Flashback: 2014

I feel like this year has been crazy and that so much has happened, but when I look back at my pictures, it looks like a relatively ordinary year!  I guess it's kind of cool that life, itself, was the big even this year, rather than just doing random cool things!  Either way, 2014 has brought many wonderful blessings and well as huge challenges.  I'm grateful for my Heavenly Father, who has given me so many experiences, good and bad, to learn from and to make life everything it should be!  Here's a little glimpse into my 2014 experience!

January

I remember being a teenager and in my early twenties too, I guess, and being so concerned about my New Year's Eve plans!  I wanted to do fun things with my friends and I wanted to get all fancy with perfect make-up, hair, etc.  Now, that is just not the case, nor has it been for the last several years.  I spent both New Year's Eve and New Year's Day holed up in my bedroom catching up on the previous season of Once Upon a Time on Hulu.  Yes, folks, you read that correctly.  I rang in the New Year by Huluing alone.  And it was awesome.  The following day was both an awesome day and a crappy day.  Jacob and the boys flew back to China on January 2nd and it's always so hard to say goodbye to family you know you won't be able to see for extended periods of time.  I had plans with Scott that day, so I dropped by Nancy's house early in the morning to say goodbye.  Here I am with Josh and Dylan:

I love these sweet boys so much!

The rest of the day was spent at Scott's house!  It's always awesome when you get to set aside an entire day just to have fun with a great friend!  I had decided to make it a theme day and told Scott to be ready to roll with it, which he did.  I decided to make it a Snow White themed day (remember, I'd just spent my life catching up on Once Upon a Time) and I printed off an "invitation" that introduced the theme and, since Snow White has a magic mirror in it, the message was written backwards and had to be read in a mirror.  Scott let me in and then went to his room to put in his contacts.  While he did that, I hustled to put the food I'd brought for the day in the fridge and I set the table with super cute dishes and goblets.  I even had cut holes in apples so that I could put tea lights in them.  It was awesome!!!  Why, why, why did I not take a picture???  Haha! Oh, well!  When he came in, I handed him the invitation, which he immediately started reading until I told him to play along and go read it in the mirror.  He humored me and then it made sense to him. I gave him three options for movies: the original cartoon Snow White, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Mirror Mirror.  We ended up watching Snow White and the Huntsman.  Later, we made apple dumplings and had chicken pot pies for lunch.  All of it was delish!  In the evening, we went to Jumping Jacks for a while.  It didn't exactly go with the Snow White theme, but I feel like playing in bounce houses is always appropriate and can fit with absolutely any theme.  Anyways, it was a really fun day and I was grateful to be able to start off the new year with such a great friend!

A few days later, Nancy and I decided that we needed to do something fun together before going back to work.  We had seen that the Queen Mary had a pretty awesome Princess Diana exhibit and we wanted to make sure we saw it before it closed, so we decided to make that our last hurrah before the end of Christmas Break.  There was SO much cool stuff there!  It didn't even stop with Princess Diana, though.  It even had dresses belonging to Kate, which was way exciting for us!

 Afterwards, we stopped in at the Tea Room for some dessert.  While Nancy and I were there, we found out that you could order a Royal Tea, which included a whole bunch of stuff on one of those fancy tiered trays and Nancy mentioned that it would be cool to do something like that for her birthday some year.  Go ahead and tuck that away for now; we'll revisit it in the March section of this post.  ;)

A couple of days later, I got to go to Disneyland with Jake so we could spend some time together before he went back to Hawaii.  We've been friends for a long time, so it's always nice to get to spend some time together, particularly when he lives so far away for most of the year.

February

February wasn't a super exciting month for me,  I got to take a completely spontaneous trip to St. George, Utah to help my little brother and his family get moved into their new apartment.  That was crazy and fun all at the same time!  When I got there, my nephew was playing hide and go seek and he found the tiniest place in the world to hide!  Haha!  He's so funny!  I love that little guy!

At the end of the month, Scott celebrated his 28th birthday, which of course, meant going on an adventure.  This year we went whale watching and then to a Brazilian restaurant for dinner, since he served his mission in northern Brazil.

It was a fun day!

March

In some ways, March always sucks for me because I always get pink slipped and that always happens in March since the big deadline is March 15th.  Hopefully, someday this will stop and I can just live my life and feel some stability in my employment.  Hopefully, THIS will be the year it will stop.  However, life does go on and I've always been blessed to have my job back...at least in the past few years I have.  Other than that, March was pretty full of events to do!

