Little known fact about Kayla...

I love cemeteries. I am one of two people I know that don't get weirded out by them. Truthfully, I think they are beautiful and I love the special spirit I feel when I am in them. Since the weather finally started to cooperate and behave like spring today, I made Mitch take a walk through the local cemetery with me. I really wanted to walk somewhere, and it's right across the street, and much more picturesque than taking a walk down the road to, say, 7-11. It did not disappoint.

We found out not too long ago that my great-grandmother is buried in this particular cemetery, so we went and tracked down her grave.

See? We love the cemetery.

Yes please.

Ever since I was little, I knew that I wanted the library from Beauty and the Beast. Seriously, what's not to love?


Since I'm older and more realistic now, I have done my research and have determined that I will settle for any of the following:

freaking awesome book nook.


swirly staircase? yes please.


a rolling ladder with rows upon rows of books is pretty much my dream come true.


at minimum, it must be well-lit, cozy, and have an oversized stuffed chair. even this room would be more than adequate.


sigh. I want to curl up in that chair and bask in the sun with a good book right. now.

3 things.

1. Saturday, I impulsively chopped off all my hair (10 inches to be exact) and donated it to locks of love!! Ta-da! Surprisingly, Mitch loves it. Yay.



2. A couple weeks ago, my friend Cassie and I entered in a competition offered by the BYU education department. Basically we had to come up with some innovative use of technology that could be useful in a classroom setting, make a movie about it, and then present our idea to a panel of esteemed judges. Our idea was to use skype to facilitate community involvement through virtual volunteers. The volunteers could include parents, international "pen pals", or influential members of society (senators, famous authors, etc). After presenting to the judges, they deliberated, and the results were in! We got runner-up, with a total prize of $1000, meaning $500 apiece! Pretty awesome. Here we are. Famous.

3. We then entered our project into the "People's Choice" portion of the competition, which required us to get as many unique views on our youtube video as possible. We got extra points for the more states or different countries we got. Mitch is actually way more competitive than I am, so he took it upon himself to win this competition for us. He found this website that people post their videos on to get hits. The entire point of the website is "you watch my video, I'll watch yours." Due to this website, as well as the fact that we all had lots of friends and family living outside the US, we got a lot of hits from all over the world. By the end of the competition though, we were still lagging behind in terms of raw views. It was hard to tell who was going to win, since the hits don't include the point calculation for the extra countries and stuff. We were far enough behind though that we thought we had lost.

...a week later I get an email from the guy in charge of the competition. He said that due to the fact that we had far surpassed the other teams in number of countries and states (39 states, 92 countries, to be exact), we had racked up way more points that way and had won the competition!!! Can you believe it? Also I forgot to mention what the prize was...

dum da-da-dum! the ipad 2 ladies and gentlemen, wi-fi enabled, 32 Gb, retail $599. pretty much we have no use for it, since it doesn't have 3G internet. we figure they are trendy enough that we should be able to sell it pretty easily.


All in all, a pretty satisfying couple of weeks :D

In honor of General Conference Weekend...

I will tell you the amazing opportunity I had a couple of weeks ago. As many of you know, I have been driving up to Salt Lake every day for my month of student teaching with the same carpool of girls. One of these girls invited us all to a sleepover at her aunt's house in Salt Lake, so we all went, excited for a girls night and an opportunity to sleep in 45 minutes the next morning. Even more exciting, guess who her aunt is?

Yep, that's right, I spent the night at this wonderful lady's house. She was, as you would imagine, incredibly hospitable and generous. We had so much fun hanging out and listening to her words of wisdom. She gave us our own little devotional about receiving personal revelation...wow. I had even prayed the day before that if it was appropriate, she would be inspired to tell us something that I needed to hear to help me through the next few months of graduating and growing up and getting careers and all the craziness that has me stressed out. Well she didn't disappoint...that little talk was definitely the thing I needed to hear.

