"Hey, Hey, La, La- We're gonna' build our dreams together"

This week has been full of Sign Language and interpreting. Rachel has been a busy girl running to her various jobs around the city. Also, she spent the weekend at the RID conference in Cincinnati where she took classes on preparing for the NIC test (a crazy hard test for interpreters to be nationally certified).

A surgery she interpreted for confirmed to her that she is a squeamish person. I say "confirmed" because she actually learned of her squeamishness when I asked her to watch an oral surgery I thought was cool. She started watching it, and before long she was crying, shaking, and rocking back and forth in her chair. We turned the video off before it got to the bad part. The next day she had to interpret the surgery, and she knew from the previous night's experience that she best not watch too much of it.

Rachel was not the only person doing Sign Language though. I am actually trying to learn a little bit of it now. I have never really put forth much effort to learn, as I sort of considered it to be "her thing," but I actually became interested for myself this week and she is now tutoring me. I'll never be as good as she is. I'll probably never really be fluent either, but I will have a basic vocabulary and understanding of grammar. So far, I can do pretty well at introducing myself. If anyone tries to talk back to me, I'm in trouble though! I'm excited to learn.

Autumn time is in full swing here in Cleveland. The ground is littered with leaves and the air is cool (bordering on cold). One day, Rachel picked me up from school and announced that she had planned an Autumn date for us. We went out and collected different leaves and stuff, then brought them home to make Autumn wreaths. She also bought apple cider and stuff to make pumpkin pie. It was a fun night.

Speaking of pie, we have made four pies in the last week. We love baking, but we were getting tired of cookies and brownies. At the beginning of the week, we made a strawberry pie that turned out to be delicious. It got eaten so fast that we made two pumpkin pies later in the week. Tonight, we made a "dump pie" where we threw a bunch of random ingredients (chili, fresh veggies, hamburger, etc.) into a pie crust and baked them. It also turned out really good. I don't think that Autumn time is the healthiest season at the Hazard home, but it is certainly one of the yummiest ones!

Here are some pictures of our week. Enjoy!

These first two pictures are when we went leaf collecting for our Autumn Date

Here are the wreaths we made with the leaves. Mine is on the left, and Rachel's is on the right. We've noticed that all of our friend's blogs center around their children. We don't have any children yet, so we'll fill that role for the time being (but I doubt that we'll stop playing once the kids come).