Being a science teacher was the best because life was crazy full of exploration and learning new things.  It was such a cool experience to see my middle schoolers look at their own cells for the first time, or figure out what genetics really are and how they're affected by them.  This is why teaching is awesome and March is really when crunch time began and we started doing big experiments nearly every week!  So coo!!!

At the beginning of the month, I got to do something fun and sentimental!  I got to go see My Fair Lady at the Candlelight Pavilion with Scott and his mom.  It's sentimental to me because my family went to see Candlelight's production of My Fair Lady on my 16th birthday!  It was just as cool the second time around!

I also got to enjoy spending some time with my sister, which we do not do often enough.

Hunger Games and virgin Pina Coladas!  Yes, please!!!

Mid-month, Daniel and family came to visit and I got to do science time with all 5 of my nephews!  We did a diffusion and osmosis experiment with different shaped gummies!  It was fabulous!

I love getting to explore our amazing world with them!

Ok, flashback to January when I talked about going to the Queen Mary with Nancy.  Now, fast forward to her birthday in mid-March!  We surprised her and took her to the Tea Room for Royal Tea!  It was awesome with those cute little sandwiches and pretty little cakes for dessert!  We even tried caviar for the first time.  Not bad, not bad at all!

I had the opportunity to participate in an awesome program called Hippocrates Circle, which is run by Kaiser hospital.  It's a program that shows middle schoolers what to expect from a career in the medical field and gives interested students an opportunity to be mentored by Kaiser doctors.  It was such a cool experience and I'm glad I got to be a part of it!  The last day of school before Spring Break, we got to go on a little fieldtrip to Kaiser Fontana and take a behind the scenes tour!  We even got to go from one hospital building to another via the secret underground tunnel!  That's right!  Be jealous!  haha!  Each teacher was given 10 students to supervise as we explored the hospital.  Here's my group all gowned up and ready to go into surgery!

Next up: Spring Break!  The first day of Spring Break was spent with Nancy and my parents.  We decided to take the same whale watching trip that Scott and I had taken in February.  It was fun!

I decided that I wanted to go away for Spring Break this year, but I wasn't sure where to go.  Then, I checked my bucket list and discovered that nothing on the Palm Springs portion had been checked off, so I decided to fix that!  I booked a room at the Monroe, which was a pretty cheap hotel, but completely surprised me when I got there!  It was actually SO nice!  Thanks Expedia!  ;)  I mapped out the things I wanted to do and made myself a little itinerary to make sure I got to do it all!

 The Air Museum

 The Arial Tram

 The Forever Marilyn Statue

 Walk of the Stars

 Hike to Tahquitz Falls

 The Living Desert

The Dinosaurs at Cabazon

I was actually able to check off every single thing on my Palm Springs bucket list and more!

April

On April 1st, we went to the second Angel's game of the season!  It was fun to be there AND we all got Mike Trout bobbleheads!

I gotta say, I'm not a huge sports fan, but there's just something about a beautifully manicured baseball field that makes my heart happy!  :)

Ok, I promise I won't blog about every single lab I did with my students, but this one is a MUST!  I taught them about respiration and they did a lab where they monitored their own (human) respiration.  Then, we learned about cold blooded creatures and how their respiration differs from ours.  We did a respiration lab with LIVE goldfish!!!  Don't worry, we didn't hurt any of them.  We put them in a beaker of water inside a larger beaker of water and monitored their breathing as we gradually and gently adjusted the temperature of the water.  In case you're wondering how the goldfish got into the beakers, I totally caught them with my hands!  I don't like gross things and I didn't think I would be able to do it at first, but finally I got the guts to go for it and it worked!  It made me happy that the kids, at least, were impressed by it!  Those little guys are quick and it wasn't always easy to grab them while they swam around in a huge tank!

Here's Franky the fish in his little beaker world!  As soon as we were done with the experiment, we put him back into a big tak with a bunch of his friends.  No little fishies were harmed during this lab! :)

Later in the month, I got to do something I've always wanted to do!  We went to Disney on Ice!  It was so amazing and our seats were fantastic!  What a great night!

Easter was fun this year!  The past couple of years, I'd taken the boys out "egging" where we color paper Easter eggs and leave some sweet treats on the doorsteps of friends and family so they get a surprise when they leave the next morning.  This year I found some super cute ideas on Pinterest to use with Hostess cakes.  So, the boys colored eggs and I assembled the little paper animals!  They turned out super cute!

