Jolly Old St. Nicholas, Lean your ear... what?!

Apparently, I have been singing the words to "Jolly Old St. Nicholas" wrong for my entire life.

According to Wikipedia, the original lyrics are thus:

Jolly Old Saint Nicholas,
Lean your ear this way;
Don't you tell a single soul,
What I'm going to say

Christmas Eve is coming soon;
Now you dear old man,
Whisper what you'll bring to me;
Tell me if you can.

When the clock is striking twelve;
When I'm fast asleep,
Down the chimney broad and black,
With your pack you'll creep;
All the stockings you will find
Hanging in a row;
Mine will be the shortest one,
You'll be sure to know.

Johnny wants a pair of skates;
Susy wants a dolly;
Nellie wants a story book;
She thinks dolls are folly;
As for me, my little brain
Isn't very bright;
Choose for me, old Santa Claus,
What you think is right.

The last verse has been changed recently to be more politically correct:

Johnny wants a pair of skates,
Susie wants a sled
Nelly wants a storybook –
one she hasn't read
as for me i hardly know
so I'll go to rest
Choose for me, dear Santa Claus,
What you think is best.

I still like my last verse the best - the one I've been singing my whole life, I mean. It goes like this:

Johnny wants a pair of skates;
Susy wants a dolly;
Nellie wants a story book;
She thinks dolls are folly;
As for me, you dear old man,
On this Christmas night;
Bring for me, dear Santa Claus,
What you think is right.

*shrug* I think I'll just keep singing my version. Haha.

This is me.

All I do is read, read, read! Sadly, the stuff I read is more difficult than what this little girl is reading... most likely. :)

Master's programs sure require a lot of reading! I have read more than 80 research articles since I started this July. Ahhhhh!

Horses, oats, and math?

So it turns out that if you set a Holly loose in your office, she will teach you a hilarious mnemonic decive (instead of SOHCAHTOA, we have some old horse caught another horse taking oats away), and once you leave, you will come back to a funny picture. Or at least, that's what happened the other day :)

Waffles, mmm!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled overdue posts to bring you a delicious waffle recipe.

Seriously. I was out of Bisquick and decided to try this recipe. I don't think I'll ever go back. It was so delicious, that even though it required a little extra effort, it was more than worth it.

I have a photo album recipe book. If you have one, here's a PDF with the recipe on it for you to print and cut out. Otherwise, here's the recipe.

Way-good Waffles
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons white sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups warm milk
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:
In a large bowl, mix together flour, salt, baking powder and sugar; set aside. Preheat waffle iron to desired temperature and spray with non-stick cooking spray.
In a separate bowl, beat the eggs. Stir in the milk, butter and vanilla. Pour the milk mixture into the flour mixture; beat until blended.

Ladle the batter into a preheated waffle iron. Cook the waffles until golden and crisp. Serve immediately.

Oh yeah. When I made them, it made 7 waffles (I scraped out ALL the remaining batter for that 7th one, though, and it was still smallish). So I don't know how many you want to make, but that's how many this makes (of the 2-square variety, see below).

Mmm-mmm good!

Overdue post #2

Father's Day!

For Father's Day, most of us kids (and grandkids) went to Mom and Dad's for a cookout - except those of us who were out of town. It was way fun, and I mostly tailed Jake and Elly around so I could get pictures of them. By the way, Dad, if you're reading this, I'm glad you're my father and you've taught me a lot of things! For example, when I was little, you let me do logic puzzles with you, and taught me pretty advanced deduction for a kid my age. And now I'm a master's student in Math Education... go figure.

So without further ado... the pictures!

Amy made the dessert. "Burger" cupcakes and "french fry" cookies! It was delicious.

Jake obviously agrees with me. Yum, yum!

Jake found some stuff in Grandma's garden... a baby carrot (which he ate) ...

... a turnip (which he didn't eat) ...

...and a worm, which nobody ate.

Then, Grandma took the kids on a wheelbarrow ride. They loved it, and so did she... can you see that big smile on her face?

Even though Jake and Elly have a full sized trampoline at home, they thought this one was great to jump on. Haha.

I took Jake and Elly outside to do sidewalk chalk. Elly actually made lines and circles. I was impressed! Jake made lines, scribbles, and squares.

