My Top Five Proudest Moments

In order of when they happened:

Winning First Place in a writing contest in my local newspaper

I entered a portion of a short story I wrote into a contest for the Simi Valley Acorn Newspaper, and I won First Place in the Under 18 division! This was the first time I'd ever entered any of my writing into a contest, and even though it was just a local thing and I probably wasn't competing against many others, I felt SO PROUD! If you want to see the article and read the piece that won, click here!

Graduating with an Associate in Social & Behavioral Sciences AND another in Humanities from Moorpark Community College

I wasn't happy about staying home for the first three years of college, since I always planned on going straight to BYU-Idaho after high school. But in those three years, I took enough classes to get me TWO Associate Degrees in two very different fields, which sets me apart from a lot of others not only going into teaching, but going into the workforce in general. It was worth it in the end!

Getting my endowments

What exactly is an endowment? The best way I can describe it is a special spiritual blessing for members of the LDS church. Think of it sort of like communion in the Catholic church, only you receive your endowment when you're much older than that. Most people get them before they go on their LDS mission, or before they get married.

Getting married

This one pretty much speaks for itself. Every girl thinks she'll never end up finding someone who wants to be stuck with her for so long, but I lucked out and found a keeper! Jake and I were married in the LDS Los Angeles Temple on August 30th, 2014. Want to know why we had a temple marriage? Click here!

Student teaching position offers/acceptance

From the conversations I've had with several of my classmates who are going to be student teaching around the same time as me, I am extremely lucky to have received the offers that I did. Several people interviewed locally and NO ONE wanted them at all, so now the school is scrambling to find them a place to teach. Several others are ending up having to move to Ogden or even farther out to do their student teaching, because those are the only schools that were interested in working with them. And many people only received one offer, whereas I had TWO schools that were interested in working with me. I feel bad for my friends that are struggling and anxious about figuring out their futures, but it also makes me feel extremely grateful and proud of myself for how I conducted myself at my interviews, and for how hard I've worked over the past few years to be able to reach this point.