Sadly, my Disneyland pass expired in April, but not before I could check off the final Disneyland items from my bucket list!  I got my first set of "ears"

and I FINALLY got to eat at Blue Bayou!

I made it a mini-vacation and got a room in Anaheim so I could have two days of adventure!

So, being a science teacher really helped me to unleash the science nerd that's always lived within me and I finally caved and bought a microscope!!!  I know, I know...it's weird to just randomly buy a microscope, but I love it and actually do use it quite frequently (I now have two different types, by the way).  I love being able to show my nephews how amazing our world is and how amazing the works of God really are!

The next weekend, I got to attend a medical school fair with the Hippocrates Circle kids and there were so many cool demonstrations!  We even got to dissect sheep hearts, which are very similar to human hearts!  It was the coolest!!!

And the next week, we attended the Hippocrates Circle graduation and got to see all of our students successfully complete the program.  Here they are with Aquanetta Warren, the mayor of Fontana!

May

As I looked through my folder of May pictures, I realized that it's almost exclusively pictures from all the cool labs I got to do with my students!  I'll spare you from them...mostly! 

There were a few family related things that happened!  My mom retired!!!  Yay for her!

 Then, for Mother's Day, we kids got together and bought her this.  My mom is funny!  She knows she's hard to shop for, so she likes to give little hints.  For example, this conversation took place shortly before we decided to get her this ring.
Mom: (showing me a picture of this ring in an ad) Look at this!  Isn't it pretty?
Me: Um, sure, Mom!
Mom: It has 5 spots for names and there are 5 of you kids, just a thought. (she hands me the ad and moves on)
So, we were confident that she would like it, and she did!  :)

Ok, now you get to see some pictures from a few of my ultra cool labs! Just a few...I promise!

This is the genetics lab where they cross their traits and see what the offspring would look like.  We affectionately call it the "Ugly Baby Lab" and I think you'll understand why when you look at the pictures below! haha

This is the same child, drawn by different "parents".  Either way, we should all pray that these kids don't ever have real children together! ;)

 Horrifying!

 And this one's just kinda cute!  :)

Next, we had the Adapt or Die lab, where students are like birds trying to pick up worms out of the grass.  The students are given different traits to help or hinder their ability to get worms and then they are given a minute to grab as many worms as they can.  Then, we count the worms to see which adaptations allowed them to pick up the most, fewest, etc. Also, the worms are just different colored toothpicks.  We counted how many "worms" of each color were "eaten" and, of course, the ones that were the same color as the (dead) grass survived the best and the blue and red ones did not blend in, causing them to be "eaten" very easily.  It really helped illustrate the idea of trait adaptation and natural selection.

 We also dissected worms!

 But before we dissected dead worms, we ran some tests on live ones. Don't worry!  We didn't hurt them.  This lab was done on a Monday, which means that a carton of night-crawlers spent the weekend in my fridge!

Our last lab of the year, of course, was dissecting squid!  It was the coolest!!!

 Here I am explaining some of the procedures and squid parts!  I loved rocking my lab coat! :)

June

June was crazy, but in a good way!  Lots going on!  Since school was out, I decided to take 4 of my nephews on a road trip to Utah to play with my 5th nephew, which would also allow me to see my baby brother!  So, that was planned and then Daniel and Tyisa decided to come to California just a few days before we were scheduled to visit them in Utah.  So, we all hung out in CA and then the boys and I drove up to Utah, stayed in a hotel that first night, and then met up with Daniel and Tyisa then next day when they got back in town!  Crazy how things go sometimes!

The night we stayed in the hotel was a late one, so we wanted to go to bed as soon as we got to the room.  I also knew that the following morning would be an early one, so I made sure to set out all of our clothes the night before so everything was set and ready to go!

This picture illustrates my OCD!  haha

Anyhow, we got up the next morning and did a bunch of things like the Jacob Hamblin Home and Brigham Young's Winter Home, and even took a completely spontaneous side trip to Zion National Park!  After meeting up with Daniel and Tyisa, we went to the splash pad and then to Iceberg for dinner! The next day we hit up the St. George Children's Museum (the coolest kiddy museum I've ever seen, by the way),the St. George Temple Visitor Center, followed by a pizza picnic in the park.  I won't inundate you with pictures here, since I already posted way too many when I initially blogged about this trip, but I will share the picture that absolutely melts my heart:

 Uncle Buddy reading the boys a bedtime story!

