Nationals Game!

*at the stadium, with our new Nationals baseball cap bowl*

A few weeks ago some friends from church offered us their tickets to a Nationals Game-- they have season tickets and couldn't go, and didn't want the tickets to go to waste. We snatched them up and took off!! The seats were amazing-- super close at the 3rd base line. Unfortunately, the Nationals lost, but we had a fun time.

*Julian and the stadium*

*the presidents racing*

*Zimmerman, the famous pitcher*

*Cherry Blossoms*

Every spring the cherry blossom festival brings hundreds of thousands of tourists to DC-- one week DC is pretty empty, and the next week even the sidewalks have traffic jams. Julian and I went out one beautiful Sunday afternoon after church to see the blossoms. The weather was gorgeous and there were performances for the festival, so we had a nice lazy afternoon under the sakura trees!

*pretty blossoms*

*washington monument through the blossoms*

*by the yellow flowering bushes*

*by the tidal basin, on the way to the jefferson memorial*

*julian at the jefferson memorial*

*at the jefferson memorial*

*nuzzling at the tidal basin :) *

Conferences

My job has allowed me some great professional development opportunities-- every month we have many professional development sessions locally, and we also travel to various conferences to stay up to date on the latest research. In the last month I went to two-- the ERF conference in Seattle, Washington and the SRCD conference in Denver, Colorado.

The ERF (Early Reading First) Grant conference was for all schools/groups that had received this grant from the government. The new grantees come and learn from the top speakers in early literacy and from various schools/groups who had the grant previously. We were lucky to have had the grant before-- therefore we were there presenting as well as learning for our new grant. I got to present along with a few others from AppleTree, and it was a great overall experience to learn about the grant, the politics, and to see how well AppleTree is doing. It's not really overstating it to say that we're one of the top preschool programs in the country!

Pictures from Seattle:

*by the poster announcing our presentation*

*space needle!*

*at the top of the space needle*

*view of seattle from the space needle*

The SRCD (Society for Research in Child Development) was a completely different experience. It's overwhelming, with hundreds of thousands of 

people attending and about 40 presentations going on every 2 hours. You have to pick and choose what you want to hear, with topics ranging across all areas of child development from birth to adolescence. It was interesting to see the different types of research-- some very controlled and not applicable to real life, and some highly applicable research that is "messy." Some researchers were a little snotty about their work and I felt the difference between academia and what I'm doing now. I have to say that I'm very happy to be working in a place where we back things with research and theory, but we're very much living in the real world. My coworkers aren't fighting to see who can publish the most or who has the best credentials. (Not that all academics are like this, but there were a lot at the conference). I left the conference early to come celebrate our first wedding anniversary :)

Pictures from Denver:

*bear peeking into the conference center*

*view of mountains from my hotel room*