Moab Getaway

My family and I all got together for a long weekend in Moab a couple weekends ago.

The reason for the get together was because of my niece Audrey's first ever dance recital!

Audrey with her friend and her cousins after her performance

After the recital we all packed up and headed to Moab for a little three-day getaway!

It was so much fun for all of the kids to get to play together.

They got along pretty well!

We had a weekend full of fun in Arches, swimming, playing games and a whole lot of laughing :)

I definitely love that family of mine!

It was a much needed get away :)

P.S. This is my 200th post! Yay!

May 25: Shine

Day 25: Something someone told you about yourself that you'll never forget.

My first year going to EFY (Especially For Youth) was incredible. I think any teenager would tell you that it was definitely life-changing, but the most memorable experience from the entire week was the Sunday after I got home. I was at church waiting for Young Women's to start when one of the girls in my group sat by me and we started to chat. I was telling her about EFY because she hadn't gone.

Class started and our conversation ended. She leaned over to me and said, "You know, I just see this light in you. You're glowing. You look truly happy."

 She has no idea that she gave me the greatest compliment anyone ever could that day.

Having that "light" in my countenance is something I've continued to strive for.

Hopefully I've continued to succeed!

Marriage and Family Studies

I'm taking a class right now, The Family: A proclamation to the World.

For the class I have to do a semester long project, and I decided to do a blog.

I started a blog over a year ago for one of my other Marriage&Family classes, so I'm just continuing on with that.

I'm proud of it and definitely passionate about it, so check it out!

Just click here.

Yay! :)

May 24: Worst Traits

Day 24: Your top three worst traits

I'm not sure these are my worst traits, but they were the first three to come to mind.

1. I'm a worrier. I worry. A lot. My nickname by my friends in high school was "mama Mel" because I was constantly telling my friends to drive safe, be smart, or to text me when they got home. I know it doesn't bother some people, but I've also been told that it can be incredibly annoying.

I can't help it if I care! :)

2. I'm really good at making up reasons for why every day is a special occasion. This sounds like a good thing, but it's not. It means that every time I try to eat healthier or commit to working out six days per week, I fail. For example - today is Friday (that in itself is special) and it's the Friday before Memorial Day weekend. Everyone else is taking the day off, so I deserve a cookie.

Logical, right?

It happens every. single. day.

3. When I'm mad or when I just simply don't want to be talked to, I get scary.

No, really. I get scary.

You can ask some of my closest friends or past roommates.

It's a silent kind of scary where I don't say anything, but I have the "look."

But don't worry, I'm working on this one :)

May 23: Lessons

Day 23: Things you've learned that school won't teach you

I've been skipping days (oops!).

Quite honestly some of the days just haven't been my cup of tea.

Combine that with being ridiculously swamped with school and trying to keep my head above water, and blogging is just simply not my number one priority.

So I'm going to make today easy.

Here ya have it, according to Pinterest:

This topic had a lot of potential for a rather insightful post, but I just quite frankly do not have the time.

Off to do homework while answering calls and appeasing needy clients.

Party!

May 21: Favorite Posts

Day 21: A list of links to your favorite posts in your archives.

Easy peasy!

Understanding Grace: If you need a little inspiration :) I read this one often. I reminds me how far I've come, but also just how far I have to go (or have the privilege of going).

Daddy-daughter Vacation: One of my favorite days from my vacation with my dad last summer. It was hard to pick a favorite post from this trip!

Girl Scout Cookies: Freshman year memories with two of my favorite girls! I still find this post absolutely hilarious, though I'm probably the only one in the world that does :)

What we want the most, but use the worst: All about time. I'm not sure why I like this one so much.

Balloons, Blankets and BFF's: More memories. This was definitely one of my favorite semesters ever!

Project 365: I loved doing this project and this post is a really good summary of my favorite pictures as well as what the project meant to me. I need to do another one!

So there ya have it :)

May 18: Memory

Day 18: Tell a story from you childhood.

Once upon a time my parents went to Hawaii and left my sisters and I behind at my grandparents house. My grandma had a tradition with her grandchildren of sitting on their front porch swing and swinging and singing songs from the Children's Songbook. She would always bring a little boom box, the songbook, and occasionally a few snacks outside.

While my sisters and I were staying at their home some of our cousins came to join us for a little bit. While we were all they, my grandparents shared the bad news...

My grandpa was to redo the front porch to put in the beautiful wooden deck that they now have. This meant that they had to get rid of the swing.

My cousins and I were so upset by this news that we got together and schemed about how we could stop this tragedy from occurring.

So, we put my grandparents on trial.

We had a judge, attorneys, and a jury.

