YTC: “Is aquaculture an option?”

About a week after I got back from California, I headed back to Athens to pick up some kids to take to YTC.  

At the beginning of last school year, Mr. Boggs okayed me starting a Y-Club for the next school year (this one).  When I resigned, I made sure that I could still start one if I found someone to sponsor it.  Luckily I coerced found a willing sponsor so MCMS could have one.  However, the new sponsor wasn’t going to be able to take the kiddos to YTC, so since I was going to be there anyway, I volunteered to take the kids.  Not only was I taking kids to the conference, I also had CAS responsibilities!  Not going to lie.. I was a little worried about how I was going to balance it all, but it worked out beautifully.  

My girls made friends quite quickly and they were much more interested in hanging out with them rather than me.  Perf!  I ended up teaching the Secretary class and the Leadership Academy classes.  Josh and I (lets be real, mostly Josh) also ended up being the NE Bedlam Ball coaches.  If I couldn’t play then getting to coach was second best!  I think that the weekend is best described with pictures so here it goes!

At the 'Rave'

After participating in one of the games

My Leadership Academy class

Taylor planking

My little zebra girl athletes!  

NE Bedlam Ball is serious business.. 

CONA kids and our Purity Balls

NLC 2011: Day 6 and 7—Awards, Huntington Beach, and Home

Sorry for the blog hiatus.. I was off having more adventures! 

The last day of our trip was quite busy!  That morning we had the Award Ceremony to attend.  My girls did GREAT!  The way scoring works with FCCLA is a score 0-69.9 is Bronze, 70-89.9 is Silver, and 90-100 is Gold. 

Chapter Service got Gold!

Focus on Children got Silver!

Life Event Planning got Gold!

I was so proud of all my girls!

After the Award Ceremony we changed into our beach stuff and headed to Huntington Beach!  We grabbed some lunch once we got there and found ourselves a spot on the beach.  Huntington Beach was really cool!  There were lots of surfers and they were even setting up for the World Cup of Surfing that was going to be held there in a couple of weeks.  The water was freezing (again) but that didn’t stop our girls, or me!  There were some great waves for jumping! 

Afterwards we went back to the hotel, got cleaned up, and took the party bus back to LAX to catch the red eye back to Atlanta.  

I will admit—I did tear up on our way back to the school.  It was a great trip but, despite how exciting my new adventures will be, I will miss my girls!  

NLC 2011: Day 4 and 5—Disneyland and California Adventure

After a good night sleep we headed off to one of the happiest places on earth—DISNEYLAND!  I am unashamed to admit that, even at 23, I love Disney!  They really know how to create magic! 

The Focus on Children group was competing that day, so Mama took them to compete and afterwards they came to the park!  We rode some famous rides, met some famous characters, and had lots of fun!  I also learned how to do the fishtail brad from a cool Romanian woman while waiting in line for Space Mountain.  That kept us occupied for a while!

Around dinner time we left the park and went to eat at Bubba Gump!  Bubba Gump is kind of a tradition for my family.  If we are in a town where there is one, we must go eat there and get a glass.  The first one we ever went to was in Maui when I was in middle school.  We stayed there for hours because it was July 4^th and we had a great view of the fireworks!  We also collect glasses from each one.  So far, I think we have Maui, Chicago, New York, Orlando, Charleston, Daytona Beach, and now Anaheim!  Not only did we get a glass, BUT our waiter was also in the Suite Life movie!  My girls were SO EXCITED!!

After dinner we went back to the park, rode some more rides, and saw the fireworks! 

The next day got off to a rocky start for me.  The Life Event Planning girls were competing that day and I had to decorate their cake.  For those that don’t know about the project, we planned a wedding.  Lots of people do that for this event, so we needed to do something to make us stand out.  We made a dress that we put on my American Girl doll, made an example invitation, and made a bouquet.  For region and state competition, we also made a cake; however, that was impossible for Nationals.  What we did instead was order a cake from the local bakery and picked it up when we got there.  We had them just put a crumb coat layer of buttercream on it because I was going to make the fondant to cover it.  Making fondant in a hotel room?  No problem, right?  Wrong!  After a minor breakdown on my part (though I’m blaming the exhaustion), I just sprinkled the white frosting with our gold flakes, put a ribbon around it, and put our topper on it.  Done is better than perfect—I have to remember that sometimes!

After that got taken care of (at like 8am), the rest of us went to the other Disney park, California Adventure.  The Life Event girls met up with us a bit later.  Again, we rode some fun rides and met a very fun character!

