Senior Spotlight: Janelle

Tonight was a combined YW/RS activity to spotlight our Senior girls!  It was held in Robyn Parry's backyard with a nice spread of food. (Only I ate a gluten free cracker that had either almond flour and flax seed in it, which made me really sick. I was kicking myself for not checking the ingredients first!) Thankfully I was able to make it through the program before becoming really sick.  Jaiden, Janelle, and Emily sang their beautiful rendition of "Come Thou Fount" and Jan Broberg sang "I Dreamed A Dream" from Les Miserables. Each of the moms were asked to fill out a questionnaire for their daughter's spotlight. I have included Janelle's below! They also showed a nice slideshow of pictures of the graduating girls. Those graduating were Janelle Jensen, Sophie Smith, and Tayli Morris. 

Senior Spotlight Questions:

Name: Janelle Jensen

Favorite book: The Hunger Games Series

Favorite food: Lasagna

Hobbies/Talents: Singing, Sleeping, Reading

Activities: Madrigals, Seminary Council, Musical Productions, hanging out with friends, hiking, working at Papa Murphy’s Pizza.   

Favorite movie: Doesn’t have one.

Biggest Fear: Isolation

Describe your daughter in 3 words: Pure, Spiritual, Compassionate

Interesting Fact: Janelle has always been very expressive and talkative. In the fifth grade she won first place in district in the Storytelling Festival. She was also a Hands in Harmony Caroler for several years.   

Plans after High school: Janelle plans to serve a mission and then pursue a degree in Occupational Therapy.

What is your favorite thing about your daughter?

Janelle cares about other people. She will often ask me about my day and expresses gratitude freely. One line in her patriarchal blessing states: “You have been blessed with eyes to see the hurt in others and with a heart to heal.” I love this sentiment and it describes Janelle perfectly!

Anything else you want to tell us about your daughter?

Janelle has always had a desire to do what is right. She regularly studies her scriptures and records spiritual insights in her study journal. She is a great teacher and will be an awesome missionary! Janelle is beautiful inside and out! I am so grateful that she is ours!

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY4gmz5G9-g)

Night of Excellence

Tonight was our Young Women Night of Excellence. We decided to have it as an open house and invite the Relief Society sisters to come get to know the Young Women by visiting with them and looking at their displays. It was fun! I actually learned quite a few things about the Young Women that I didn't know! We ate finger foods -- fruit kabobs, cucumber bites, mini sandwiches, and brownie bites. I was in charge of bringing brownie bites and so I had the Beehives make them last week for our class activity and then put them in the freezer. I was worried about having enough and so I made two more batches today. Janelle couldn't come because she had to work (she works at Papa Murphy's Pizza). It was a fun evening!

Night of Excellence

We had our Night of Excellence on the 7th. These are all our Young Women.  There were two girls missing but I think everyone else was there. We had about 25 YW in the 5th ward and only 17 in the 17th ward. The girls helped to make the decorations for one of their YW nights and also brought items to display. All of the girls sang "Peace in Christ," which they sung at Girls' camp last year. They also sung it in church a couple of weeks ago and were asked to sing it at the Missionary Fireside coming up next month.  

 

Night of Excellence turned out really nice. I had taken pictures of all of the girls on Sundays and had them printed and put them in little frames for the event. The Young Women's organization has a lot of big activities, but they also have a lot of leaders, which really helps to spread the responsibilities around. I love serving with the girls and leaders. It is a busy but fun calling.

 

Janelle earned her Young Womanhood Award this year back in February along with Sophie Smith and so those two were asked to speak. Janelle talked about one of her final projects, which was making a personal history book. I have made a Blurb book for a few of my kids of their early years with tons of pictures and the annual histories they write along with our annual family histories and funny anecdotes and stories. 

 

Janelle's book covers her first five years and we thought it would be a great final project for her to make another book that covered several more years of her life. The ten hour project ended up being more like a hundred+ hour project with the two of us working on it. It turned out really nice and is a wonderful and precious history. Out of all of my kids Janelle is the one who has enjoyed the history books I have made the most and has read them often and pretty much has all of the funny stories and anecdotes memorized. 

 

Evening of Excellence

I have loved serving in Young Women! I really enjoyed my primary calling, working with the primary children and my awesome presidency, but there was also a lot of administrative stuff to the calling which took a lot of time and wasn't always that enjoyable. YW is also a busy calling, but it is just SO fun! I love being with my girls and their friends. I already know most of the girls quite well since many of them have spent lots of time at our house through the years. We have had some great Young Women's activities and I have really enjoyed going to them! We had a board meeting with all of the YW leaders and one of the items on the agenda was the Evening of Excellence. I had been a bit nervous for this event because in past years they went all out with fancy decorations and treats and so forth and that is so out of my comfort zone! 

One of our presidency members mentioned that years ago instead of having the Evening of Excellence on a Wednesday night, they did a special YW program during Sacrament meeting. She said it was really neat and that way all of the YW would be able to participate (several have conflicts on Wednesday nights) and all of the congregation would be able to watch, instead of just the girls' parents. I really LOVED this idea!  It was also WAY more in my comfort zone!  The rest of the presidency liked the idea too and so we got permission from the Bishop and Stake YW Leaders to do a special sacrament meeting program. My girls teased me saying that since the new YW president and I just came from primary (and had just barely finished the primary program) we missed having a sacrament meeting program and were just dying to do another one, ha ha! So NOT true! The advantages of doing a sacrament meeting program is that it puts the focus back on the girls. It also completely eliminates extravagant decorations, invitations, food -- the whole bit! We are actually saving a lot of money by doing it this way! 

