Pictures at last!

My wonderful parents got me a new camera for Christmas to replace my broken one, so now I have about a billion pictures to share with you. Enjoy!
Family

More family

My aunt Kim with her cute puppy

My grandparents opening gifts

General Christmas mayhem at my grandparents' house

My cute niece Addison

My other cute niece and her beautiful mama

Just cute

New shoes from Tim!

I really love my shoes

General Christmas mess at our house

The top of our Who-ville tree

From the side

At the end of our wonderful Christmas

Game night with the games we got for Christmas



Too many pictures, I know. I may have been overcompensating for the several months without a camera. I have more from New Year's...but maybe I'll save those for later.

What I'm grateful for (in no particular order)

1. Family. A thousand times over, I'm grateful for my family. Grateful that I get to spend time with them, that we have so much fun together, that they are such good people.

2. A new camera! My blog will be cool again!

3. My loving, supportive husband who keeps me from freaking out on a regular basis. I'd go to pieces without him. I'm so lucky to have someone who cares about me enough to tell me when to take things off my to-do list.

4. My job. I absolutely love my writing/editing job at Northridge Publishing and when I think back to where I was working six months ago and how much I didn't like it, I am so incredibly grateful to be where I am now.

5. Tim's job and how much self-esteem it gives him to be needed/wanted/valued in his work.

6. Our memory foam mattress. Not to brag or anything, but we have the best bed in the world. If you ask real nice, I'll let you sit on it. :)

7. Snow. Okay, this is a stretch today, but I am grateful that there will be some water for next summer. And for how pretty it is when it snows.

8. New tires on Tim's car. I didn't get stuck when I drove his car today and that is simply miraculous.

9. Tim's math tutor Alli. She's amazing and Tim's grade improved like, 400% from the last time he took Calculus. So so grateful.

10. Christmas! My favorite Christmas moment came after the presents had been opened at my parents' house but before we left for my grandparents' house to see my extended family. I was sitting in the living room, cleaning up and packing up our gifts, when I looked around at the jumbled mess and I was completely overwhelmed by how blessed I am to have so many people to love and who love me back. It wasn't the gifts that made me start to cry, but what they represented. I know there are so many families who do not get along, who have been torn apart by the choices of some family members, who don't have everyone with them at Christmas, and I am so grateful that at least once a year, my family gathers to celebrate not only our Savior, but our love for each other.

Turning to Jesus

As much as I love Christmas, it tends to get a little crazy. Everyone wants to spend time with everyone else, but party times conflict and all the fun plans get smashed in between trips to the grocery store and baking crazes and shopping. It's wonderful to have time off of work and school, but there are days when it doesn't feel like much of a vacation. Something has to get cut out. This year, it was my family's annual trip to the Cathedral of the Madeline in Salt Lake for a Christmas choir concert. I love going, but I knew that fitting it in would be more stress than it was worth (and besides, those wooden benches are not comfortable).

My mom shared a quote with me the other day that I can't remember exactly, but it was essentially that we have to turn to Jesus in order to survive the Christmas season. I laughed when she told me, but it occurred to me that Christmas, with all its accompanying stress, is exactly when we need Jesus the most. I've watched the season get crazy, and the to-do lists become overwhelming, and in the midst of it all, my patience with people and traffic has run low. In the last few days, I've seen more angry drivers and impatient shoppers than at any other time of the year. The demands of the season distract us so easily from the reasons for celebrating it.

And so, I'm turning to Jesus to help me get through the season. I'm trying to remember why it is I'm shopping and baking and wrapping, and surprisingly, it's in those very activities that I've found the Savior. He gave unselfishly and unceasingly, and as I have planned gifts and surprises, I have felt the Christmas spirit most strongly. I can't wait for Christmas so I can watch the faces of my husband and family as they open the gifts I carefully picked out for them. I can't wait to feel the kindness of the day envelop me. We celebrate Christ's birth because He gave us life and love and hope, and in turning to Him, I find my patience and compassion returning. And that is the best gift of all.

Merry Christmas!

The Nativity: A Christmas Production

Last night, at my Maryon family party, my extended family put on our Nativity play. This play has been a part of our family since my father was a child. My Grandma Pat wrote the script and it includes Christmas songs and hymns, and scripture passages from the Book of Mormon as well as the Bible. We have performed the very same thing year after year. When I was growing up, I was an angel with a halo of gold tinsel and a white sheet draped around me. Once or twice I got to play Mary, and in later years, I played the piano accompaniment or read some of the narration.

This year, Tim and I were asked to play Joseph and Mary. We were being a little silly as we put on costumes and as I tried to swaddle the baby doll that was Jesus. But when it came time to walk across the room and kneel together around the blanketed infant, the story took shape and reality. My cousins knelt around us, my aunts and uncles read lines of scripture, and together we sang joy and praise.

My cousins and I are growing up, growing a little old to dress up, but this is a tradition that I know we'll carry on. Eventually we'll have our own children and they will be forced to dress up as angels and shepherds and wisemen. There is something beautiful about sharing a tradition with family, especially one that celebrates something as holy and joyful as the birth of our Savior. We may roll our eyes a little at the production, but in our hearts, we love taking part in this Christmas pageant every year.