We began the trial by making a picket sign which said, "No swing, no sing!"

We marched upstairs chanting, "No swing, no sing!" until we gathered up my grandparents and held them on trial.

I remember my poor grandmother being so amused but so upset that we were threatening her precious singing time with us kids if grandpa got rid of the swing.

I don't remember much more than that, but in the end my grandpa got rid of the swing and my cousins and I actually boycotted singing for some time.

My grandma still has that little piece of paper we taped to a wooden stick that reads, "No swing, no sing!" She has it in her scrapbook.

To this day my grandma still talks about how our little trial broke her heart.

We eventually gave in and started singing with her again :)

I love my grandparents!

May 17: Favorite Picture

Day 17: A favorite photo of yourself and why

I feel kind of vain doing this blog post... :)

Instead of finding a favorite (because we all know I'm terrible at picking favorites...) I decided to find one that was candid, random, or just a fun photo of myself.

This was taken in our limo to dinner for my Senior Prom.

I love this picture because it was almost a completely candid shot, but at the last minute I looked up and smiled.

My senior prom was by far my favorite high school dance.

The group was great, my date was great, dinner was great, the dance was great, and our little after party was great.

I'm glad I got this fun picture out of it :)

May 16: Blessed

Day 16: Something difficult about your "lot in life" and how you're working to overcome it.

Wow.

I've been thinking about how to go about this post for about a week now.

I worry that I'll sound conceited or as though I have the perfect life, but I can assure you, my life is far from perfect, I am far from perfect, and I definitely have many trials.

Here's the thing...

We all have things in our lives that we have to overcome, and I am no exception.

I could sit here and complain about a whole multitude of things, but I've spent the last month or two really focusing on being positive and I don't want to ruin that now.

As I've thought about this post for the past few days I've come to the conclusion that I really have been blessed in many ways.

I feel like I have my head on straight and am working towards becoming a better me every day.

Overcoming my "lot in life" has become easier and easier as I've accentuated the positive and stopped letting the negative have control.

There's power in positive thinking!

All you have to do is change your attitude :)

M.I.A.

I knew when I decided to do the Blog Every Day in May challenge that I'd miss a few days due to my family vacation this past weekend.

I'm super swamped with work, homework, and laundry among a trillion other things.

So, I'll be back to the challenge tomorrow and will hopefully blog about my wonderful vacation sooner rather than later ;)

May 10: Am I Really That Dumb?

Day 10: Most embarrassing moment(s).

I really feel like I have been fortunate enough not to have any profoundly embarrassing moments throughout my life (knock on wood...).

So when I sat down to write this post, I could not think of a story for the life of me.

I asked my coworker if I'd had any embarrassing moments since I started working here.

She successfully reminded me of one painfully embarrassing story.

So here goes nothin.

Once upon a time I was a brand new employee at a super awesome Executive Suites office downtown.

The training for the job was somewhat informal - kind of learn as you go.

The first day, my coworker took me down to show me the mailroom and the FedEx and UPS drop off boxes where we take packages every day.

Every day for the next two weeks my coworker and I alternated days taking the FedEx and UPS packages down at the end of the day.

One day, my boss comes in saying how one of our clients had a super important international FedEx envelope that hadn't been scanned or tracked at all, and we were supposed to have taken it down two days prior.

This tenant basically accused us of not taking his packages/envelopes down to the basement.

Every day for those two weeks I HAD been taking the packages/envelopes down.

I do my job, and I do my job well and thoroughly (or so I thought).

Allow me to present a visual:

Here's where it gets good:
See that little orange strip with little words on the left?

It says, "lift here to deposit packages"

Any person with a brain would realize that the entire purple part is like a little lid, and you lift it to put in smaller packages or envelopes.

But apparently I'm not the smart, college-educated person I thought I was, because I had been putting the envelopes in the top part - the place where all of the supplies are.

Here's the thing...

Every day I took packages down, they were either too big, so I'd just set them in front of the drop-off box, or they were envelopes. The first time I took an envelope down I KNEW that it could not possibly be right to put them in the supplies area, but there were three other envelopes ready and waiting to go out.

So I went along with it, all the while with this little feeling in the back of my mind that something wasn't right.

Our regular FedEx guy knew that there were idiots like me in the building who put the envelopes in there, so he would check there on a daily basis and pick up those envelopes.

Well, the regular FedEx guy went out of town, and we had a guy filling in... 

This guy didn't know (rightfully so) that some brilliant people were putting envelopes in the supplies area.

So, my coworker, boss and I are all scrambling around figuring out what happened to this client's package.

I go down to check to see if it had been picked up.

I come up with the package.

