If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

The birds were abundant Sabbath afternoon on the back porch, especially cardinals and chickadees.
They've started coming to the window feeder above the kitchen sink too. It's really fun to see the birds come and land right in front of your face.

Saturday night, the gymnasts all came together to show off their skills in a performance. Emmylou, Renee, Jacquelyne, and Amber are ready to start the show.


All of the teams from across the conference, as well as SAU's Gym-Masters lined up on the mats and turned toward the flag while Christen sang the national anthem.



I got some snacks to sell as concessions to make money for our Junior class. Josh helped me the whole time and we were able to sell almost all of our food. It looks like we made about 3x what we spent on supplies, so that's great!

Highland's Gymnix team toward the end of their routine. Each school or group got to perform a routine at the beginning of the show.

It's fun to see the Highland (& Pisgah) students perform with the Gym-Masters. Two of our students that came back as part of their team were Alex (left, top) and David (right, top).



This was the Gym-Masters' "war" routine. The green and gray "armies" tried to one-up each other and pushed each other back and forth on the mat. You can see that in this picture, the gray army was temporarily higher, and therefore stronger than the green.

Bekki, Chantel, Jared, and Kim watching the show.






The aerial silks routines are pretty cool. Leah (SAU) did a routine by herself that led into the Gym-Masters' last routine. In this picture, she had "tied" herself up by wrapping the silks around herself several times, then fell toward the floor.



I helped host a baby shower for Andy & Bekki on Sunday morning. The baby shower spread - Becky made sticky buns, Janelle made muffins, Nikie brought fruit, and I got all the paper stuff and drinks. We're becoming the unofficial shower committee on campus.

All the colored tissue and bags were pretty in the sunlight from the window.






This is Bekki and Andy reacting to the pacifiers I got them. I had called them corks, which they thought was funny. They got a lot of really nice gifts, including a high chair, pack-'n-play, carrier, and lots of other cool stuff.

Gabby and Becky toward the end of the shower. Can you tell we need a home leave?









Bekki is due on March 6 (although I secretly hope the baby's born on my birthday, three days late) and Chantel is due March 26. Their husbands are cousins and they're both having girls.









We finished up watching the fourth day of Winter X Games competition tonight with the snowboarding Superpipe competition through our 2D snow goggles. I don't think it improved the picture quality.

This is how I feel about the stupid robber. When Ryan and I play one-on-one, we play that you can hold 9 cards in your hand before the robber can take half away if a 7 is rolled. When you roll twice per turn, you accumulate cards pretty quickly. We rolled several 7s in the course of our two games and lost the cards pretty quickly too.

I can tell a couple of things from this picture. 1) It's too late to be playing a second round of Settlers. 2) Gotta stop feeding grain to my sheep!