Humble

So I'm talking to one of my piano students as we walk to the copy machine the other and the conversation went something like this...

Blake: Miss Stephens you walk fast!

Miss Stephens: I do! I have lots to do!

Blake: I'm fast too. I'm always the first one to finish my math homework in class.

Miss Stephens: I believe it! It's because you're so smart!

Blake: I know I am!

Miss Stephens: (jokingly) ...and you're humble too!

Blake: I know I am!

Miss Stephens: Do you know what "humble" means?

Blake: No...but I know I am!

Ben's Visit!!!

I'm going to start this post off with my apologies to everyone for falling off the face of the earth these past couple weeks. Ben came to visit and we had a fantastic time! I somehow still managed to attend most my graduate classes and taught all my elementary classes (and even managed to pull off a program!) Here are some pics from our adventures!



We went to a Spurs game one night because I had to make Ben a Spurs fan! We had so much fun! We even managed to get about 7 rows from the floor!!!



We went to a Halloween Party at Karessa's sister's house and we won the "Best Costume" trophy with our awesome hippie outfits!



On Halloween, we carved a pumpkin and Ben dressed up and passed out tons of candy to the neighborhood kids! He was so awesome!!



We spent an evening downtown and went to the Alamo and dinner at the Rainforest Cafe. We had ribs, steak and shrimp! It was AMAZING!



Downtown we made a visit to Davy Crockett's outhouse. CLASSIC!



Ben's birthday is in November so we celebrated early! I took him to Gruene, TX and we walked around the little historic town and had a great lunch. We made sure to stop in the general store to pick up nerds and pop rocks!



Ben's last night here we went to Hondo, TX to a corn maze. We got big time lost but we succeeded in the end and had so much fun in the process!

Tagged

I was tagged by my sister Jessica. I'll do it since I love my sister!

Here are the rules. 1)Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves. (2) People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules. (3) At the end of your blog, you need to choose people to get tagged and list their names.


MY FACTS:

1) I don't drink out of plastic cups...the only explanation I can give for this is that they just don't seem like they would get as clean.


2) I'm addicted to all things musical. In fact, I'm probably the biggest music nerd you have ever met. If I hear a song I like, I can't stop until I've researched everything there is to know about the artist/background of said song.


3) I hate to put away clean clothes and dishes. I'd much rather load the dishwasher than put them away!


4) My cat Thomas is spoiled rotten! This cat lives the most charmed life ever. I can't help it...he's my pal!

5) One of my most favorite things to do is to take a hot bubble bath and sing at the top of my lungs.

6) I can't go a day without checking my mail. I love getting mail and I can't stand the thought that there might be something amazing in there, so I have to check!

7) If I didn't get to talk to Amanda on a practically daily basis, I would probably explode! I never make decisions without consulting her first. LOVE THAT GIRL!

8) I graduate with my Masters of Music in May 2008 and couldn't be more excited about it!

I will tag: Amanda, April E., Charity, and Emily W.

Helicopter Tricks

Who knew a helicopter could do this?!?!

Giving the Video One More Try!

This is from my trip to San Diego. I finally got the blog to post my video! This is the Red Bull Air Race and the video doesn't do it justice!

The European Studies Conference 2007

Last week I traveled with four other music graduate students to the University of Nebraska at Omaha to present papers at the European Studies Conference. Turns out, Omaha is not such a bad place! We had a great time!





Here I am giving my presentation!



After the conference, we went to this great park and walked around and got some great pictures.



A WWII memorial in the park.




My traveling buddies!

San Diego - Friday

Ben had to work Friday but he got off just in time to go to Riverside, CA (about 2 hours away) and we spent the evening with my brother and his beautiful family!




This was my first time to meet Noah and Julianna, and Noah only wanted to play with Ben! It broke my heart but it was cute to see them playing together. Ben was awesome with Noah. They had a really good time. So I just enjoyed cuddling with Julianna!







After dinner, we just sat and chatted. It was so good to see them! I love you guys!

San Diego - Saturday

On Saturday, Ben took me downtown for the Red Bull Air Race. It was incredible! We watched these planes fly 20 feet above the water at 250 mph and go through this obstacle course on the Bay. I took some video but I can't get it to load onto my blog properly...





The air race was about 6 hours and then Ben took me to a fantastic dinner downtown. What a great day!