The day after I got back from Utah, my car went into the shop to have the bumper repaired from a car accident I was in a few months prior.  I was stopped at a red light when a woman, who was talking on her cell phone, slammed into my car.  I saw something fly from the car and she had pushed me half way into the crosswalk.  I was sure my car was going to be badly damaged, but a miracle occurred and my car had minimal damage. Just some dents on the bumper, a few scrapes, and also her license plate was now imprinted into my bumper.  Her car wasn't too bad, but definitely needed some help.  It was part of her front bumper that had flown off.  Neither of us was hurt, though, which is the most important thing.  It's amazing how Heavenly Father takes care of us like that!  Anyways, I hated that I got in an accident and I hated that my car had to be in the shop, but since that's what had to happen, I might as well make the best of it!  The rental place gave me a Dodge Charger, which was kind of fun!  I noticed that the trunk seemed absolutely cavernous and my sister-in-law and I decided to see if we would fit into it!  We did.  We also decided to see if that little glow in the dark release lever would really open the trunk from the inside.  It did.  And we had lots of fun finding these things out!  This was my very first rental car of my own, so of course we had to make it memorable!

July
In July I actually got to go on two very big vacations!  First, I went on a cruise to Alaska and then I went to Arizona with my sister!  Not too shabby! Since I've already posted a ton of pictures of each of these trips, I'll go easy on this one!
Some highlights:
Ketchikan, Alaska

Mendenhall Glacier and Nugget Falls

 Caribou Crossing, Canada

Dog Sledding in Carcross, Canada

Victoria, Canada

 Seattle, Washington

Space Needle in Seattle

Capilano Suspension Bridge in Vancouver, Canada

 Seattle, Washington

 Seattle Underground Tour

Spruce Goose in McMinnville, Oregon

Portland Temple in Portland, Oregon

 Voodoo Donuts in Portland, Oregon

Mount St. Helens in Washington

 Portland Aquarium in Oregon

Needless to say, this was the vacation of a lifetime!

Then, my Arizona vacation with my sister:

 Montezuma's Castle

 Frank Lloyd Wright's church in Sedona

 Lowell Observatory

 The Grand Canyon

 Bedrock City

Sunset Crater

Wuaptki National Monument

We saw a ton of stuff and had a great time!

Later that month, I got to go on a fishing adventure at Irvine Lake with Nancy, Jacob, Josh, Dylan, Anthony, Marianne, and Ava!

 I even convinced Nancy to give it a shot for the first time!  We had a great time!

August

August is always a little of a bummer month since it's when summer ends and we have to go back to school.  This year, I got to start it by going to see Hairspray at the Redlands Bowl!  Scott was in it, so his mom and I went and it was SO good!  Lots of talent on that stage!  It was a nice last hurrah of summer vacation.

 Tamara's birthday is on August 16th and we got to hang out at the Mary Vagle Nature Center!  I love that place!  Her 3 little boys had fun feeding the ducks and dodging the geese!  We all had a great time and it's always fun to do stuff with her!  She really is supermom!

September

September was an extremely difficult and stressful month for many reasons, which I won't go into, but that's life and it's all good!  :)

At the end of the month, however, I did get to celebrate my 30th birthday!  I got to spend time with my family on my actual birthday and then the following Friday, I got to celebrate it again at Northwoods Inn with Scott!  Great atmosphere, great food, great company, no complaints!  My nephew and I have birthdays 6 days apart, so we doubled up on our family birthday celebration!

October
October started out like a normal month and then on the 19th, I unexpectedly signed the lease for my first apartment!  From that moment onward, life was full speed ahead and crazy!  That day, I became sort of a "real" grown-up when I bought my first set of couches!  Unbeknownst to me, at the time, my sister-in-law snapped this picture of my official transformation into adulthood! ;)  haha

 I also discovered that I'm a hoarder with way too many board games!  Actually, is there such a thing as having too many board games?  I submit that there is not!  And in reality, I was pleasantly surprised that I actually didn't have too much unnecessary stuff.  I just have more books than I have space for in my apartment, so thanks to my parents for babysitting them until I figure out where to put them!  :)

October also allowed me the opportunity to see IVRT's production of  A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Candlelight Pavilion!  It was SO good!  Thanks to Scott for being in so many amazing plays!

