A River Runs Through It

Tonight, for the first time, Justin and I watched 'A River Runs Through It.' I know, I am a little late to the game. It left me with such a haunting and profound reminder of the parallel lives that people generations and geography apart can have. That sadly my family's walk has been tread before.

A story of the Maclean family, like my own McLean family. Siblings raised with a knowledge of God by parents who loved them, who never stopped caring or hoping for them. One gone astray. The brother who wouldn't accept help. The brother bent on living his life according to his own rules, however treacherous. While the film was beautiful, it left me with a sadness knowing that the phone call will come, just like it did to the Maclean family, telling my McLean family that my brother is dead. And really despite the gut-wrenching heartache, not one of us will be surprised.

It's a sick feeling to see a path that will ultimately lead to death and you can only watch helplessly as innocent people get sucked into the warpath of reckless vice. But there is nothing you can do. Your hands are tied.

However, the words of Reverend Maclean, towards the end of the movie, seared into my mind as he said "Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding."

I will never understand. But somehow, through the grace of God, I can still love. It's the only thing that has brought me an ounce of peace.

It's funny how life can blow you in different directions with the slightest breeze. I have had pictures and subjects I have wanted to blog about the last couple days and life just got away from me. There is something you should know about me...I almost always have the best intentions in the world. But it's my follow-through that lacks. My mom told me once and I know she is 100% right, "Sarah, you are a wonderful mother but your greatest struggle is going to be the same one I struggled with and that is being consistent." I'll start having Family Night regularly, or scripture study, or organizational systems or whatever and I start out gung-ho and something happens and it all falls apart. Whether it be a lack of time, energy, kids going banzai or whatever, my best intentions seem to fall by the wayside. Then I beat myself up and feel overwhelmed.

What I want and aspire to is living life more aware and more deliberately. To not let those moments derail me and all those lovely intentions of mine. To be what I want to be, not merely hope for it. I have been in a little funk of negativity the last week or two. I told my friend Laura, I don't know what is wrong with me. My life is better now than it has ever been, but I still felt like biting everyone's heads off. I let whatever was going on around me (kids screaming/fighting, rushing to get out of the house, whatever...) get to me. I was letting external influences determine my mood.

I have spent the last couple of days trying to get a hold of myself and to, pardon the expression, "Pull my head out of my butt." But I got the extra push this morning from Justin, who has also seemed to be overwhelmed lately, as he happily bounced down the stairs and said "I just listened to the greatest TED talk!!" Seeing him lightened and happy made me lightened and happy and it made me grateful that he was catching the vision I was trying to catch myself.

He shared the link with me and I too loved it. This TED Talk (which we LOVE! Way better than mindlessly watching t.v.) talks about the importance of positive outlook and how it determines our reality and not the other way around. It's funny, informative and left me with a smile on my face. If you want to check it out, click here.

I am going to try the recommended actions for creating lasting positive change that the presenter shared...

* 3 Gratitudes (Recognize three new things you are grateful for every day for 21 days. This will retrain your brain towards a more positive outlook.)

*Journaling (Write down one positive experience you had that day.)

*Exercise (Need to work on this...trains your brain that behaviors matter.)

*Meditation (Resist the urge to multi-task and truly focus on what you are doing in a moment.)

*Random Acts of Kindness (contact one person every day with words of kindness or affirmation.)

I know my faults are many and that I will always be a work in progress. But I am excited to at least feel like I am equipped with tools in bringing about personal success and not just hoping I am able to become the person I know I could be.

Daily Gratitudes

So my 3 Gratitudes for today include...

1. I am thankful for Justin and how after 12 years of highs and lows, I am more in love with him than I ever have been before.

2. I am thankful the sun is shining today! I am nicer, more motivated, and more inclined to be positive when I can see that blue sky smiling down on me.

3. I am thankful for new challenges. I have some new ones on the horizon and I know we can't become better if we are stagnant...so here's to moving forward!

I know, I'm a beast....

No, this is not my freezer. Hopefully soon, but not now. If we had to live off the contents of the freezer in my basement we would be eating strawberry freezer jam, IKEA meatballs, frozen chicken breasts and little else.

Once upon a time I had a freezer stocked full of meals and loaves of homemade bread. Once upon a time I clipped coupons, shopped sales, had a great little food storage set-up and loved menu planning. Once upon a time I only had two kids...(Motherhood is hard work regardless of how many kids you have. All I am saying was #3 and #4 sent me for a loop and it's taken awhile to recover from the sheer workload that each new child brings.)

