New Beginnings

Last night we had New Beginnings. That is one of the reasons I have not been updating my blog! I have been busy helping with preparations for it. Minnie was really excited to go to her first official YW activity. They spotlighted each of the four girls who are coming in this year and gave them each a daisy:

(Minnie is also holding a little box shaped like a dress that has candy in it--each of the girls got one to take home.)

I didn't even attempt to get a photo of Jumble because she is not cooperative about that these days! The theme for this year was based on a poem and a song about the three important white dresses in a girl/woman's life--her blessing dress, her baptism dress, and her temple dress. We had the girls bring either their blessing or baptism dress--some brought both--and the leaders brought their wedding dresses (rather than displaying their temple dresses) for the decorations. We interspersed the dresses with pictures of temples and pictures of Christ and potted plants and trees. (None of this was my idea--I am not an idea person!) We went over the night before to set everything up. Here are some photos of some of the results:

From left to right is my blessing dress, Minnie's baptism dress, and Minnie's blessing dress. (Some more dresses arrived after I took these photos so the chair on the right didn't look so bare.)

In this photo from left to right is: my wedding dress, Jumble's blessing dress, and Jumble's baptism dress. All of our dresses ended up across the front, on either side of the podium. I'm not quite sure how that happened! I didn't put them there. I was doing other stuff and when we were done I realized that all of our dresses were up front. I guess whoever was arranging dresses thought all of ours looked the best and wanted them up front. :) My mom is an amazing seamstress!

The song that we used is called "What Heaven Sees In You" by Doug Walker. He had made a music video that one of the leaders had seen on You Tube. So she called the composer to ask if we could use the video for our New Beginnings program. He said he would be happy to let us, except that he was having copyright issues right now so he couldn't let anyone use it. Someone suggested that we could make our own video to use instead. I thought maybe Jumble could do something like that (she's really good at stuff like that) so I told the other leaders I would ask her about it. She was interested but had a lot of other things going on so wasn't sure she would have time. But she told me how to use windows movie maker so I decided to attempt it myself. And amazingly I figured it out and got it to work! So this is what I was doing for two days straight:

I got all the photos off the internet through Google images (except for one cameo appearance by Minnie--see if you can spot it!) Hopefully I didn't break any copyright laws or anything. I figured if I could right click on a picture and save it, it was free game. And I'm not selling this or profiting by it in any way. I am only posting it for my family to see what was consuming my life for two days. If I'm doing something illegal, I'm not doing it on purpose! Again, we used wedding dress photos because there are no photos available of women in their temple dresses outside the temple. But we really were talking about preparing for and being worthy to make temple covenants more than getting married, although of course we hope that every young woman will have the blessing of getting married in the temple as well.

It was total divine intervention that I was able to get this to work. I have not had good luck with trying to do computer projects like this in the past. I think that having the visual element helped the girls to feel the message of the song better so I'm glad that it worked out. I'm also glad that I learned how to use windows movie maker and plan to use it in the future to do things for my children with our family photos. Overall, I think the evening went well and was a special event for all the young women in our ward. I love my calling!!!

After the song with video presentation, we had a mother with a tiny new baby, a little girl who got baptized the beginning of this month, and a young woman who recently went to the temple and got married speak for a few minutes each (all in white dresses.) Some girls received awards for projects they have completed and one young woman got her medallion. Hopefully Jumble will earn her medallion by Young Women in Excellence next fall. She is pretty close to being finished with everything.

One final note about New Beginnings. While my wedding dress was out, I decided to try it on to see if it still fit. I was totally stoked to discover that it still fits! Almost 17 years and four children later!! Yeah!