DECEMBER - And then it was BTS. (RUN... save yourself!!) 5 of 5

Whew! Made it through report cards this month... Aaron's favorite time of year and mine too! (NOT! ...to use the favorite 90's phrase). Luckily, Aaron has helped me build a report card comment generator in Excel that I've been able to use to help speed up the process. It can be incredibly time consuming to write personalized paragraphs for 53 students and we don't have the comment codes that middle and high school teachers get to use. This allows me to communicate personalized information about each child and reduces the time needed to generate these comments. Each time I use it I think of new ways to improve it. I find it easy to use, but it is not super user friendly for those that are not technologically savvy. I would like to make a version that would be more user friendly, but just haven't devoted the time to figuring out how. Anyone wanna help? :)

This year we celebrated Christmas in Walla Walla. We enjoyed homemade tamales with my family and made it out to an ugly sweater party. How do we look?

After Christmas we headed up to Vancouver, B.C. to meet with Aaron's lomg lost brother Brock ;). We had been to Vancouver before, but had a much better experience this time around. We stayed at the Sandman in on Davie St. and were able to enjoy a 23 story view from the balcony. The hotel was walking distance to many eateries and shopping. It also had a nice little gym and steam room. Our first night there we enjoyed dinner at Moxie's. Afterward we walked around town and took in some music from a cover band, but left soon after a creepy looking guy kept trying to follow us around the bar.

Mmmm....peach bellini

The next day we met Brock, Emily and the kids at the Vancouver Aquarium located in Stanley Park. Aaron and I would like to go back and explore the park a bit more.

While at the aquarium we took in our first 4D movie. We watched the Polar Express and it was quite the experience. The seats shook as the train barreled across the screen, and water splashed us as the train plummeted into a half frozen lake. It was a whole new way to experience a movie and we would definitely watch a 4D movie again.

Unfortunately, the next day Aaron had a full blown cold, which for him is severely dibilitating. :) We stayed around the hotel and ventured out for a walk around lunch time, but quickly came back as Aaron's symptoms worsened. We made our way back home the next day (Jan. 31), and spent the night in as Aaron nursed his cold.