It hasn't been picked up!

FedEx clearly hasn't done their pick-ups for two days!

My coworker gets on the phone with FedEx and starts chewing them out, saying that I was able to see three envelopes that had not been picked up, pulled them out and brought them back upstairs.

The FedEx lady tells my coworker (not so politely) that her coworker is a liar and there is no way she (I) could get my "little" hand in there and pull packages out.

Well, lo and behold, little Miss FedEx was right.

My boss had me walk down to the basement with her and show here where I had been putting the envelopes.

I thought I was going to die, or worse, get fired.

So that's the story of a college junior with a 3.95 GPA who couldn't figure out how to work a FedEx drop off box.

Maybe FedEx just needs to make their drop-off boxes like UPS'.

I figured that one out ALL on my own :)

Luckily, we all make mistakes and a chocolate chip scone made it all better.

C'est la vie :)

May 9: Moment

Day 9: A moment in your day

View from my reception desk.

Looks peaceful, huh?

Don't be fooled, we have two depositions happening all day today.

It's madness up in here.

May 8: Advice

Day 8:

A piece of advice you have for others.

I could have decided to write my own hopefully inspiring post, but I feel like I've done a lot of those lately, and I hate to bore you.

So, I'm keeping it short and to the point!

My advice comes from two incredibly wise men, and the graphics come from this article from Time Out For Women

I felt that these two went hand in hand really well, and I couldn't agree more with them.

My advice is to think about those two incredibly wise quotes, but more importantly, to apply them to your lives.

I promise you'll see a change for the better :)

May 7: Fears

Day 7: The thing(s) you're most afraid of

Ideally, with this one I'd get all deep and share a few of my real fears, but those are just a little too personal. Honestly, I'm already working on overcoming many of those big, personal, life-altering fears. But don't get me wrong, I still have some!

As a matter of fact, I'll share one of them.

This one is fairly recent, like within the past few months.

I honestly fear marriage.

Well, maybe that's a bad way to put it.

I fear all of the negative outcomes that could be a result of a failed marriage.

I fear that my husband won't commit or he'll want out.

Over the last few months I had an inside look at a couple of my friend's marriages, and due to that I am actually scared to death to get married.

To the point that I'm not even thinking about it, I don't want to think about it, and I'm planning to avoid it for the next few (four or five) years.

Now before I get a bunch of people getting all preachy on me, I know that marriage is hard but can be amazing. I've had, and continue to have, incredible examples of amazing and strong marriages in my life.

I know it's possible.

I'm a Marriage and Family Studies minor, I understand the importance of marriage, and I will get married one day.

What I'm afraid of is marrying someone who will just decide they want out.

Or end up not being who I thought they were.

Maybe they will change and end up different than they ever thought they would be.

It could be a million different things, and that's what I'm afraid of.

Don't worry, I'll get over it, but for now I'm sticking to living my own independent and happy life.

Bad point of view? Oh well.

I'll get married when it's right (but I'm just seriously hoping it's years from now.)

May 6: What do I do?

Day 6: If you couldn't answer with your job, how would you answer the question "what do you do?"

Wow, what a loaded question.

So, what do I do?

Being honest (and this isn't a cop-out), I am a student.

I've always really loved learning, even more so when the learning is in my particular area of interest.

I'm not just a student at a university, I'm a student of life (is that cheesy? Oh well!).

But seriously, I feel like I'm constantly learning about myself, about the Gospel, about other people, and about the world. 

To prove that this isn't just a cop-out, I'll share some potentially nerdy facts about myself:

~I am addicted to TED talks. I've mentioned this one before, but seriously, TED is amazing.

~I listen to General Conference talks every night in bed while I fall asleep.

~I'd rather read an autobiography or something non-fiction over Nicholas Sparks or Jodi Picoult (though those are amazing too, and I do take the time to read them ;) )

~It's not uncommon to find me spending a Saturday night watching a documentary on Netflix.

~Top Gear is one of my favorite shows. Hey, it's educational in its own way :)

In short, there are a lot of ways I could have answered this question, but I will forever be a student even long after I have my degree and have left college campuses and textbooks behind.

My fourth grade teacher would be so proud that I really have become a lifelong learner :)

May 4th: Words Words Words

Day 4:

Favorite quote and why you love it.

Let me just throw a little disclaimer in here and say that I suck at picking favorites. Favorite food, favorite song, favorite movie... whatever it may be, I despise and am quite possibly incapable of picking favorites.

Instead, I prefer to choose whatever I've seemed to love the most in recent days, weeks or months.

I'm a lover of quotes (as my Pinterest followers can definitely see...) so it's very difficult to pick just one. 

