picture of the day

aren't we cute

i think so.

dash

crazy how this
turns into this

changes

weird.















exciting.














mixed emotions. bitter sweet.
I couldn't be happier to be moving to a new house that will fit our expanding family and work better for everyone but leaving the home you have lived in for almost 16 years is never easy. I love this place and always will. So many families around us have moved because they feel they need newer, better, and fancier homes for their huge family of 2 children. Not us, we feel so blessed to have lived in this home for so long. to have had jobs so we never had to move. we have made everlasting friendships and created unforgettable memories.
adventures in the field behind our house
building forts
playing night games
exploring the trees and swimming in the creek
countless backyard barbecues
parties full of teenagers and pizza
front porch chats
hide and seek in the crawl space
boys in pink bedrooms
mowing the lawn
mowing the lawn
mowing the lawn
love and laughs

this house has been good to us and we will miss it. it will remain in my memory "our house" not the lucky people who get to move in to this sweet neighborhood.

gratitude is in my heart for the blessings of good times here and the amazing opportunity to create memories in a new home.

busy busy

Its going be a week. I did my informative speech on brownies: how to make them and where they came from. So check that off the list, along with making brownies, passing them out to the class, seeing satisfied faces, and hearing, "you get an A" from the teacher. Now for the rest of the week.

-tonight: article review for Exceptional Lives class, math
-tomorrow: finish my picture book and have it ready to be published for Children's Lit. class
-thursday: study for meteorology test, math, and prepare for my interview for the Elementary Education program. I am so nervous and just want it to be over with.

I wish I could make like "I Dream of Jeanie" and blink my eyes and have it be Friday night so I can be with my friends enjoying life. Until then, I will be a slight stress case.

That's life.

creations

Stuff I've made lately:

I made this sign for me and my sister, Gnat-uh-lee...

We put it on this wall in our bathroom, now we need to add pictures to those bargain frames I got.

This cute guy was created for Ethan's Valentines Day party at school. I think he is the cutest valentines box monster I have ever scene.
Another little creation for Mr. Ethan, was this fabulous Scouting's-100th-Birthday-cake. It looks like it came straight from the Ace of Cakes bakery, or maybe Cake Wrecks. Either way Ethan and I are proud, and the cake was super yummy with homemade butter cream frosting.

For my next project I want to make these...

I just don't know what book to cut up...

just what I needed

"In this same vein may I address an even more sensitive subject. I plead with you young women to please be more accepting of yourselves, including your body shape and style, with a little less longing to look like someone else. We are all different. Some are tall, and some are short. Some are round, and some are thin. And almost everyone at some time or other wants to be something they are not! But as one adviser to teenage girls said: “You can’t live your life worrying that the world is staring at you. When you let people’s opinions make you self-conscious you give away your power. … The key to feeling [confident] is to always listen to your inner self—[the real you.]” 8 And in the kingdom of God, the real you is “more precious than rubies.” 9 Every young woman is a child of destiny and every adult woman a powerful force for good. I mention adult women because, sisters, you are our greatest examples and resource for these young women. And if you are obsessing over being a size 2, you won’t be very surprised when your daughter or the Mia Maid in your class does the same and makes herself physically ill trying to accomplish it. We should all be as fit as we can be—that’s good Word of Wisdom doctrine. That means eating right and exercising and helping our bodies function at their optimum strength. We could probably all do better in that regard. But I speak here of optimum health; there is no universal optimum size.

Frankly, the world has been brutal with you in this regard. You are bombarded in movies, television, fashion magazines, and advertisements with the message that looks are everything! The pitch is, “If your looks are good enough, your life will be glamorous and you will be happy and popular.” That kind of pressure is immense in the teenage years, to say nothing of later womanhood. In too many cases too much is being done to the human body to meet just such a fictional (to say nothing of superficial) standard. As one Hollywood actress is reported to have said recently: “We’ve become obsessed with beauty and the fountain of youth. … I’m really saddened by the way women mutilate [themselves] in search of that. I see women [including young women] … pulling this up and tucking that back. It’s like a slippery slope. [You can’t get off of it.] … It’s really insane … what society is doing to women.” 10

In terms of preoccupation with self and a fixation on the physical, this is more than social insanity; it is spiritually destructive, and it accounts for much of the unhappiness women, including young women, face in the modern world. And if adults are preoccupied with appearance—tucking and nipping and implanting and remodeling everything that can be remodeled—those pressures and anxieties will certainly seep through to children. At some point the problem becomes what the Book of Mormon called “vain imaginations.” 11 And in secular society both vanity and imagination run wild. One would truly need a great and spacious makeup kit to compete with beauty as portrayed in media all around us. Yet at the end of the day there would still be those “in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers” as Lehi saw, 12 because however much one tries in the world of glamour and fashion, it will never be glamorous enough.

A woman not of our faith once wrote something to the effect that in her years of working with beautiful women she had seen several things they all had in common, and not one of them had anything to do with sizes and shapes. She said the loveliest women she had known had a glow of health, a warm personality, a love of learning, stability of character, and integrity. If we may add the sweet and gentle Spirit of the Lord carried by such a woman, then this describes the loveliness of women in any age or time, every element of which is emphasized in and attainable through the blessings of the gospel of Jesus Christ."To Young Women
Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, November 2005

I don't have much to add to that. Reading this really helped changed my recent thought process. I want to love me for me. I want to love me enough to continually making myself feel good about me. I want working out to be more of the highlight of my day where I have fun and feel good and less about getting my cardio in for the day. I don't want to fuss over scales and sizes, I want to focus that energy on more important things like family, friends, school and my testimony. I want to be a good person who just so happens to know how to throw a good punch and kick really hard.