but we wanted to make a patio that could be used as a chess board, so we needed two different colors, exactly 12"x12", so buying used was more complicated.)

So, now that we have suffered the torture of paving our land in so many ways, do I have any lessons learned for the unlucky Googler who lands at this blog when they are really trying to find a legitimate do-it-yourself website? Sure. I am happy to throw out some advice.

• My first bit of patio-building advice is the similar to the advice I give to anyone who asks me about remodeling*: Don't build a patio.  Seriously, there are big advantages to paying someone to pour a concrete patio instead of doing it yourself.  Yes, doing it yourself is cheaper, but still, probably not as cheap as you expected.  Also, concrete makes a smooth surface that is useful for all kinds of activities.  Flagstone and recycled concrete won’t come out perfectly smooth and even our brick patio has some very subtle waviness to it.  If you want concrete to be prettier, you can buy a stamp for $15 and a can of cement die for about $25.  (We stamped and stained the walkway to our front porch.)
• Verify that your assistant is at least two years of age.  (Check birth certificate documentation, if necessary.)  My assistant did not meet this important age guideline, resulting in a variety of inefficiencies. He enjoyed working on the brick patio with me because up until the moment I finished laying all the brick, it was the world's largest sandbox. I was smoothing and laying brick in small 4 foot x 4 foot sections at a time, leaving the rest of this vast area for him to play in.  He did not want to play in sand that clearly was of no interest to me.  He only wanted to dig in whatever little square of sand I had recently smoothed.  Also, he interrupted me every few minutes demanding to be held, fed, or diapered.
• We followed the rules and layered gravel and sand under our paver and brick patios, but found that this was not a good method for the recycled concrete patio.  The huge, heavy concrete slabs had to be moved with a rented bobcat, and they slid all over the place when my husband dropped them on the gravel.  He ended up having to remove all of the gravel before he could place the slabs.  (During this process, he tipped over the bobcat and broke our fence.  Fortunately, he was fine and so was that expensive machine, and we found some spare pieces of fence left over from when it was installed to replace the broken parts of the fence.)

*Don't remodel.

Family Photos at the Great Salt Lake

The Great Big Group Photo

Just My Little(r) Family

My Parents

(See where we got our good looks?)

My Siblings (Plus Sibs-in-Law)

Nieces and Nephews

First Time Repelling

I am surrounded by rocks. I live in a valley of the Rocky Mountains, just north of red rock desert.  A co-worker pointed out once that personality tests measuring impulsivity, based on questions like whether you had tried so-called “extreme sports” don’t work too well in Utah because everyone here does those things. With so many rocks and mountains around, almost everyone here has thrust themselves off of one or two in a few different ways.

But there are exceptions.  I have met people who have lived here their whole lives without ever even skiing. Fortunately, I have had many opportunities to ski.  Still, I had never tried repelling—at least, not on a real mountain instead of a gym climbing wall.

I recently remedied that. We went to Pete’s Rock, a 110 foot cliff located right where urban Salt Lake City meets Mount Olympus. Since I like to stay alive, we went with professional trainers.

It actually wasn’t too scary, because you repel down with your back toward the ground, so you can’t see exactly how high up you are. 

Kindergarten: The Year in Pictures

My daughter's kindergarten teacher sent all the parents a CD of pictures from class. How cool is that?

August

September

September

October

October

October

November

November

November

December

January

February

February

February

April

May

May

May

May

May

May

Kind of flattering that she made a picture of me--most of the kids made toys and animals and flowers