Anyhoot, Devyn is getting a little older and Lauryn is more independent and life is settling into a groove that feels manageable. Busy still, but manageable. I decided I should start trying to get back into the swing of things and try to reclaim some of my former self. So I got on Pinterest looking for some good recipes and stuff for freezer and slow cooker meals. I came across some sites that looked good; but the cutesy, perfect Mom/cook/blogger persona on the sites got so nauseating after awhile. For instance....

"I chopped all my vegetables while precious, wonderful, perfectly behaved, little Janie sat in her really expensive learning toy next to me and we took time to talk about all the colors and textures of the vegetables...blah, blah, blah....Then I put all my ingredients (that were all organic, because organic is so great and the only way to go!)...blah, blah, blah, blah, blah....Don't forget about how lethal BPA is....blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...I stacked all of the meals the same way I did with my frozen breast milk (because breast milk is the most wonderful nectar we could ever give our wonderful children)....blah, blah, blah...I labeled my freezer meals with the cutest, most-wonderful, custom designed (by me of course!) labels...blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...."

You get the idea.

I'm thinking "Lady just shut up and give me the recipe. I don't care to read on as you pontificate about all this other peripheral crap." It was like bumper stickers for me. (I detest bumper stickers.) You're driving along, you see five million bumper stickers on the back of some car/van/truck summarizing their every like/dislike/activity/vacation destination/family member, etc... I don't need to know all that. I'm a random stranger. Why do they care for me to see all that? They know where they've been, what they do, who is in their family, etc. Why the need to advertise to people they don't even know? I just want to drive down the road without getting the lowdown on your whole life...

Again, I digress.

The point is, here I was just looking for a simple recipe and instead had to wade through this lady's commentary on every little thing. Enough already! I like organic stuff too, but I don't announce it from the rooftops so I can seem so cool and with it. I breastfed my kids too, all four of them. But I don't gain some sense of fulfillment by making sure everyone knows about it. And no, I don't croon colors and stuff with my kids as I cook. Mostly I ask them to get off my leg so I don't trip with a knife in my hand and kill both of us in one fell swoop.

I know, I'm a beast. But seriously, get real people.

Usually I work Friday mornings, but I had today off because our office is moving locations this week and we aren't seeing patients. So I carpe diem-ed by going to a morning pilates class with my friend Laura that I otherwise would usually miss. This class is no joke....at one point I found myself mentally comparing the strain to childbirth. Yeah... it's good. To negate any and all goodness we may have just achieved, (or to placate my bruised self-esteem after watching ladies 20 years older than me kick my butt...) we took the kids to breakfast, with our friend Kristy, at Chick-fil-A where I promptly polished off the equivalent of two, yes count them two, Chicken Biscuits, slathered in strawberry jam accompanied by a nice tall orange juice. I've decided this is the reason why I evade a regular exercise routine...because I eat like a beast when I do!

School Choice

An Associated Press photographer took this picture of Maryn and it was featured as Good Morning America's Photo of the Day. Pretty cool if you ask me!

This morning I had the opportunity to attend the School Choice Rally at the Georgia State Capitol. It was the first ever rally of any kind I have ever attended and it was such a great experience.

We were so grateful for the blue skies we got after so much soggy rain lately!

I am not a very politically minded individual. (I know, I should be better informed, but raising four kids...some things get put on the back burner.) But education and specifically my children's education is something that is very important to me.

Our friends, Asa and Ivy Speidel, Maryn, Brynna and Brynnie's buddy Olivia

Which is why Maryn, Brynna, our friends the Speidel's and I made the trek to downtown Atlanta today; to let politicians in the state of Georgia know that we, as parents, want to be able to choose what we feel is the right educational fit for our children.

Maryn and Brynna attend a charter school, so it is important to me to protect our right to be able to continue with a charter school education. In our area the public schools are actually pretty good (although that is not the case elsewhere in Atlanta.) I have many friends near us who are very pleased with their public school experience and some who are not. I also have a handful of friends that Homeschool. I love that despite our different opinions, needs or expectations, each one of us has had the freedom to choose what we deem to be the right environment for our children. To me that is something worth protecting and worth speaking out for.

Brynna and Olivia, those two are just a hoot together! I love the silly looks they get on their faces!

