New Beginnings in Excellence

Our ward is kind of different. I love a lot of the people in it, but it's kind of a weird ward because it's basically run by young people. Our bishop and one of his counselors are in their early 30's. Jordan's the YM president at age 26, and one of his counselors is 22. The primary presidency is pretty young. And in YW, Kristi (the president) is 27, I'm 24, and our secretary is 26. We have a few "mature" people sprinkled in the auxilliary presidencies, but for the most part, it's young leadership.

Anyway, we're all sort of bumbling about doing the best job we can without really knowing what's going on. So we totally forgot that we were supposed to do a YW in Excellence and a New Beginnings until it was January...and then NO dates seemed to work. There is always SO much going on with the youth! Anyway, last night we finally put on our New Beginnings in Excellence (our YW program is so small that we just combined the two).

Our theme was Be Your Own Kind of Beautiful.

It was based off of that MormonAd with the roses and the daisy. All the girls made their own special flower to decorate the room.

We started off with a getting to know you game where everyone had a little-known fact about them and we all had to match them up. It was fun!

Mine was "Loves apple pie but hates applesauce and apples"



Then we talked about how all our girls are unique and special to their Heavenly Father. Some of the girls sang "Every Star is Different" from the Children's Songbook. Then we introduced our new Beehive.

After that, each of the girls shared a value experience or project that they had worked on in the last year and what they had learned. I was absolutely floored. I wasn't sure that the girls were getting anything out of our lessons or activities but they proved that they were! What they said was so perfect and sweet and gave me hope that I might actually be doing an okay job in this calling.

Of course we served refreshments. We tried to do things with value colors. I only ended up using four colors in my cupcakes but oh well.

My cupcakes were supposed to look kind of like hydrengea flowers. Even though they weren't perfect they were still cute and colorful!

It was a very enjoyable night and made me glad that I have an opportunity to serve these girls. I love all of them so much!