The Bartles

Thanksgiving Celebration

I have and always have had the greatest parents to work with. The reason I have so many great children is because they have so many great parents. My parent helpers have helped me out so very much. I asked Melissa Estes, my room mother and one of my weekly helpers as well, if she had any great ideas for Thanksgiving at school. A few years back I had her older son and she and the St. Johns, and some others cooked a full Thanksgiving dinner for my class. She said, "Why don't we do another turkey dinner again this year?" I asked her if she was sure she wanted to take that much on and in her sweet way she said, "Sure!" She called other moms for help and together they took care of the whole dinner. I planned other activities, but the main one was taken care of. They even made Pilgrim and Indian hats and headdresses. As you can see we all had a great time.

Thanks again mothers for yet another great memory and experience!

Birds

As you read from the last blog, I am having a revolving museum in my room this year. After the reptile and amphibian display, I decided to have birds. This big guy came just before Thanksgiving so it was perfect timing. He was a huge turkey. He rode from Provo in the back seat behind Duane. He could barely fit him into the seat. I asked Duane if he got a lot of strange looks from people going by. They probably wondered why this man had a huge turkey riding in the car behind the driver. Well it was almost Thanksgiving, don't you know. Again, he was much bigger than he looks in the picture. Compare him to the size of the binders on the shelf behind him.

This cute little penguin was a favorite of a few of the students. He was very endearing. We also enjoyed the pheasant.

One of the favorites was our snowy white owl. It was to fun to study the different types of birds with their different types of beaks and feet.

Notice the coot's feet. By studying their feet and beaks you can determine what kind of environment they live in and what type of food they eat.

Reptiles and Amphibians

OK mother, before you read on let me warn you that you probably will want to skip this blog. It is widely known that my mother along with many other females in my family, and that includes me, HATE snakes. I know this is hard to believe but these critters actually lived in my classroom for a couple of weeks. At BYU they have the Bean Museum which has many, many animals of all kinds on display. They have a program where teachers may check out some of the specimans to take to their classrooms so children can get a closer look at these animals. When I went up there in October I checked out my first batch of animals. This year in school we are studying the different classes of animals. Even though this freaked me out, I decided to tell myself that they were dead and they couldn't hurt me and if I did this I would score a lot of points with the children, especially the boys. It worked! They loved it. I invited any teacher to bring in his or her class to see our display. We had many classes visit our display. It was really enjoyed by all. The big lizards were monitor lizards. The yellow one was a skink.

I also had a display of insects, frogs, toads, salamanders, newts, cameleons, and turtle carapaces.

The large turtle shell in the back left was a sea turtle shell. The large one on the right was a land tortoise shell. They were much bigger than they look here.

We had rattlesnakes, cobras, vipers, water mocassins and many others. I had eleven snakes in all. Even though it was hard at first I'm glad I had them because it really gave us all a chance to really examine them up close when we wouldn't have ever had the opportunity to do that otherwise.

Our October Visit to the Bartles

I wanted to share some more pictures of our visit in October of the other 3 grandchildren. This is Tyler doing what he loves to do, climb trees. He has no problem scaling most any tree. This one is in his back yard. He loves to show us when we arrive how high he can climb. There are some pine trees behind their house which are even higher. Tyler isn't at all afraid to climb anything. Two summers ago I took him and Zachary rock climbing and he climbed to the very top. Heights don't bother him a bit.

Our cute little Gavin. He's 23 months here. He's our busy little, affectionate boy. How we love him.

Heidi with Lexi. Heidi thinks Lexi is the cutest thing ever. She's so glad to finally get a niece.

Grandma and Lexi. I'm pretty glad we finally have a girl too.

After The Baptism

After Zachary's baptism all of the family decided to go out to dinner at TGI Friday's. We had good conversations and delicious food. We enjoyed the company we were with. These are good memories.

Zachary with Grandpa. He and Grandpa are buddies.

Zachary has a special place in Grandma's heart. He's a great boy!

Well we were busy and played hard. Can you tell these boys go, go, go all the time? I thought this picture was priceless:)

Baptism Day -2nd Try

OK, I feel stupid. I started this blog days ago and had it done and said post but when I did I was in such a hurry I didn't check it. So today I go to look at it and it wasn't even there. I have been so busy that I'm embarrassed to say I'm months behind in blogging. So I decided I would blog the most important event of the last 4 months which was Zachary's baptism. In case you don't know, Zachary is our oldest grandchild. Well yesterday I put the pictures on but then had trouble getting the text on and then I had to leave so I saved it and then when I checked back this evening it had posted when I didn't mean to post and I already had two comments. I'm embarrassed because it seems I don't know what I'm doing. I apologize for the mistakes. I'm sure some of you reading this think I'm confused as all get out and I can't even explain myself logically. Well anyway, here goes.
On Oct. 24th, 2009 we had a wonderful event in our family. Zachary Todd Bartle, our sweet grandson had his first great mile stone in his life. He chose to be baptized by his father, (our son, Garry). We all met at their stake center along with Heidi, our daughter-in-law's family. Duane gave a very nice talk on baptism and I played the piano. Heidi's mother led the singing. We shared this baptism with another family in their ward, so they also participated with talks and music. It was a very nice day.