It still took quite a bit of time -- writing the script, making copies, practicing the songs, and so forth. The Miamaids and Laurels were all assigned to give shorts parts or talks and the Young Women prepared four songs. One of the songs, "Ask in Faith," is one they already know from girls' camp last summer (and it is beautiful) and then we had them learn "I Walk By Faith." That is an old song -- I learned it when I was in Young Women! But it is also beautiful and talks about the Young Women's values. The Beehives sang "Learn of Me," (another older song) and the Miamaids sang "If I Listen With My Heart." Both songs included various solos and duets from the girls. We have a lot of great singers in the group and so they sounded awesome! We practiced two weeks during young women's and had separate class practices for their songs. Our final practice was still pretty rough and we wished that we had another week or two to practice. We kept it really simple. It was WAY easier than a primary program, that's for sure! We were nervous because we had never made it all the way through the program and so we had no idea how long it would be. Would it go way over time or would we end really early? 

As it turns out we ended about ten minutes early. But I would rather end a little early then go over. The girls did a great job on their talks and songs and overall we felt like the program went well. The congregation seemed to really enjoy the program also and we received loads of compliments on the program and on the girls' beautiful voices!   

BUSY Wednesday!!

Today was picture day at the Elementary school and so I needed to wake the kids up early in order to curl the girls' hair.  We don't actually buy school pictures any more since we take our own every year, but the kids' pictures still go in the yearbook for class and individual pictures and so I want them to turn out nice!  I do buy a yearbook every year that the kids can share -- no sense in buying three of the same book.  The fact that they leave the house with their hair curled all cute doesn't necessarily mean it will still look nice when picture time rolls around, but we can always hope.  I should have taken a picture before they left. 

Janika also went to school early for an ETS fieldtrip to Las Vegas for the day.  We signed her up for ETS (Educational Talent Search) in 8th grade and it continues throughout middle school and high school.  She doesn't particularly like it but we thought it would give her some good information. According to the SUU website, "ETS is one of the five TRIO programs that helps prepare students for post secondary education. The program is funded by the United States Department of Education, Student Services Division...In addition to tutoring, counseling, and academic instruction, this program also provides valuable information pertaining to financial aid, scholarships, federal grants and college applications."  

When we got the Itinerary for the trip a couple of days ago we saw that the kids were scheduled to be home between 7:15 and 7:45 tonight.  Janika was in a quandary as to what to do because she had been asked to sing a solo at the Young Women's Night of Excellence tonight that was scheduled at 7:00.  I told Janika that I could pick her directly up from the school and bring her to Young Women's and she could change to a dress in the car, but you never know with trips if they will be on time.  She texted her leader to see what she should do.  Her leader said that they would put her last on the program and hope that she made it.

Janika had been really excited about the trip because she was going with one of her friends. But her friend ended up backing out at the last minute and so Janika was distraught at the thought of going on a trip with a bunch of kids she wasn't really friends with. But I was proud of her for keeping her commitments anyway, even when it wasn't always comfortable. Their bus left this morning and picked up students from various high schools in our area and they headed to Vegas. They were supposed to go to the Shark Reef Aquarium but ended up going to the CSI Exhibit instead. Janika said it was really neat. They got to become investigators to figure out what happened in various crime scenes.  She said it was really interesting. 

Then they took a tour of UNLV and ate lunch on campus.

ETS provides a field trip each year to a different University so that the kids can see the campuses and get a feel for college life.  The 8th graders take a tour of Dixie State College, the 9th graders go to SUU, the 10th graders go to UNLV, and the 11th graders go to BYU, UVU, USU, and Weber State University.  Janika is really excited for next year's trip.

Janika texted me a few times throughout the day to let me know how her trip was going. I checked Josh out of school 15 minutes early so that I could drop him and Jenna off with a friend while I went to an appointment.  After I got back, the kids and I did the dishes and then Jared arrived home from school.  I took my half hour nap (thanks, Jared!) and then started working on dinner with Jase.

The kids arrived home from school.  Jaiden's friend, Emily is doing her second grade "family or friend" presentation on Jaiden and so her mom came and took some pictures of Jaiden and Emily.  Jaiden went to Emily's house for awhile and then Rick dropped Jaiden off to her Cheer Clinic at the High school.  Then I dropped Janelle off to Achievement Days and stopped at the store to pick up photos and poster board for Jaiden's second grade "family or friend" presentation (she is doing hers on her Aunt Gerilyn).

I picked up Jaiden from the cheer clinic.  I had been praying that Janika would make it back in time to do her song in Young Women. Right then I got a text from her saying that they decided to skip dinner in Mesquite and were coming straight home and so she would be home earlier than planned! Yeah! I gave a "thank you" prayer, rushed home and changed to a dress, hurried back to the high school to pick her up, picked up Janelle from Achievement Days and hurried to the church. Janelle's Achievement Day project for the evening was a cute round mirror that she had decorated with buttons around the outside edge.

Janika had already changed in the car. She had worn a darling outfit that she would just need to throw on a matching skirt with but the ETS advisors had given them all T-shirts which they were required to wear which made the "car change" a lot more awkward. I threw a skirt to Janelle and and told her to change too since I wouldn't have time to bring her home and so she would need to come with us to Young Women. We pulled into the church parking lot at 6:58.  Whew!!

It was a lovely program and Janika's solo was a beautiful addition and perfect ending to the evening.  I felt very grateful to Heavenly Father that everything fell into place today!