Dear Hannalyn,
Happy birthday to you. We have had the best week celebrating you and all the good you are. Thank you for being such an amazing light of goodness and kindness. Your example, your heart, your love all lift us up so much.
Today you are 11 and I thank all my lucky stars that you are mine always and forever.
Love always, Mom.
We had an early Thanksgiving with my family yesterday and while I’m still feeling all the good stuff, I wanted to write about it.
My family is amazing. I am so incredibly grateful for them. Having all my family together for the whole day was a huge blessing and we had the best time.
After a very full day, hanging out and eating and playing games- all the best things- I just am happy and grateful.
Very redundant. :) Happy and grateful and documenting such.
I said it. :)
I think it is so dumb that whenever I feel good about something, I also feel guilt for something else.
When I’m a good mom, guilt tells me I’m a bad spouse.
When I’m a good spouse, guilt tells me I’m a bad mom.
When I’m good at my job, I’m bad at the rest of my life.
When I perform well, other things are sliding and my priorities “aren’t correct”.
When I take time off, I’m “not committed” but when I never take time off, again my priorities are called into question.
When I read a book, I’m not doing enough meaningful things.
When I mourn childhood, I should be grateful for what I have.
.
Are you exhausted yet? I am. And all these thoughts entered my head just today.
Guilt is stupid. I am working on living my life the best I can, doing all I can to live with hope and happiness, being a good person and taking care of those I love.
And that’s all. No inspiring thoughts today. Just a goal to not let these invasive thoughts get the best of me.
I’m a huge fan of Dallas Jenkins and The Chosen. HUGE fan. (Going to watch “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” tomorrow type of fan.)
He talks a lot about the feeding of the five thousand, and it was one of my favorite parts in the series to watch. Dallas says often that we bring what we have to the Lord and He makes the miracle. In a recent devotional that he gave at BYU, Dallas said that his wife Amanda used the phrase “God does impossible math”.
Boy oh boy I love that so much.
A couple weeks ago, we were getting ready to open our October show and struggling to find popcorn boxes. Couldn’t get them anywhere. Anything online had awful shipping and the ones we get in SLC were out of stock. And I probably should just let it go, but I love the size of our boxes. Perfect for sharing or if you like lots, it’s a good big single box. The smaller boxes you can’t share, the bigger boxes feel oversized. I’ve been trying to brainstorm which way to go, but just can’t decide. I really like the ones we use.
Well, we did the math, and if figured out the number of boxes we could sell each night and not run out of boxes after the show. I had some smaller ones as back up and we just entered into it going to do our best. That number was about 50 boxes per show.
Opening night of the show we sold 73 boxes of popcorn.
Our highest selling night of popcorn ever before that was 66. We had no reason to expect to sell 73. But there we were.
I texted my dad and he sent “Congrats?”. Which is about how I felt. Yay for amazing sales and oh crap we are running out for sure.
The next two nights did not sell 73 each, but they both did well over the expected and, more importantly, more than our 50 number. So I started thinking about how and when to make the switch to the smaller boxes.
Fourth night, more than 50 boxes sold. Counted up trying to decide if I had enough for one more night and…
had enough for two more nights with ten left over if we sold about 60 each night.
…what?!
Somehow, even though we sold WAY more popcorn than expected, we would not only make it through the last two shows with boxes, we would have extra?
I told my dad and he said “Wow. Loaves and fishes, huh?”
And I said, “Yes. Exactly. Loaves and fishes.”
We had exactly six boxes left at the end of closing night.
God does impossible math. ❤️