Oh! And I almost forgot!  I got a new job in October!  Well, I was hired in October, but won't actually start my new position until January 12th, when I return to work from Christmas Break!  I get to go back to Sequoia, where I LOVED working last year! Yes, I will miss my awesome friends and colleagues and Poplar, but am really excited to be back at the middle school with a staff that feels like family!  It will be quite a change as I will be going from teaching 6th grade math to teaching 8th grade English.  I'm excited for the challenge and plan to give it my all!  Wish me luck!  :)

November

November's main event was moving into my apartment!  Since I already posted, in great detail, about this and put up way too many pictures, I'll go easy on you here!

Home, Sweet Home!  I just love my place and feel so happy and peaceful here!  Everyday I feel so grateful to my Heavenly Father for leading me here and giving me the courage to jump into moving out, since I'm really bad at handling change!

I also got to see a couple of things that I'd wanted to see for quite some time!

The Pompeii Exhibit

The Space Shuttle Endeavor

So cool!

December

December was insanely busy, but good!

I decorated for my 1st Christmas on my own!

I went to the Nutcracker with my mom!

I hosted my first sleepover at my new place with my nephews!  I was a little nervous because my apartment is so much smaller than my parents' house where they're used to sleeping over, but it was a success!

 Jonathan made it in the living room until about midnight, when he decided that my bed was more comfortable!  haha

I got to be a caroler/greeter and an angel at the Living Nativity this year!

It was cold, but fun!

We also got to hang with Santa at our ward's Christmas party!

Had adventures at work!

And said goodbye to my 3 classes of kiddos...

On the 21st, we did our Christmas Program at church and I was in a quartet, singing What Child Is This?  It was originally too high for me, but Scott saved the day by transposing the entire piece so that it was do-able!  That man is going straight to Heaven, I'm nearly certain!  haha  It ended up going just fine!  That evening, we had our big Wheeler family Christmas party with our cousin gift exchange!

Our exchange was a bit smaller this year since Dana had just had baby Sawyer, David and Melissa were in Vegas celebrating their anniversary, and Daniel, Tyisa, and Diane didn't get into town until later in the week.  BUT we had fun anyways!

Later that week, we got together and went to see the newly re-done Nativities on Euclid in Ontario!  Aunt Cheryl called my parents to invite them and I decided that it would be fun to go too!  David, Melissa, and the boys were able to come too!  I truly love my family and the fact that we are all so busy, but can get together and pick up where we left off!  We always have a great time when we're together!  Seriously, LOVE IT!  :)

Diane came into town on the 23rd and I helped the boys make signs to welcome her home!

Diane and the boys crashed at my place and when we woke up on Christmas Eve, we took the boys to do the Adventure with Santa thing at Victoria Gardens!  SO COOL, by the way!

That night we had our Christmas Eve gathering and went caroling, though our group was markedly smaller this year due to illness.  We still had a fun time, though.

On Christmas Day, Diane, my mom, and I went to Universal Studios and had a great time, though it was super cold!!!

And the day after Christmas, ALL of us got to be together again!  It was completely all planned, just one-by-one, everyone showed up or called and asked if anything was going on!  This actually happens fairly regularly, where we end up together without even planning it and it's one of the things I love so much about my family!  We have our crazy times, but I really can't think of any family I would rather have been born into.  The night was full of fun, noise, pizza, and piggyback rides!

And of course, there had to be a little bit of Science Time!

Finally, on the morning of New Year's Eve, I got to go hang out with Nancy, Jacob, Josh, and Dylan.  Jacob and the boys fly back to China on January 2nd and I knew I wouldn't have the chance to see them before then, so I made sure I got a chance to say goodbye!  It's always sad to see them go.

In the evening, I didn't make any plans to go out, and instead decided to stay at home with some sparkling cider, a blanket, and movies.  Then, my mom called and said that she and my dad were getting to watch Danny for the evening and invited me to come over.  I still wanted to spend my evening relaxing, but wanted to spend some time with Danny too, so I went over to my parents' house for a little while and hung out and then rang in the new year at my place!  Perfection!

 My parents thought a gingerbread train would be a fun project for Danny to work on, so he and my mom made it happen!

I love snuggling this sweet boy!

This has been an incredibly full year with lots of ups and downs, but I can't deny that I have been extraordinarily richly blessed!  I'm grateful for a loving Heavenly Father who has guided my steps and lead to me to do things I never thought were possible.  I know that, through Him, and His Son, Jesus Christ, I can do all things, no matter how scary or difficult they may seem.  This has, indeed, been a year of victory!  Now, on to a new year, which will, hopefully, bring even more blessings and growth!  

Happy New Year!