San Diego - Sunday

Sunday afternoon, Ben and I headed to Pacific beach to watch the sunset. It was absolutely beautiful so I'm going to just let the pictures speak for themselves!









What a perfect way to end a pretty perfect weekend in California...

Facts About Mozart...

So this year I have a composer featured every month with a bulletin board dedicated to that composer. Each day in music we staple a fact to our board and go over the previous facts. Well August was a short month and we learned about Mozart. At the end of the month, I ask the students to write down two facts about Mozart. My kids got pretty mixed up on this one.

Below are the real Mozart facts followed by some student answers. I thought some were pretty funny, especially considering they all knew the facts when asked to review them out loud!

THE FACTS:
Mozart was born January 27, 1756.
He was born in Salzburg, Austria.
Mozart started to compose music around the age of 3.
Mozart wrote more than 40 symphonies.

Student Answers:
"we now [know] his brday [birthday]
"happy birthday"
"Mozart was born in 1978. Mozart was plaing the peanow."
"January 4, 1997"
"Mozart [wrote] 8 sinphones when he was 3."
"He was born in Zalsalzburg. He was a famas music righter"
"Mozart born in Austina...he play music"
"Slazebr Astrich January 26, 1852"
"He had long hair"
"He has a whig"

Hopefully next month, we'll do a little better! ha! Gotta love 'em!

Bruised Knees...and Egos...

So I was pretty happy yesterday. It was the first day of graduate classes and I was feeling good. I met a couple of my gal pals for lunch at our favorite nearby restaurant. As we're walking, I'm talking and not at all paying attention when I step off a curb and completely fall down! I think the weight of my backpack kept me from catching myself because I fell straight down! It was not my best moment for sure. Although I know it had to have looked amazingly funny! I know I'm getting older because I woke up this morning and my whole body hurt...guess I can't recover like I used to! What a first day...

The Music Teacher Is In...

So today is the first day of school. While coming back to teach part-time has turned into more than I anticipated, I am still glad to be back with all my old kids. So here's a quick story to start out the year...
We are sitting in Adv. Band listening to some movie theme songs which we plan to play this year, when "Somewhere Out There" from An American Tail comes on and I say, "oh this was popular when I was a kid, I loved this movie!" to which one of my students replies, "Man, I be the guy who was the voice is dead now then." and I say, "how old do you think I am?" to which he replies, "I don't know...50....40?"

WHAT?!?!?!

It's good to be back...

Baby Quilt

I wanted to show you the quilt I made for my friend Andrea's baby, Isabella. Okay...I mostly wanted to show my mom but you all can look too!

Girls' Weekend

I was long overdue for some fun this summer and all my friends having babies was the perfect excuse to get out of town for a weekend. My best friend Amanda came down from Stillwater, OK to meet me in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area to see the Bartee family as well as Kevin and Andrea Johnson and their new baby girl, Isabella! It was great just to hang out with these wonderful friends and hold beautiful kids!



This is baby Isabella. She was so tiny and beautiful! I held her every second possible!



We took this picture right before we left Kevin and Andrea's Saturday morning. Andrea was an especially tired mama this morning since Bella kept her up most the night so she opted out of the picture, but we understood. We had such a great time catching up with her!



After we left Kevin and Andrea's we headed to Ft. Worth to meet the Bartee's and Charity Harvill, Amanda's old college roommate. We haven't seen Charity in years!! So that was so much fun! The four of us girls all met our freshman year of college and we're still so cute!


We went shopping for some maternity clothes for Amanda...okay, so she's not this big yet but we made her try on the "belly pillow" in the store and just had to take a picture of what Amanda will look like in just a little while longer! She's such a good sport!


This is Alex, the newest addition to the Bartee family! He cuddled with me most the rest of the weekend!



This is the Bartee family getting ready to go to church. Unfortunately, the picture taking interrupted the routine and we ended up forgetting the diaper bags at home! OOPS! I'm going to have to take the blame for that one!



Just us girls! Thanks to Jonny for being our official photographer for the weekend!



Caleb is getting so big and he loved playing with his Aunt April!



And Alex is a big time cuddler. We snuggled on the couch for most of Sunday afternoon.



Mama-to-be practicing her sweet technique!

I had a great time with all you girls (and boys!) and I can't wait to do it again! Next baby on board....Baby Nichols and Baby Everhart!

