Quick Successions: New Mexico Edition

After I returned from Washington DC I had about 36 hours at home. During that time, I exercised, did laundry and rented a car to drive to the annual meeting of the Council of Exceptional Children in St. Louis. The University of Kansas paid for me to rent a car because they have some deal with a rental company. When I got there to pick up my Chevy Malibu they didn't have one. So I took this RAM1500 instead. It was really a good truck to drive. I have never comfortable on a car drive before and I finally was.  Picking up the RAM. Stopping at Sonic on the way home to revel in the fact that I had a RAM.  The view of Busch stadium from my hotel room. Walking to the conference. Better view of the arch. I had been inside before so I didn't do that this time. Decided to take in a Cards game while I was there. They were playing the Reds.  Good game, actually. There were like about 8 home runs. Lots of cheering. Game didn't last too long. Brian ...

It's that time of the year again. The time when I put my life on hold and go to the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Last year, I profiled all of my experience at various AERA meetings. This year, I am going to give a day-by-day accounting. Wednesday, April 6 The conference didn't start until April 8, but that didn't stop me from getting on a plane at 5 a.m. to head to DC. I was slated to present my dissertation at noon during the mentoring session of the International Scholarly Association on Teacher Thinking (ISATT). The ISATT group was really wonderful--educational researchers from Portugal, Spain, China, and the United States in our group. This was amazingly good fun and lots of good meals together over the course of two days. Thursday, April 7 Together with my colleage from Germany, I presented research on preservice teachers uptake of technology during their preparation courses. This presentation occurred during a pre-conferenc...

Hannah and I want to go to LegoLand. So we got out the calculator and the Internet and priced out for a grand total of just under $4,000. No dice. We will never get there. I was really sad and so I started to see what people did to make it more affordable and I found out that in Kansas City there is a LegoLand Discovery Center. Not LegoLand, but an affordable experience. So I bought tickets and we went to Crown Center in Kansas City. I was very clear with her that this was not the amusement part and I did not intend for it to be a substitute experience in any way--just something fun to do. She was excited and was very well behaved. We rode the rides and saw a 4-D movie and she played all afternoon. Then we went and got food.  Here is she is riding the Harry Potter Lego ride. Taking all Saturday for the Lego Discovery center meant that we couldn't color eggs until Easter Sunday. Hannah didn't mind at all. She did a really good job minding the eggs and the colors turn...

Since I have been in Kansas I have worked over Spring Break. The first year I went back to Utah to work on a grant. During the second one, I ran a research project and wrote a paper for publication. For the third, last year, I went into work every day but St. Patrick's Day writing papers, working on a grant proposal for a class, also and doing a book chapter proposal. This year, I decided to take the week off. The whole week. Read on, to see how it went. Monday--I had a meeting in the morning with a scholar from Germany that I am presenting with at a conference in a couple of weeks. Afterward, we went to the zoo in Kansas City. I bought the expensive tickets so we could ride the tram, the train, the boat, carousel, and the sky safari. All were fun, but it was really packed. We took lunch with us and save some money on food, but did pick up some ice cream and some funnel cake on the way out. Monkey at the zoo. On the carousel.  View from the sky safari. Tuesda...

The program came out for AERA. Here are my program participations for this year. The conference is in Washington DC. There are about 20,000 education scholars that meet every year and it is more difficult to get into than other conferences in my field. I have been going since 2007 and this is the first time we have had the conference in DC. Hannah was invited to a pirate birthday party at the East Lawrence Recreation Center. She dressed the part. They made treasure maps and played some games and ate cake. It was a good party.  I had two articles come out within a few days of each other. One of the journals already sent me a hard copy. It still looks good to see my name in print.  On February 29, it was Leap Year day, but also my half-birthday. I have been trying to get people to take this up as a legitimate celebration for a long time and it just hasn't come together. This year we went to McDonalds to celebrate and Hannah wanted to make me a c...

I traveled a lot in January and February by myself because of work, but Hannah and I agreed that she could come to Indiana with me to visit my sister and her family right before President's Day. She was really excited to play with her cousins.  Here she is close to tears in the Indianapolis airport, not wanting to leave. When she went through security her little lip was quivering and she secured the compassion of the TSA officer and he gave a sticker. It was nice of him, but it didn't work. When I got home from all my traveling (I had been about 10, 000 miles since December) I was pretty tired and I canceled a lot of my schedule and just stayed home to nap and catch up on my writing. At night, Hannah still lets me rock her to sleep and here is a photo of her capturing how we both felt. This last Friday was pajama day at preschool. The kids dressed in their pajamas and brought their sleep toys to show the class. Then they made pancakes for a snack. I had the all...

Well, the rest of Christmas Break was busy. It was cold and snowy, I went to Indianapolis to visit my sister and her family and then a week later I went out west again to do dissertation research. Since then, the semester had started and I have been traveling around quite a bit particularly on the East coast. I have not been taking pictures really either. Hannah did manage to have her first dental appointment. She go a cleaning and they showed her how to floss. She did a really good job of sitting still in the chair.  She goes to a preschool that brought in a puppeteer as a fundraiser and so I took her to the show and then we went to lunch at Arby's. The show was fun, but it was more fun to watch Hannah watch the show.  I have been writing my dissertation and I am about 100 pages in. That's probably about halfway through the writing. The study is done. The data are analyzed. It's really just a matter of getting the document written. I was told that the ha...