As you can see, it looked awesome! I did help a bit, by the way. Hahaha.

Overdue post #1

Well, hopefully I will be doing several of these, since I have several events I should have posted about! Here's the first:

This is Maylee, Nikki (and Ryan) Souter's baby. I babysit her a lot and she really likes me. I'm really sad that Nikki, Ryan, and Maylee are moving to PA. But here's some pictures of Maylee! (She's 9 months old now, but these were taken when she was 8 months-ish.)

Maylee playing peekaboo. She doesn't quite get that you're supposed to cover your face. She plays with rattles, books, anything... if she lifts it up over her head, you're supposed to say "peekaboo!" and it's hilarious.

Maylee is quite the crawler. Getting ready to walk soon, too, I think.

Look at that happy baby! She is holding her baby food sippy.

How did I get in here?!

Playing by yourself is one thing, playing with an imaginary game is another.

The other day, I was practicing with my partner, Seth, and he wrote something in Hebrew on the whiteboard in the practice room (it wasn't ACTUALLY Hebrew, it was English words but with Hebrew letters). This small thing sort of rekindled my love for Hebrew. In fact, I went online and tried to re-learn the aleph-bet (which I knew at one point in my life...and now I am getting close to knowing it again!) by watching videos on YouTube.

A great aleph-bet video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiCzoTs1AdE

As you may have experienced at some point in your life, it is possible to get caught up in a crazy cycle of YouTubing. I ended up learning how to play dreidel, and although this is a 2+ person game, I decided to go practice by myself. Then I realized, I don't have a dreidel. Oops!

In case you're wondering, here's how you play, compliments of Wikipedia:

-Each player begins with an equal number of game pieces (usually 10-15). The game pieces can be any small object, such as pennies, raisins, or chocolate coins.

-At the beginning of each round, every participant puts one game piece into the center "pot". In addition, every time the pot is empty or has one game piece left, every player puts one in the pot.

-Each player spins the dreidel once during their turn. Depending on which side is facing up when it stops spinning, they give or take game pieces from the pot:

a) If nun is facing up, the player does nothing.

b) If gimmel is facing up, the player gets everything in the pot.

c) If heyis facing up, the player gets half of the pieces in the pot. (If there is an odd number, they get half of the total plus one)

d) If shin (or peh) is facing up, the player adds a game piece to the pot.

If the player is out of pieces, they are either "out" or may ask another player for a "loan".

When one person has won everything, that round of the game is over.

Master's Student!!

This is Brian. We are friends from dance.

Today, Brian defended his master's thesis and I watched! It was actually pretty fun, plus he provided Einstein Bagels afterwards which is a good enough reason for me to be there. I learned how defending a thesis works, and I learned some stuff that applies to my life too, from his thesis. His thesis was on foreign language (Japanese) vocabulary acquisition through multimedia. In other words, does it help to not only read a definition of a word, but also to see a picture or a video? Yeah, so it got me thinking about teaching math, because math is really a language in and of itself, and how I can appeal to different learning styles through multimedia presentations once I am teaching... and it served as a reminder that repetition is not necessarily the key to learning... but repetition in different forms might be better. Saying that to solve an equation you need to get x alone 300 times might have less effect than saying it, doing a problem, demonstrating it with video/pictures/objects, and getting the students to do it themselves...

End ramble.

Kids!

Sunday, June 7, 2009

A bunch of us were up at Ben and Amy's and the kids were just being so cute. I thought I'd video some of their antics and post them here.

April Fool's Video

For April Fool's day, I made this video with Justin. It was a lot of fun, and Nikki was a good sport about videotaping us even after she got soaking wet. Hehe thanks Nik.

An Overdue Update

Well, here's the scoop: twelve of us went on an awesome vacation, thanks to my awesome parents. Here's who went: Mom and Dad, me, Ben (my brother) and his wife Amy and his two kids Jake and Elly (age 2 and 1, respectively, at the time), and Erica (my sister) and her husband Doug, and Alif (my brother) and his wife Nikki and kid Justin (age 11 at the time). So I made a video of a bunch of pictures from the trip. Yay! Here it is. This is the first of hopefully a few good updates.