But I finally settled on this...

I think I've loved this so much lately because I myself have learned a lot in the past few months and can relate to some of these realizations.

If anything, we all just need a reminder that we're in control of our happiness, we don't need to take things so seriously, and most importantly, we need to be nice to one another.

We're all going through our own personal battle.

Kindness goes a long way.

And now, one for kicks and giggles....

That kid is a genius :)

Happy Saturday!

May 3rd: Oh So Uncomfortable

Day 3:

Things that make you uncomfortable

~The words crusty and moist

~Watching Mariah Carey judge on American Idol

~Any talk of bodily functions

~ People who stand too close to me

~Being late

~Those who argue in public

~Poor grammar

~Watching Taylor Swift perform

(I still love her music though!)

~Panty lines

~Twitter

~Going to the bathroom on an airplane

~Having to play any type of sport in front of a guy. I'll watch you play, I'll watch your favorite team with you every single time they play, and I'll honestly love it, but good luck ever getting me to play any sport. It really isn't pretty.

That's enough for now :)

May 2nd: Educate Us

Day 2:

Educate us on something you know a lot about or are good at.

I wouldn't necessarily say I know a lot about this, but it's hard to be bad at and I've been meaning to do a blog post about it for months, so here we go.

A few months ago I decided to make a few freezer meals for nights when slaving over the stove just didn't seem like fun.

Let me tell you, it was so incredibly easy.

I found three recipes:
Chicken Cacciatore
Black Bean Taco Soup
Chicken Broccoli Alfredo

You can find all three recipes here

The most time-intensive part was chopping up the ingredients for the chicken caccitore and cooking the ground beef for the black bean taco soup.
In total, it took me 45 minutes to assemble everything and clean up.
Fifteen minutes per meal?! Can't argue with that!

I apologize in advance for my photos.
I'm definitely no aspiring food photographer :)

So here are my reviews after trying all of them.

Black Bean Taco Soup:

This turned out great. I really liked the consistency of the soup and how easy it was. My only complaint with this was that I felt it needed to be a little spicier. I shared this one with my parents and they both liked it quite a bit and I seemed to be the only one who would have preferred a little spice :)

This is definitely one I'll make again with a few modifications.

Chicken cacciatore:

SO delicious. The first night I had it I just cut one of the chicken breasts in half and had it over angel hair pasta (which I prefer to spaghetti) but the chicken was so tender that I decided to shred it for leftovers the next night. My advice... definitely shred it before you serve it! It was so much better shredded and it was easier to eat if you're weird like me and something about a whole chicken breast on top of pasta bothers you :) I shared this one with my roommate and neither of us could get enough of it. It was definitely my favorite of the three freezer meals and one I'll make multiple times in the future.

Chicken Broccoli Alfredo:

Alright, here's the deal. This one was a partial fail. It took forever for the chicken to cook through, which I could have remedied by cutting the chicken breasts into strips before freezing it. The other problem with this one was that it was way too soupy. After dishing it up and letting it sit for a few minutes it started to thicken, but it was still pretty soupy.

This is the only one that I wasn't crazy about and won't make again, but it was okay for one time.

In the end this was definitely something I plan to do many times again in the future with new recipes and those first two that turned out fabulous :)

Blog every day in May - May 1:

I decided to do this "blog every day in May" thing.

I have a feeling I may regret it, given the fact that I'm working 40 hours a week and taking 14 credits of classes....

BUT...

Once upon a time I did a Project 365 through my busiest year of high school and first semester of college.

It was so worth it and is so fun to look back at, so I'm hoping this will be something similar.

If not, at least I'll allow myself a tiny break each day just to write.

It's theraputic :)

So, Day 1: 

The story of your life in 250 words or less

I was the piece that completed the puzzle when I was born on January 28^th 1992 to two loving parents and two older sisters. We moved a lot, from Utah to Washington, then Minnesota and Illinois, and back to Washington. When I went to college at BYU-Idaho in 2010 my parents moved a year later back to Utah. I am unable to decide where I “grew up” and consider home to be wherever I’m living at the time.

I’ve always had a passion for the arts, mainly music. I have a lot of interests, minus anything involving math. I’ve changed my life plan over a million times and am still figuring out what I want from my future.

I prefer a few close friends over a lot of acquaintances.

I love getting out and experiencing new things, but prefer good quality time at home with those I love.

I have big plans for my life but am still working on believing I can make it all happen.

I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, though I didn’t always believe it. Struggling to find a testimony on my own made me stronger and allowed me to stand more convicted of what I have faith in and what I believe.

I want to spend my life making a difference in someone else’s.

I’ll get there some day :)