Done, Need to, Ready

Done with teaching, done with finals, and done with being sick.

Still need to work, still need to shop, still need to wrap, still need to bake.

Ready to play, ready to plan surprises, ready to sleep in, ready for snow, ready for family, ready for Christmas!

Gosh, I love this time of year.

My Many Hats

I don't actually own many hats (though I do drool over the incredible works of art in the My Fair Lady Ascot scene) but somedays I feel like I have too many to keep track off.

For example, this morning I woke up and put on my elementary school teacher "hat." It's a little ragged but still intact. It's wide-brimmed with a ribbon around the band, an attempt at homey comfort, but most of the time it's just a work hat that keeps the sun off my neck. (Please read into these metaphors...)

As soon as I was done being a teacher, I threw that hat into the back of my car and pulled on my writer/editor hat as I zoomed to my next job. When I got to the office, I collected boxes of new submissions, answered emails, edited text, and settled in to write more. My 1920s journalist hat still looks sharp after several months of working, though the brim on one side is starting to stretch where I keep pulling it down.

Throughout the day, I occasionally switch to my friend/confidante hat (a wide scarf) or my creative writer hat (newsboy cap). When I'm done with work, I have to switch again, sometimes pulling on my ACT prep teacher hat (cowgirl) or thankfully slinging on my best friend/wife hat (Tim's BYU baseball cap). Tonight I will pin on my Ward-Christmas-Party hat (I'm still not sure what that looks like) and then I'll pull my hair back and tie a scarf on when I hang out with my friends.

The roles I play occasionally feel so completely different from each other, I hardly recognize myself. Sometimes I wish I had just one hat to wear each day, one person to be.

I have a blog I follow that always asks a question at the end of each post. If this were that type of blog, I'd end this post like this: What "hats" do you find yourself wearing most often? Are there any you wish you wore less or more? Do you think it's possible to only have one hat?

Teaching update

Yesterday I made a conscious effort to be positive, energetic, and animated when I taught. Usually that makes my class time go better--if I'm excited to be there, they are too. And then I'm moving so much that I don't notice if they're chatty.

Yesterday I had first graders, one of whom spent the class crying under the long counter on one side of my classroom until I told her if she didn't participate in class, we'd have to talk to her teacher later. She came out long enough to be obnoxious and disruptive so that I had to discipline her again, which provoked more sobbing as we walked back to class. Literally sobbing. Her shirt was wet from her tears.

Another student spent the day pulling sheets of colored and lined paper from my small supply, drawing pictures, and handing them out to other students regardless of me asking her to just sit down.

Two other students decided that having the freedom to move around the room (we were exploring how music can make us feel) meant they could roughhouse and wrestle where they thought I couldn't see them. When I called them out for it, one of them got his feelings hurt and refused to talk to me for the rest of the class.

The rest of the class was restless, chatty, and did not stay quiet for more than about two minutes at a time, which is usual for first graders.

There are good days, and there are bad days. This was a bad day.

To be a teacher

Last August I took a job teaching music at an elementary school. It's been about four months since then, and I've discovered that teaching well is an extraordinarily difficult task and truthfully, I'm not very good at it. I've gotten better since that first terrifying day, but I haven't figured out the secret to it. I can make a decent lesson plan and I've learned how to deal with most of the problems first and second graders can come up with, but I haven't been able to make the leap from just going through the motions and being a teacher.

Then a few weeks ago, I was called to be in my ward's Primary presidency. Other than being slightly overwhelming because of the responsibility of the calling, I found it ironic that I'm being called to work with more children. I wonder, what am I supposed to be learning from all of this? Is it preparing me for my own kids, or is it an incentive to wait?

As I sat in Primary on Sunday and watched one of the younger kids yell through Sharing Time, it occurred to me that maybe the only lesson I will take from all this is patience. I have never been good at letting chaos go uncontrolled and kids really are the epitome of unpredictability. If I am going to survive the year and eventually be a good mom, I am going to need so much more patience than I currently possess.

I think the other thing I am going to learn, or at least I hope I will learn, is love. My sister-in-law Bekah is a fantastic teacher and she's given me lots of help and humor. She said on her blog the other day that as she's become a mom with a daughter to love, she's found more love for her students as well. When I read that, I realized that's one of the things I'm lacking. Most of the time, my students are out-of-control problems that need to be solved, shushed, corralled, and managed. I don't worry very much about whether or not they're having a good day, but rather whether or not I'm having a good day. And I think it's supposed to be the opposite.

I don't know if I'm going to get any better, but I've decided to give it a try (probably after Christmas break, let's be honest). I'm teaching 120 six-, seven-, and eight-year-olds how to read music notes and clap a beat and sing, but I want to teach them to be good people, to be excited about learning, and that I am an adult who cares about them. I don't know how to do it yet, but I'll let you know if I figure it out.