Crazy....

Hey I just got here

And life is CRAZY

But here's a blog post

So love it maybe?

Ha okay I can't believe how busy I got in such a short amount of time! That's a senior year of college for you I guess. Weirdly enough, despite having no free time and stressing about a hundred things at once, I am just a happy kid. You know when you just feel good? Life is hectic but at the same time it is just so good and I just have this happy feeling all the time. I just feel like this is going to be a great year and I just have that feeling that there are some really good things to come. It's kind of a fun feeling to have.

Classes are classes. It's still a little soon to tell how they are all going to be, but for the most part I think I will be okay. Minus my FCD capstone class. Family Life Education (FLE). It's going to kill me. At SVU the Family and Child Development major doesn't require a senior paper like most of the other majors do, but it does require a "senior capstone experience" aka, a class from....you know where.... Okay, so the class itself doesn't seem like it will be too bad, but it's all that's required with the class that is freaking me out. We don't have to write a senior paper but we do have to write a bunch of little papers and a research paper. The biggest part of the class is a presentation that we have to give toward the end. I hate presentations as much as the next person, but this isn't your typical 15-minute presentation that you make a powerpoint for and present to the class. We are required to give an hour long presentation/workshop/class to a group of people in the community. Terrifying. It's an FLE presentation so it is ideally supposed to be given to some kind of group of parents or people with family life needs. I haven't done much with it yet, but I am planning on contacting the local Head Start program and setting up a presentation for the parents of the kids at the Head Start. Now besides the obvious stresses of giving a super long presentation in which your professor is critiquing your every word and movement and determining whether or not you graduate, I am even more terrified for this whole thing because of my audience. This isn't like a presentation to my classmates in which half of them are asleep and the other half are too focused on what they will say in their presentation to listen to mine. I am going to be asking real parents with real questions and concerns and problems to give up an hour of their day to come listen to what I have to say. If people show up it's because they are legitimately interested in what I will be talking about and are hoping to gain something from it. That's some pressure. They are going to be looking to me, some 20-year-old college kid who has next to nothing when it comes to interaction with young kids, to give them valuable advice and principles to apply to their parenting. What do I know? The even scarier thing is exactly what I will be presenting about. What bigger job do people have than properly parenting their own children? None really. And I'm supposed to tell them how to do it? Ummmm......yeah you could say I'm freaking out a little bit. But I know it will be good for me. Let's try and think positively.

In other (much more exciting) news, I am now a member of the SVU tennis team!!! I could not be more excited. I have missed playing tennis sooo much. I thought about trying out my freshman year, but then I pansied out and never did. This summer I decided that I might as well give it a shot so I called the coach (Deidra Dryden) and talked to her about it. We talked a couple of times but I ultimately just ended up walking on the team. We started practice on Monday and I am loving it. I'm really terrible and I don't know the other girls very well yet, but I am still having fun and can see that it is headed in a good direction. We have our first match on Wednesday, but I don't think I will be playing in it. From what I understand, our matches consist of two doubles teams and two singles teams. So only 6 girls actually get to play in the match. We have 10 girls. So I'm not 100% sure what that means for me other than that I can be pretty sure that I won't be playing in every one. But hopefully (probably) some. I absolutely love Coach Dryden. I don't know her that well yet but I can tell that she is just an incredible coach. She kicks our butts but I feel like I have gotten better in the last 3 days than I did throughout my 3 years of tennis in high school. I really wish that I would have started my freshman year because I think I could be sooo much better by now, but I also know that I probably couldn't have handled it when I got here two years ago. I'm better at managing my time now than I was as a freshman and I'm just more comfortable in everything now than I was. Even bigger than that is the fact that I physically couldn't have handled it my freshman year. I am in ten times better shape now than I was two years ago and I can guarantee you that if I was in the same shape now as I was then, I probably would have  ran walked away crying yesterday when Coach Dryden told us that we would be ending practice with a "puke drill." Instead, I saw it as a challenge and while I was absolutely exhausted by the time we were done, I felt sooo good. It's definitely a nice change. 

One last piece of news. On Sunday, Imari and I were called to be the Gospel Principles instructors. Ahhhh!!! When our first counselor text me Saturday night and asked if he could meet with me before church, I immediately knew I was getting a calling. I also knew it would be a semi-big one since it's the beginning of the semester so everything has to be redone. I thought to myself "Anything but teaching. I can handle just about any calling, but pleeeaaase don't let it be teaching." Of course that's what I got. Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor? I'm trying to laugh along with him, but I am freaking out. I've never taught before and Gospel Principles is generally the class for the less actives/investigators/non members. Which means I really don't want to screw it up. So yeah, I'm terrified, but it will probably end up being good for me too. 

Okay, that ended up being way longer than I planned but there it is for you. Those are the highlights of my life right now. I'll keep you updated.