A Walk Down Memory Lane...

Something fun happened that I just had to tell you all about. So I'm bored the other day just wasting time on the computer (namely facebook) and I run across a friend from high school whom I haven't spoken to since I graduated in 1999! Ben Martinez. I had the biggest crush on Ben for just about my entire senior year of high school. He was always such a cool guy. Well immediately I sent him a message to see if he was, in fact, the guy I knew and he was!!! We've been emailing back and forth catching up on life and we even talked on the phone for an hour and a half like we were never seperated for 8 years! Well after we talked I started looking through some old high school pictures and came across this:




It's not the best picture of us but it's the only one I have (sorry Ben!) and I can't remember why I'm sitting on him, I think I was trying to prove how strong I was or something silly like that!

Now Ben is all grown up and a pilot in the Navy and I'm all grown up and still a music nerd! Ha! Anyways, I just had to share my fun story! Maybe you should think about getting back in touch with a new friend...you never know what could happen. Happy Tuesday!

More Sweet Babies

This is the year of babies for my family and friends! I just wanted to quickly show off some of the sweet babies that are coming into the world!

My newest niece, Julianna Stephens! Isn't she pretty?!? Born May 27th!



Andrea and Kevin Johnson had their pretty baby girl Isabella on July 9! I will get to meet her in person in August!




Emily and Curtis Winkle welcomed their second son, Luke on June 2(just one day before my birthday!) They are such a beautiful family, I just had to share them with you two!


These are just a few of my friends who have recently had babies...and there are many more to come! Not to mention, I will have more pictures to share when I get to meet them in person! Congratulations to all my family and extended family! I love you all!

Sweet Family

Because I love this family just like my own, I feel the need to share the newest member of the family. Amy and Jonny had their sweet second baby boy, Alex on June 23. What a great looking family right? I wish you all the best!



P.S. I will post more pics of my awesome extended family when I get back from visiting them in August, then I'll have Aunt April pictures!! Yay!

Save the Date...

So I just read on my friend Auvrey's blog about this new thing on EHarmony that will estimate your "most likely wedding date" and I couldn't resist but visit the site to see what it said about me. According to the "experts" at eHarmony, I have an 85.20% chance of getting married before the age of 65 and my most likely date of my marriage is July 21, 2013 (that makes me 32). I'm amazed that they can predict the future by asking you simple questions like, "how often do you smoke, are you dating someone right now? etc" How does smoking affect my chances of getting married? Do they help? Maybe I'll start! JUST KIDDING...I'm just pointing out how goofy the eharmony marriage clock is. Have a Happy and Safe 4th!

Open Mouth, Insert Foot...

And it wasn't me this time! So today I'm sitting in my music history class and my professor puts up a musical score of a Haydn oratorio and all the alto lines are highlighted in yellow. Dr. Schmidt is going through the score pointing out various musical tidbits, and one of the students shouts out, "Man, this alto must not have known how to follow her part!" (referring to all the highlighting), and without skipping a beat, as dry as ever my prof says, "this was my wife's copy." HA! I laughed so hard! I really needed something funny to happen today. Two more days of summer school and I'll be past the halfway mark in my Master's program!

My Birthday (2 weeks later...)

Well it's official...I'm old! 26 is a big one to me. I can't believe I've been driving for ten years (Mom and Dad probably wish I haven't had my license that long!), I've been out of high school 8 years, and almost every girl I went to college with is married and getting ready for kids! So how did I celebrate this momentous occassion? With a full weekend of fun...actually it was closer to a full week of fun!!





It started on the Wednesday prior to my birthday when Lacy took me to see game 5 of the Spurs/Jazz Western Conference Championship! And we won! It was such a blast!






On Friday night, I met up with a bunch of friends from school, work, church (all my worlds collided into one for one night only!) And we had a great dinner at Stonewerks. I even got a free birthday ice cream!



On Saturday night, I had the opportunity to see the San Antonio Symphony perform Beethoven' 9th Symphony! It was incredible! This symphony was a turning point in music history and I have always wanted to see it!

On Sunday (which was my actual birthday), I went to lunch with all my church friends and enjoyed some great fellowship Sunday night when we got together for a singing devotional, a new staple in our week! It was so uplifting!

Thanks to everyone who made my birthday so special and meaningful! Y'all are the best!