 

That afternoon we were supposed to leave the park early to go to the official closing ceremony and then have a formal dinner at the Cheesecake Factory.  We made it to the Cheesecake Factory…Disney is just too much fun!  

NLC 2011: Day 3—Knott’s Berry Farm

The next day was the first day of competition and my Chapter Service girls were scheduled to compete that day.  Since her daughter was competing, Shona (one of our chaperones) volunteered to take the girls to do that.  Mama and our other chaperone, Paula, were also occupied that day judging.  Each school has to provide 1 judge for every 3 kids you bring so I was SUPER grateful that they were suckered into so willingly volunteered!  I’m not a good judge.  I am totally a Simon.

While everyone of competing and judging, I took the rest of the kids to Knotts Berry Farm (yea, like the jelly).  It’s actually not a farm—it’s an amusement park quite similar to Six Flags.  The kids had a great time and so did I!  The best ride of the day was definitely The Accelerator.  So much fun!  The girls that competed caught up with us after they got finished and still got a few rides in before we had to head back to change for the opening session.  

Opening session was crazy!  3,000 middle and high schoolers piled into this huge arena.  It felt like we were there for a concert!  It was a great session full of skits and a fantastic keynote speaker, Chef Jeff from the Chef Jeff Project on Food Network!  His story is a great one of overcoming circumstances and poor decisions.  After the session we went to our State Meeting and then hit our beds! 

NLC 2011: Day 2--LA Tour

The next day we woke up bright and early to meet the bus for our tour of Los Angeles.  This was the only tour that we were doing through FCCLA so I was kind of anxious.  Being the control freak I am, I really wanted a schedule of the tour.  I wanted to know where we were stopping and what all we would get to see, but alas, I got nothin’.

As our tour began our tour guide introduced himself.  Despite not remembering his name, I do know that he was an older gentleman (I’m guessing mid to late sixties) who really loved, and knew a lot about, the arts and music (classical, NOT modern).  I also know what he didn't know about—anything that middle schoolers and high schoolers would find remotely interesting.  Our bus driver on the other hand was awesome!  He was in his late twenties or early thirties and was very knowledgeable about the celebrities that my kids cared about—you know, the important ones like Beyonce and Linsday Lohan. 

To be honest, I kind of tuned out the tour guide.  I had never heard of most of the people he mentioned.  Not only did the kids not care about the stuff he was talking about, but I didn’t either.  I did listen to the driver though.  The first place of interest that he pointed out was Lindsay Lohan’s home/previous home.

LA Women's Correctional Facility

Told you he was good.  After we got into LA, we went to the Chinese Theater, saw all the hand prints, and the stars on the walk of fame.  Then we walked through the little shopping area past the Kodak Theater (where they hold the Academy Awards) to a place where we would have been able to see the Hollywood sign if it hadn’t been ridiculously cloudy that day.  We took pictures regardless because if you zoom in a lot you can kind of see it.

Obvio my favorite ones there!

If you zoom in its there!  

After that we got back on the bus and drove through Beverly Hills and saw Rodeo Dr.  A few of the kids were real disappointed that they didn’t get to get off the bus on Rodeo, but I explained that the cheapest thing on that street was probably over a hundred dollars and they shut up.  I, on the other hand, remained disappointed.  I completely get them not wanting a bus load of kids walking around there, but come on... the adults have money!  Oh well.. c’est la vie!

After our driving tour we went to Universal to have lunch at Hard Rock Café which we were pleasantly surprised was already paid for!  That totally made up for having to eat fries instead of my usual salad!  Life’s tough..

After lunch we loaded back up and went to the Disney Concert Hall.  The tour guide talked a lot about the different shows and performances they have, but as you probably realized by now I tuned him out.  Instead, I took lots of pictures of my girls! 

That was followed by a driving tour of the Mission District which I’m sad to say I slept through (the sleep deprivation was too much for me at this point).  From what Mama told me, it’s probably best that I did or else I most likely would have made him stop the bus so that my girls could go work a soup kitchen line or something.

We made it back in time to change and go to all our official FCCLA meetings that night!

NLC 2011: Day 1--Airplanes, Newport Beach, and Rainforest Cafe

I got back to Athens around 1pm on July 8^th.  I washed clothes, repacked, ate dinner, and went to bed at 7pm.  Why?  Because I had to wake up at 2:30am to go to… CALIFORNIA!  Because I’m insane, right after I got back from CONA (aka sleep deprivation conference), I was taking my FCCLA babies to National Leadership Conference in Anaheim, California!  I will admit that while I got zero very little sleep at CONA, the conference was not at all stressful for me seeing as how I wasn’t the main one in charge (Thanks Randell and Jeremy!).

