bitter sweet

I'm feeling very bitter sweet today.   I was released from my calling as activity days leader.   Part of me is very sad because I was just getting the hang of my calling and I really love my girls though they were all going to be turning 9 shortly anyway and leaving my class so I guess that's ok.  I was called as the Primary Chorister.  Knees are definitely shaking a little bit here.  This has got to be the most scary calling for me that I have had yet to date.   Primary Secretary, substitute primary pianist, ctr5 teacher, ward music chair, ward choir pianist, ward activities chair, visiting teaching supervisor, young women's miamaid advisor, sunday school teacher...etc, etc, etc,... all of these pale in comparison to me because they don't require that I come up with ideas how to teach 20+ kids all at once how to sing commanding their attention and entertaining them for 15-20 mins 2 times once a week.  On the up side.  I get to see my activities days girls more often cause now they're in primary with me every week instead of at my home just 2 times a month.  I know that I'm plenty qualified for this calling and have watched as people with much less musical ability than me have tackled it and succeeded with flying colors,..I even know that I will do a great job and this will be a good calling for me.  However, I have never felt as intimidated of a calling as I do right now.  I'm sure this is going to be small potatoes to me sometime down the road but at this moment I've never had a calling that was responsible for so many children at once or demanded that the bowels of creativity be shaken quite so frequently as weekly.  I also have big shoes to fill as Sister L. in my ward has done an amazing job in the past and I love and have loved being in singing time with her in primary weekly.  I'm also certain that Sister B. who I have not had the opportunity to see teach was equally effective at commanding the kids' attention.  I'm a little afraid that my quiet ways will come across as timid or afraid but I'm equally sure that my inner animation will take over and we'll just be one big happy group of kids singing and learning songs together and I'll soon forget my trepidation.  At any rate.  Wish me luck!

Now for the sweet.  I just finished enjoying some fruits of my labor.  Did I ever mention how much I LOVE LOVE LOVE cooking?  I don't think I have.  I particularly have a passion for good food and for being able to cook something from scratch with my own two hands and some meager ingredients.  I purchased a whole cut chicken this weekend and proceeded to make slow cooker chicken soup.   I love the Nourished Kitchen blog and was intrigued when I saw this recipe for chicken soup and I suddenly really wanted some.  I finished eating some of it for lunch and it was so heavenly.  I love eating wholesome old school recipes like this even if I have to occasionally eat a piece of bone that I missed that disintegrated in my mouth before I had a chance to realize I'd eaten it because I missed it when I picked all the bones out of the chicken and broth before making my soup.   I feel sooo good.  I can't really think of a better way to describe how this kind of food makes me feel.   empowered,...skilled,.. nunchuck skills, computer-hacking skills,..bow hunting skills,.. ok ok.  let's not get carried away.   I also had a piece of my fudgy brownies that I made from scratch out of the better homes cook book.  Didn't leave home without it.  They were soooo nummy.  I know I'm making you all jealous.  And speaking of Scratch.  If any of you are food connoisseurs you should check out my friend Lillian's blog called scratch-eats.  She is an amazing cook and I'm expecting awesome things from her new cooking blog.   Something else from the nourished kitchen that I can't wait to try are these potato chips.  Anyone who knows me knows I love potato chips and I think these sound so good except I can't stomach the thought of lard.  I have an aversion to it which is why I think the country has turned away from it's use in the first place.  anyway I digress.   I love food. 

1$ 5-day Dressing Your Truth Trial

If you've ever been interested in Dressing Your Truth today is your lucky day.  Carol is doing a 1$ dressing your truth 5-day Trial!!  You have to cancel it before the 5 days are up if you don't want to keep it.  Also, if you decide later that you got the wrong type, you can write support and they should let you change it.  If you don't know what your type is, ask me and I'll give you my first gut reaction but you're the only person that can know for sure.   I am definitely not an expert and I'm only willing to help in this specific situation because I want you to get the trial quickly. 

Link to the 1$ Dressing Your Truth course 5-day Trial

Here's my secondary motive for wanting you to get the trial TODAY!  Tonight is club night exclusively for Dressing Your Truth course members only.  I am super excited because they asked me to participate tonight as a Type 2 guinea pig for tonight's topic.  They'll use me to demonstrate the principle they're teaching tonight and I get to share some of my thoughts on the subject.  If you get the trial before 7pm MST tonight you can join me live at the Center for Living Your Truth or watch online from the comfort of your own home.  What have you got to lose?  you get to see what it is I'm crazy about and whether you are interested or not and you get to join me tonight at one of the highlights of my month,.. my Girl's Night Out so to speak.  I hope that if you have ever been interested in this and wanted to know more that you'll take a peak and see what it's all about.  See ya later!

13th Article of Faith Collages

 OK I totally forgot to take pictures of the collages before the girls left.  My bad.  This was how it looked right before I cleaned up. 

