The Space Center

Yesterday, we accompanied our friends to the Space Center in Pleasant Grove. Travis, Colby, and Rob had been there multiple times growing up. I had only been there once in sixth grade. We signed up for a mission simulation aboard the U.S.S. Phoenix and we each had a different job/title for that mission. I was in charge of operations, which was in charge of communications and my favorite, transporting people and things on and off the ship. Travis was the engineer, of course. :)

Our mission was to save hostages from this evil guy, and stop him from destroying another ship. My favorite part was when our captain, Colby, just ordered Rob to blow up the bad guy's ship 20 minutes into the mission. The people running the simulation didn't expect that, and though they complimented us for our quick thinking, reset the simulation and asked us to think of another way to handle it. The whole mission was about two hours long. It was so much fun, and we won!

Eight Months Down...

Only one month to go! I'm currently 36 weeks, and it's hard to believe that after waiting so long, our little one will be here so soon! Everything is still checking out fine as my doctor appointments are now weekly. To be honest, though I'm very excited, I'm also really nervous. Travis and I took our 5 hour prenatal class last Saturday; it was very informative, but left me wondering how I can do this!

I'm so grateful for the baby showers that have been thrown for us. We are so blessed to have wonderful family and friends who are willing to help us prepare for this new addition to our family. Now if we can only think of a name for this little guy!

Fireworks!

It's been kind of stormy this last week, and even though we had rain off and on, we still had a great Independence Day. We spent some time at the Balloon-Fest with Travis's parents. Some of the balloons were really cool, but unfortunately it was too windy for the balloons to actually take off, so they ended the show early.

In the evening we had a barbecue with my family and enjoyed fireworks. This year, the state decided to legalize some types of aerial fireworks that were illegal in the past. My sister decided to surprise us and actually had one for us to try! This was obviously our first time launching one like this- growing up all we had were those little street fireworks, like this one:

My sister set the mega-firework out a bit further into the street, lit it, and ran for cover. It shot high up above our heads and exploded! It was amazing! Travis said it felt like he was in Paraguay again. :)

As the night went on, more and more of our neighbors were launching loud aerials. Baby decided he didn't like the sound very much and kept jumping. I finally had to go inside. But it was so cool to see so many more aerials this year. Travis then spent the next hour or so playing Dr. Mario with my siblings while I calmed baby down. It was such a fun, exciting fourth of July!

A Little Domesticity

I have quite a ways to go in my transition to motherhood, but I have been able to do a couple of things to help me get a feel for the whole "stay-at-home-mom" thing. A couple weeks ago my mom and I canned homemade peach-raspberry jam. It's a recipe from one of my wonderful sister-in-laws, and Travis and I love it. In fact, Travis couldn't wait to try it so we opened a jar and had some that night before it even had a chance to cool in the fridge. It was scrumptious! The next day I made homemade bread to go along with it.

Travis and I have also been gardening (with what little space we have). This year we tried growing lettuce which turned out pretty good! It was great being able to go out back and pick our salads for dinner. Unfortunately, we grew too much and weren't able to eat it all before it turned bitter. This is just another learning experience. But it was sure great while it lasted! We're also growing tomatoes, peppers, cilantro, basil, peas, beans, carrots and asparagus. We want to be able to make our own salsa with as much homemade ingredients as possible. Even though, ironically, I'm not a big fan of salsa, but Travis loves it.

The History of Engineering Design

There are a lot of different fields within mechanical engineering, but the one that I'm most interested in is engineering design. This last spring term, a professor at BYU sponsored a research project looking at historical trends in engineering design publications. I applied and was selected to be on the team of three.

Basically, I wrote a multi-threaded scripted to gather data from the Library of Congress. We then analyzed the data and identified some major trends in engineering design publications. We created a video (below) to show our findings. The video's not the best quality, but I only had a week to do all the filming (with an inexpensive camcorder and no external microphone... Sorry!), get the photos, put in all the effects with the graphs, and do all the editing. But I still think it turned out pretty well:



(It looks our blog layout is cutting off the edge of the video... Sorry! You can also watch it on YouTube here.

In all, we obtained over 150,000 books published on the topic of engineering design, but only about 100,000 of them had a known publication date and a publication language. I built a quick data viewer that uses Google's Charts API to quickly show the results, accessible at http://loc.travisvanderson.com.

It was a really fun project to work on, and I really learned a lot!

Anderson Reunion

Every two years, one of Travis's siblings will take a turn in hosting a reunion. This year, his oldest brother Chad and his family planned the get together in Flagstaff, Arizona. It was such a nice, relaxing weekend as we spent time catching up with everyone and their families.

We visited, played games, ate delicious food, and even enjoyed a hike. Well, okay, the hike was a little difficult for me (it would've been for you too if you were hiking 30 weeks pregnant in the desert...), but I made it! I was so proud of myself afterwards.

At the next reunion, we'll finally have a kid we can contribute to the rest of the cousins! Though I doubt he'll be playing Barbies with them...

A Great Four Years

After four years of teaching, I officially quit my job. It still hasn't hit me emotionally, which is strange because I always get depressed at the end of each school year. But I guess I've just been too focused on the reason why I'm quitting, than what I'm actually saying goodbye to (if that makes any sense...). I'm sure it'll hit in the next week, or in August when everyone's going back to school without me.

I have been so blessed to work at such a FANTASTIC school, with wonderful students and a faculty/staff that can't be beat anywhere else. 

My classroom quickly became quiet and lifeless. I hate empty classrooms, they make me feel so...empty!

I suppose my new classroom will be my home as I go from 250 kids to just 1. :)