Baby Lukey!!! He's grown up in the blink of an eye! We need to convince the Man Upstairs that we promise we can handle another one, because we did such an amazing job making the first one!!! He's turned out to be such a wonderful person, despite our shortcomings.

I know I have bad roots in this pic, we were poorer than we are now. Nonetheless, we were able to see some beautiful things and enjoy thoroughly our life in England. I rummaged up some old photos from an old hard drive. This is in a seaside town called Ilfracombe. This town was even more stunning at night. The pic below is me weeding my beautiful English garden. It was an oasis that I only wish I would have had more time to spend there. We have moved an average of every six months since we've been married. No more moving for me for a while.

I miss that garden!!!

This was a very cute picture I rummaged up from a few years ago. As you can see, Amber is pregnant with Aiden, so it was at least 5 years ago. What beautiful women!!!

My dog is afraid of my neighbor's Halloween ghosts they have on their front porch. They are happy looking ghosts, but nonetheless, they have black holes for mouths and eyes. The think is, is that he never barked at the door-to-door salesman who was accosting me on my front porch. Koda never barked once at him. But he barked at the Happy Halloween Ghosts. He stares at them and his ears go back and he backs away and gives a cowardly woof.
So, this has been a lousy couple of days. I was feeling sorry for myself because my ward is so big that no one knows my name, or would care that I died, let alone anyone in my gigantic stake. So, naturally, for General Relief Society meeting, I decided to go to my mom and sisters' gathering for General RS meeting at their stake center. My mom is on the stake RS Presidency and was in charge of organizing the cake-and-drink-after-the-meeting-mingle. So, of course, I volunteer for the set up and cleanup, which eventually set me up for the screw up. No one would think it was that big of a deal to break a platter someone brought to showcase the yummy cakes on. Unless it was a gift given by a friend, or an heirloom, or crystal, or something like that. Well, I shattered the platter, all over the kitchen floor, which was a probable heirloom that was probably crystal and was definitely given by a dear friend to the lady whose husband killed himself last year. I cried on the way home in the car by myself, mainly because I felt like a damn fool.
I also want to vent about the myriad other ways in which I tend to feel like a damn fool. So, I am getting to be disgusted with the very yuppy school my child attends that is trying to make me spend a damn fortune on extra-curricular things outside of school. Not to mention this silly Dragon Pride award program. So little six year-old Luke is supposed to read 900 minutes in a 9 week period. That is just fine. I can handle that. I can also handle the exercise requirements, since he plays soccer at least twice a week. All the other requirements in order for this little boy to feel like he is able to compete with his peers is just ludicrous for a first grader to have to worry about. He has to jump a rope 15 times in a row without making a mistake, for example. Bloody hell. The child is already a perfectionist and harps on himself if he writes a number 3 backwards. So, naturally, I feel like a failure of a parent because I told Luke it was a bunch of rubbish to feel like he had to get a phone call from the school to tell his parents they were really proud of him! We don't need the school to tell him they are proud of him. We are proud of him even if he can't tie his own shoes yet and still wets the bed! He was like, 'but, I want the school to be proud of me!' He also gets: please buy this product from our sponsors, it will go towards buying books for the school! Please buy dinner from Chick-fil-A from this time to this time on this particular day, or your son is not displaying school spirit! WITW!!! (We took him there by the way because I happen to LOVE C-F-A). I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't that every other day he was bringing something home to try and get us to spend money!!! I have PMS and I'm drinking caffeine and I'm going to have some dark chocolate. Really cliche', but I don't care.

Well, I am having fun with this so far. I am ahead of my lectures in school as of right now. I baked some cookies today to give to the neighbors since we let the dog out the front door on Sunday to browse over the Lillys and he came back in the house with a bag of cookies tied up with a pink ribbon. We figured the neighbors would be pretty ticked if we gave them their cookies moist with dog slobber, and today was the first day this week I have had the ingredients and the time to make it up to them. I don't even think they even know they had a bag of cookies tied up with a pink ribbon anonymously set on their front porch, (there was no name attached to the pink ribbon, unless, Koda ate the tag and left the cookies for us- he is selfless like that- I wouldn't be surprised) and I am still wondering whether or not I should actually knock on thier door or keep the cookies and the faux pas (or should I say fur paw) to myself.

Here we go!

So, it is a grand thing to conquer old anxieties, and not only overcome them, but excel in overcoming them. For me, Algebra is an old anxiety I feel I am learning to conquer. I firmly believe that my teenage brain was not developed enough to allow me to complete algebraic problems succesfully in order to retain the processes in my brain with the resources I had available to me. I also firmly believe that my perfectionist self resigned to the fact that math wasn't going to come easy to me. Because it wasn't going to come easy to me, I was going to have to fail innumerable times before I got to the correct solution, and I never liked failing. Thus, as a youngster, I didn't try many new things.Coming from a family with seven children, one child's inability to easily compute math was probably overlooked. I remember vividly the day that math became my enemy. In the second grade, I was in the highest math group and my classmates and I had gathered to the old lady with the helmet hair's classroom. We were subtracting numbers like this: 37-29= ?, or 23-15=?. Because we had to do the little fiddly thing by crossing out the first number and applying a...( you know what I mean, I can't explain it.) anyway, I couldn't do it. I got every single question wrong on my math test. The teacher looked at me like it was my fault I couldn't understand this new process, and I really took this failure to heart. I wrapped my arms around my head and sobbed and sobbed a snotty, salty pool onto my desk. Only Kelcey Kemp asked me what was wrong and what could he do about it, so, I loved him until the seventh grade. Jarrard love is loyal love. So, I am seeing mathematics in a whole new light. With a fully formed and mature frontal cortex, and with a mature 'I don't fear failure' attitude, only a 'I fear never trying' attitude, and a higher than average IQ, I can ace my math 1010 class. I think it is fitting that it is math 1010 and not math 101 nowadays, because 1010 is 911 more than 101, which would indicate math 1010 was more difficult than math 101. (I used the fiddly subtracty thing to figure that out!)