We had 3 girls show up tonight.  This activity is from the Preparing for Young Women's Section where the girls are supposed to learn about the 13th article of faith and make lists of things that are virtuous lovely or of good report or praiseworthy and then discuss with a teacher or parent how to seek after them. 

yes I know I forgot to actually write "Indeed we may say we follow the admonition of Paul: we believe all things,..."   I thought it but I was hurriedly writing while the girls were watching me so my brain skipped it since I already said it in my head.  So for the first half of the hour we discussed what the article of faith meant.  If you have an adoreable 2 year old I suggest getting a babysitter as there were plenty of distractions happening during this time and it was occasionally difficult to stay focused.  I found that the girls didn't know more than 1 of the main words in the article so we went over each phrase in the article of faith and discussed what the words and phrases meant.  Then once we got through it and I emphasized what it meant to seek after something that we want to surround ourselves with that thing or do things that fall into those categories or what have you then we got down to the nitty gritty and started making our collages!

 

I rummaged through barnes and noble and bought a couple of kids/parent magazines, health magazine, and I even threw in an old ensign at the end that they could cut things from.   I figured if we have to make a list what more fun than making a collage of pictures.  I'm a visual person.  We wrote the words "We seek after these things" on the paper and then surrounded the words with pictures.  It was fun.  

I did find that I had to monitor what the girls were cutting out and challenge them to find one of each kind of thing and to identify how every single thing they cut out was either virtuous, lovely, or of good report (yields good results or attributes), or praiseworthy (requiring a lot of work to accomplish something great).  I also intentionally avoided getting magazines that had things like Justin Beiber in them.  I was really tempted to get a justin beiber magazine but since one of my girls is particularly afflicted with "beiber fever" and gets pretty disruptive, I decided to stick with more wholesome less worldly magazines since I really wanted this to be a more spiritual learning activity.  I think it turned out well and I think the girls had a good time and while they didn't completely grasp what the words meant they got the general idea I think.   Until Next time.  Hope you enjoyed my activity idea.

waiting,..waiting,..waiting,..

for my tax return to be deposited!! 

I think this year has taken the longest yet to get my tax return deposited to my bank.  I'm so anxious cause I really want to use it to get some power outlets in our home repaired so that we can finally have power in our house in the bathrooms! and our bedroom.  hallelujah!  I will be dancin a jig when this is finally fixed....not to mention having power in the garage finally and on the outside of the house.    We've been waiting a very,..very,.. very long time for this to get fixed.

I'm half tempted to put the rest of it towards some home improvements like a sprinkler system or replacing the hot water heater or roof, but It's probably better to pay off some debts so that when we have problems on our roof or hot water heater we're not digging ourselves deeper.  

at any rate,... Why oh Why!! is the government taking so long to deposit my money.  I've been ever so patient,... I've waited for at least a week!  hahahahaha,... oh the woes of modern conveniences.  We expect everything to be so zippy fast these days that a week and a half seems like an eternity.  haha. 

In other news.  Stay tuned for my next post on Activity Days tonight.  Hopefully I can find some magazines with things in them that 8 year old girls like for a collage.   Mr. Stressa (Hope my friend SnickerdoodleSteph doesn't mind me copying her in referring to my hubby this way)... Mr. Stressa has graciously offered to let me use his car and motorcycle magazines of which he has plenty!  (there's advertisements in there that they would like right?),... somehow I just don't think that's quite going to cut it.  These girls are into Justin Beber!!  Not Justin Barcia!!

Activity Days: Hair Accessories!

I've been promising my girls that we would do another craft but I keep getting caught unprepared and so we've put it off.  I finally got my act together and came up with this fun Hair Accessories craft.  The idea is that they make hair accessories from mostly odds and ends and then "display" them afterward by wearing them with an outfit to school or something.  This was an activity for "Developing Talents" the part about making a craft and displaying it. 

The girls had a blast and I was super surprised (as I knew I would be) with what they came up with.

I prepared by getting several scraps of fun and random exciting ribbons (you know the crazy fun oddball ones that you wish you could get away with putting on an outfit but wouldn't dare actually wear somewhere), a cute colored feather boa (for the feathers),  flowers, clips, headbands, hair ties, and even fat quarters scraps of fabric from the quilting fabric store.

We used glue guns to attach the ribbons, fabrics, and flowers to the clips, and headbands.  The hair ties didn't work out because I got a really small size and nobody was sure how to really attach it anyway so we sort of scrapped that one.

The girls began pulling the flowers apart and combining different colors of petals to create multi-colored flowers.  Some girls attached feathers to the sides of their headbands to add style.  One of the girls actually made a sort of veil out of hers with some really flowy ribbon and fabric scraps with some drapey flowers running along the sides sorta like princess leia or something it turned out super cute.  They had a lot of fun creating something from their own ideas and were pleased with what they came up with.   Some of the girls even turned it into a bit of service as they were making some of the bows for younger siblings rather than themselves. 

 You'd think that this little stinker got into my supplies but in truth she was mostly out of the picture during all the action.  I was manning the hot glue gun the entire time since most of the girls were afraid of getting burned and so the chaos ensued free to leash itself upon my living room inflicted by those crazy enthusiastic girls while they worked on their projects. 

We had a good time and I keep thinking how am I ever going to keep coming up with these fun activities.  One of these days I'm going to run out and these girls are going to get sick of having "lesson" activities.   Until next week's activity days activity then.   See ya.