Dancing with Daffodils

Well, you know how much I love summer. I've been verbose at times on how much I love having my own schedule, enjoy the beach and the pool, the joy of picnics and summer rain storms and dusk when it starts to cool off but isn't dark yet, and eating copious amounts of ice cream. One of my very favorite parts of summer is sleeping in. We've been out of school for a week but because my son attended cub scout day camp this week, I had to actually set an alarm and get up earlier than on school days. Thankfully I had a friend close by who drove him each morning so I just had to get him to her house or I would have to get all the kids dressed and in the car to go sign him in every morning at 7:45 am. Does that sound early to you? It is very early for me. I don't like to start my day before 8 am and I do have to say I was shocked by how many people were out and about at 7:25 when I was driving him to our friend's house, eyes barely open. This is how I have learned what a...

My second grader is a great speller. He rarely did any practicing for his spelling tests and maybe missed five words total for the year. When he came home with a paper saying there was going to be a class spelling bee and then the top four spellers would go on a grade-wide spelling bee, I was excited for him and expected him to do well. I didn't push it or want to put any pressure on him and we had a busy weekend so it was just three days beforehand that I suggested we go through the long practice list that had been sent home. Each day we had to go over an entire front and back of words in order to go over all of them in time. As it turned out, we didn't make it to the last three columns but I figured he knew the majority and would be fine. I anxiously waited for him by the door that day and when he walked in I excitedly asked him how it went. That was when he burst into tears and said he misspelled the very first word. He said it was one of the few on the last page that we h...

I gave this talk last week in church and thought I would share it here, mostly because I've been too sick this week to do any other writing, so enjoy! I was asked by the handsome guy in the middle [Josh but I felt funny calling him Josh in church and there was no way I was going to say Bishop Darrow so he became handsome guy] here to speak today on how asking gospel questions is part of gospel living. I think he gave this topic to me because he actually really wanted to give this talk and by having me do it, he could pepper me every evening with ideas. He tried to flatter me by saying it was because of my experience in journalism, which makes me  a professional question asker, but I know better. When I was at BYU and taking my news writing class, our managing editor inspired us the first week of class with an analogy involving fishing. The actual analogy was lost on me since I don’t like fish but his point was that we need to get into the guts of the story and not just stay...