 NLC was a horse of a different color.  Don’t get me wrong, I was very excited about it, but it had seriously been the main stressor in my life since April.  Fundraising for this conference began at the beginning of the school year.  I worked extremely hard to make sure that our club had raised enough funds for us to be able to significantly contribute to each kids trip to nationals, and I thought we had succeeded!  That is until EIGHT of my kids made it to nationals!  I was thrilled, but freaking out at the same time.  I seriously only thought that three, six at the most, would make it!  That $3,000 wasn’t going to stretch as far as I wanted it to!  However, with a lot of supportive parents and a successful letter writing campaign, all of the kids were able to go!

So there I was, a 23 year old, who had planned a trip for 8 kids and 4 chaperones to California for a week.  Sure I could have just used the travel agency, but they were more expensive and we wouldn’t have been able to do half the stuff we did.  I will say that in the end the ten years it took off my life all the added stress was worth it.  Seeing my babies experiencing things for the first time was awesome!  For most of them it was their first airplane ride, first time to Disney, first time to put their toes in the freezing Pacific Ocean, first time to see Russell Brand, the list goes on!  As a person who is all about the value of experiences, this was all the reward I needed!

As I said earlier, that day started extremely early!  We met the bus at the middle school and rode to the airport.  After getting all the kid’s bags checked and we got them through security, I could finally relax.  We grabbed some Starbucks and got on the plane. 

4 hours later we were ‘hopping off the plane and LAX’ (heard that song a lot)…  After we grabbed our luggage our party bus arrived!  My kids were going to ride in style…

We got to the hotel, changed into our beach clothes, and headed to Newport Beach.  We grabbed lunch at this great local place and had a picnic on the beach!  As previously stated, the water was FREEZING, but that didn’t stop most of my kids from playing in it!  One of the other chaperones and I took the kids that weren’t braving hypothermia insane on a bike ride down to Balboa.  We saw some amazing houses!

When we got back from the beach we got cleaned up and I got us incredibly lost trekked for over 30 minutes to Downtown Disney where we waited for a millennia on a table.  We finally got a table and food (and some of the kids got a nap)!  After our journey to get to DT Disney we decided that it was well worth the money to just take a taxi back.  The taxi ride took all of 5 minutes.  *fist. head.*

Everyone was out before their heads hit the pillow!

I'm Full of BS!

Blue Ridge Spirit that is…

As soon as I get caught up I get behind again!  Oh well.. that’s how life goes sometimes!  Never fear faithful readers (where is that sarcasm font when you need it?), I shall get you caught up with my adventures!  The first one we shall tackle is…

CONA
a.k.a.
‘Conference on National Affairs’
a.k.a.
‘The Hella Awesome, Best Week Ever, Conference that the YMCA Youth in Government holds every summer at the Blue Ridge Assembly in North Carolina’

(I hope you read that last bit really fast… Its more funny that way…)

CONA is the conference that I went to every summer while in high school.   Since I am still involved in Y-Club through College Alumni Staff, and because I’m awesome, I was invited to go back as an advisor this year. 

Truth be told, CONA quite a nerd fest.  It is basically a national mock congress.  Students write proposals, present them, debate them, and try to get them passed.  It is also one of the most inspiring places in the world for me.  CONA is held the same week each year—July 4^th week.  Since I went there every summer, I don’t really have any deep rooted family traditions for July 4^th.  It wasn’t until this year that I realized that CONA is my July 4^th tradition.  CONA—A place where students from around the country come together and propose their ideas to try and fix our nation’s problems. A place where 500+ kids, despite political ideologies and religious beliefs, join hands and sing God Bless America.  What could be more patriotic than that?  

(Please don’t say fireworks. I hate fireworks--they go boom!)

I feel like this is realization is extremely timely and significant for me.  I am about to move to another country.  My 'gypsy soul' (thanks Zac Brown) wants to see the world and experience different cultures, but I feel as though I could very easily lose sight of my American patriotism.  I don’t mean my annoying American abroad, ‘I must eat McDonalds and drink Coke,’ patriotism, but simply a love and devotion to my country.  These are the kind of revelations that this view will cause..

Eureka!  I found it!

And just on the off chance that my CONA kids are reading this..  We will have to play some Purity Ball at YA after we have a discussion about aquaculture.  Taylor, keep that swan a swimming!  I love and will miss y’all terribly!