If you haven't watched the documentary 'Waiting for Superman', put it in your Netflix queue and watch it. (Watch the trailer here.) It really resonated with me because growing up I didn't realize there were or should be choices. I did have a handful of good teachers, but overall I was grouped in with a herd of teachers who really didn't care. I didn't realize then that I shouldn't have to settle for that. I didn't realize that I had potential that no one was willing to see or nurture.

I had a great teacher, Mrs. Minor, in the 5th grade who was thoughtful and really helped encourage my strong suits. But it wasn't until my Senior year in high school that I again encountered a teacher who made a difference in my life. A teacher who saw something in me and went out of her way to tell me so. She was Mrs. Schmidt, my Dental Assisting instructor at a vocational school I was attending in addition to my regular high school. (I was receiving dual credits.) I was so sick of being overlooked at my high school. So sick of no one caring. Then out of nowhere, Valerie Schmidt noticed me and made a difference.

This choir of kids from a local Atlanta academy were simply amazing. Their voices were so moving and I was privileged enough to be standing right next to them!

That vocational program was a godsend for me. It got me out of my crappy high school for half of the day and put me in an environment where I flourished. I was actually challenged and learning new things as opposed to being disregarded by teachers who were happy to read a newspaper rather than instruct. Most importantly though for the first time in a long time I felt valued and encouraged. In retrospect I am so thankful that I had that choice. To leave the school that wasn't working and find something better for me. I had beat myself up for many years after graduation for only having a vocational education. However, recently Justin showed me a Congressional testimony that Mike Rowe gave on vocational occupations that really changed my thoughts on my perceived inadequacies in my vocational education.

The bottom line is, I want my girls to do or be whatever they want to. Whether it's a lawyer, a doctor, a journalist, an artist, or even a dental assistant. I want for them if their desire is to go to college, for there never to be a question of that being supported. If they choose a vocational education, I hope they will know it was by choice because it fulfills them and not because they were made to feel they weren't good enough or prepared enough for other options. I want them to do what makes them happy. I want them to feel the stream of encouraging support throughout their entire educational journey. Not just in brief patches here and there. I want them in a place that holds teachers accountable. I want them in a place that is only open as long as it is producing good results in the lives of it's students. I want to have the peace of mind as their mother in knowing that I did everything I could to give them the tools necessary to achieve their ambitions and that is why I rallied today to have a CHOICE.

Watch local news coverage of the event here. I was caught hootin' and hollerin' in the crowd in one of the shots!

Dress Dilemma

Okay, so I bought this dress last summer when I was scouring the earth looking for something to wear to my brother-in-law, Kevin's, wedding. One may think that's not such a hard endeavor. But when you are a committed Mormon gal like me, you take the modesty factor of clothes into consideration in a stricter way than some might. While it doesn't mean you'll ever find me shuffling around in a prairie dress with a bonnet on my head, it does mean I keep my dresses and shorts to the knee and keep my shoulders, back and boobs covered. Next time you go special occasion shopping check out your options, you'll realize that is not always the easiest task!

Anyhoot, so I bought this dress for back-up in case I could just not find anything in the color scheme my sis-in-law, Missy, was shooting for, which was pinks and neutrals mostly. The dress wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but I liked it and I was seriously running out of options. It was one of those situations where there were only a couple left and they wouldn't be getting any more in stock before the wedding, kind of deals. So even though the designer did not accept returns, I bit the bullet and bought it for fear of attending the wedding in a potato sack as my only other alternative.

I ended up finding a simple, cream dress that I thought worked better with the feel my sis-in-law Missy was going for...

The whole, big extended Young Crew! Kevin and Missy's wedding was beautiful!

See what I mean? A dove grey dress wouldn't have blended in as well...

The point is, I now had this grey dress that I couldn't return but discovered once I tried it on that it fit...but not exactly how I expected. It fit me more like this gal in the picture below than how it did on the Twilight chick in the first picture, where it just seemed like a nice, tailored dress. It's not just tailored folks, this dress hugs every curve!

Justin loves the dress, thinks it's smokin' hot, BUT here's where my dilemma comes in...is it too form-fitting to be considered modest? Sure, it's covering all the essential body parts, but I don't know... It cost a pretty-penny and so I would like to wear it, but it has been sitting on a hanger in my closet lonely and unused because I am just not sure. The only time I really wear dresses is to church and I don't really think having every outline of my derierre perfectly caressed would be very appropriate for worship. So the question now is, what the heck am I going to do with it?! Sigh.