Another Crazy Day at the Fackrells

This morning Ashdon came in my room to announce that his cake was due today!  I knew the deadline was looming, but did not know today was the day. Oh great!  This caused for a very eventful morning.  We whipped up the first cake with no problems.  Luckily I have cake mix on hand.  But then how does he make the mountains for the state of Utah?  Well, the solution was not too difficult.  I have small bundt cake pans and we filled them half full with cake mix and produced 6 bundt cakes.  By then, 8:00 had hit and the other troops were up.  Of course there was a hubbub about who would lick the bowl, which ended with cake mix in Ashdon's hair. We made another 7 cupcakes.  I thought all was well and was quite pleased with my accomplishment.  Then Ashdon added, "The cake has to be frosted when we bring it school and it can't be chocolate."  Of course, with Murphy's Law you know the only kind of frosting I had was chocolate on hand.  So I went to the Internet to find a recipe for powder sugar frosting.  Not too difficult to make, but time was running short.  The cake wasn't quite cool when we frosted it and we managed to make several small bags of blue, green, and red frosting along with all sorts of sparkles for the top of the cake.  My sister Kristen came to the rescue and took the first load to school and then Ashdon in the second load to school. (She is an angel.) Ash got off to school, and I zoomed off to my first major presentation as a PhD student.  All and all it was eventful.  The cake actually turned out great.  After school he was proud to display his cake.  He was also excited that he won for the highest mountains.

That's all I will report on today.

Love

Tam

Never Have a Bad Day Again

About one year ago, I decided to take up the goal of never having a bad day again.  I do this by making a bad ten minutes, not a bad hour and a bad hour not a bad two hours.  I have learned extreme self mastery over my emotions and can self soothe myself about things in minutes.  I have a list of things that I enjoy that help to calm the trouble waters.  Some of these include: taking a hot bath, going jogging, eating ice cream, doing something fun with the kids, going on a date, etc.

So far so good!  I am happy to report I have not had a bad day since I set this goal.  It is amazing how much I can control the outcome of my day.

Join me in this goal and let me know how it goes.

Love

Tamara

Amazing Experience

I was able to sing in the world-wide broadcast for the Relief Society General Meeting.  We learned to sing with our eyes and our faces.  If you see it on lds.org you can only see me in the last song.  I am on the left hand side middle.  You can see my bangs in a lot of the other shots :).  This was a great dream come true for me to be able to sing at the Conference Center.  Also earlier this year I was able to play the organ on Temple square.  That is two dreams in one year.  Kind of fun!

Our director was an amazing woman.  She gave us a quote by Brigham Young, "Let us speak words of comfort or consolation.  When you are influenced by the Spirit of Holiness and purity, let your light shine: but if ye are tried and tempted and buffeted by Satan, keep your thoughts to yourselves- keep your mouth closed; for speaking produces fruit, either of a good or evil character." (Brigham Young Discourses 166).  She talked us about being mindful of leaving good or bad fruit wherever we are.  We all have a presence.  We either add or subtract to the room.  So let's do more to add good fruit into our lives and the lives of others.