A lot to be thankful for

Such a wonderful and much needed Thanksgiving back in good 'ole Beaumont, TEXAS! I was able to see many friends, family, and share a lot of laughs! I even put a little blonde in my hair, thanks to my favorite hair stylist and mother, Jay Sheppard!

Fun with Josh and Jeanan 

Birthday dinner for Theresa with Kyler!

Winter Camp at Woodleaf

I had a tramendous time this weekend with my Sacramento Capernaum friends at Woodleaf Winter YoungLife Camp. We laughed. We ate. We played in mud. We danced. We listened to beautiful talks. We sang. We learned more about Christ.

Exactly what I needed after GRE weekend and before Christmas season began!

This is how I felt about taking the GRE

Felt much better after some rollerblading and getting awesome gifts from my favorite girls! 

11-12-13

Nothing big to take note of today, except the fact that today's date is pretty awesome!

11/12/13

Veteran's Day!

Happy Veteran's Day!

I started my day with donating blood, which felt great cause I was long overdue for a donation, it's been awhile! Then I headed over to my teamleader's grandma's house were my two TLs had made an amazing brunch for our Rosa Parks City Year team! There we ate delicious food and played bored games. Later we went paintballing, which was scary. haha It was actually really fun. But, I had never been before, so I spent the first couple rounds hiding behind a wall afraid to move.

Nice to start my Veteran's Day donating blood in honor of the blood shed for our country and to end it with a battle of our own of the paintball field.

Thank you to all those who serve and protect us. 

Taste and See

The Lord is so good. In the Capernaum club talk tonight, Colleen gave a great talk. If we are going to bake something, like a cake for instance, the ingredients ( baking soda, flour, salt, sugar) are not good by themselves; instead they are bland, tasteless, bad, except for maybe sugar, it's good! Our lives, too, are big mixing bowls full of the mundane, hard times, trials, and wonderful things. Separately these chapters in our lives don't do much for us, but when we mix them all together, God creates a beautiful life for us, a beautiful cake! It's important sometimes to step back and look at the big picture. Tonight was a good reminder of that. 

This was a wonderful weekend, not as full of GRE studying as it needed to be, but nonetheless it was great. I did get some studying done, and I also got to hang out with lots of beautiful people. I got together with some people from City Year last night, went to Crazy Hair club at Capernaum, talked to so many great friends over the phone (you too, Mom!) and I even made muffins from scratch with my new friend. 

I got a job hanging out with a really cool eleven year old on Saturday mornings and this Sat. we made blueberry, pomegranate, white chocolate chip muffins from scratch. They turned out spectacularly! That may be another reason that verse really applys to me right now. I've been cooking up a lot of good food! 

I love middle schoolers ( Wait, did I just say that?)

I keep forgetting to post this. A few weeks ago in our after-school classroom, one of my seventh graders claimed to be finished with his homework, so I told him to make me a list of things he knew about Rosa Parks because that is the name of our school and then I planned on letting him research more and figure out how many new things he could learn. 

...But then, this is what I got. 

He gave me a list of the different parts of campus. I couldn't help but laugh a little when he told me he had completed his list. Luckily, he did know a few things about the actual person Rosa Parks! lol  

Dia de los Muertos

We had fun this week teaching the elementary students about Dia de los Muertos, and decorating cookies with them! Also, take note of the foil necklace I'm wearing in the bottom right picture. I made that little beauty in my after-school art club! 

notes in the hallway...better left unread haha

So.... I found this outside the cafeteria last week and I couldn't help but laugh.

 I should be happy she at least used the correct punctuation ending marks. 

Thankful

Tonight I was able to see the opening night production of "Soldadernas", a beautiful play that captures stories of women doing the Mexican Revolution.It it a wonderful job, capturing a sense of authenticity that I feel is hard to come by. In the Q & A section after the play, one of the actresses spoke of the play as unraveling some of the stories that were never told.  It was a great play and I was in the audience with the niece of Cezar Chavez, which was really neat. I am so thankful to the women and people that have went before me, paving the road to a better future. We are not done yet, but it is because of the strong people that have gone before us that we are able to continue to do our best to #makebetterhappen.

I also have a huge urge to listen to Mexican music in the car now!

Picture Day!

We got our school pictures today! Looks like they don't get any better as an adult. haha