Basically she told us how she once heard Elder Bednar answer a question about personal revelation in this way (I'm paraphrasing): "It doesn't matter if after lots of prayer and meditation you are still unsure that what you are doing is what God wants you to do. As long as you are keeping the commandments and genuinely trying to do the right thing, God will NOT let you choose the wrong thing. If you should choose the wrong thing, with the intention to do the right thing, he will put a roadblock in your way so that it becomes impossible."

Wow that made me feel so much better, as you can imagine. She also counseled us to ask Heavenly Father every day in our prayers to help us learn how to receive personal revelation for ourselves. She said it is something that has taken her her whole life to develop,and it didn't just happen because she willed it to happen- she had to ask to be taught how to receive personal revelation. Wow kind of crazy...I had never thought to ask like that before.

As a side note...guess who dropped by while we were there snacking on hummus?

Apparently Elder and Sis Nelson are neighbors and bffs with Sheri...and Sis Nelson had stopped by to bring in her mail for her. When she saw us in the kitchen snacking, she came up to us and introduced herself. I started to shake her hand but she gave me a HUG. Haha she was so nice and friendly and sweet- truly a disciple of the Lord.

That night was definitely the respite I needed from all the craziness I had been experiencing in my life, as well as a great reminder of what kind of person I want to be, and what I can choose to be :)

The Men in My Life

This post is dedicated to a couple of the most special men in my life :)

1) My husband Mitch.

I have been bugging Mitch for a while now that he should start playing hockey again. For one, I have never seen him play before, two, he loves hockey and it's stupid that he tells people its his hobby when he doesn't even play it anymore, and three, with his newly discovered back issues he will need to start leading a more active lifestyle to keep his back in shape and prevent it from getting all out of whack again. Well he finally decided to take his mission buddy up on his offer to get together with some guys once a week to play roller hockey. He has been twice already, and he has had a blast. (It helped that I let him get new skates so that he could play...it was like Christmas all over again!) I have had so much fun watching him every week. I have to give him credit, I cannot believe he is as good as he is after not having played in over three years. I was so proud of him the past couple weeks when he, the "new guy", made several goals and had a few great assists.


2) Mi hermano, Zach (holding his soon-to-be-opened mission call!)

Last night, my brother Zach, got his mission call to serve our church for two years in South New York, speaking Haitian Creole. He reports to the missionary training center on July 6! I am so proud of my brother, and all the good choices he's made that have gotten him to this point. I cannot believe how old he is (and by default how old I am!) and how he will be gone for 2 whole years serving the Lord and helping people learn more about the gospel of Jesus Christ. I will definitely miss him and worry about him, but I know he is doing the right thing and will be blessed for dedicating two years of his life to serving God.

Here are the boundaries of his mission...(yes it includes the island of Bermuda!)



So excited for him!!


Click here to learn more about our church and its dedication to missionary service :)

Good News

For those of you who are still on tenterhooks about my last post...we are not getting evicted! After demanding to speak to said manager's superior, we had a very reasonable conversation with her in which we managed to work out an arrangement. They will let us stay as long as we want if we pay a little extra in rent and deposit. since we did break the contract, we feel like this is reasonable. Also we are just grateful not to be evicted.

In other news...
I complain a lot these days. I am stressed and have been dealing with lots of health things so it has made me much more cynical the past semester. I know no one wants to read about my complaints, so I will refrain.

Another major thing lately is that I am so stressed to the point that I have begun to question my major...do I really want this kind of stress my whole life? Yes homework and projects make it stressful, but even just watching my mentor teacher the past two weeks I am in awe that she is able to keep her life together. She has been deathly sick the past week, yet still keeps coming to school because she is concerned her students wouldn't be able to pass their upcoming state writing assessment without her help. Basically she is burning herself out, and she doesn't even have a husband or kids to worry about! Am I really ready to sacrifice my sanity for the sake of my job? I know that it's more than a job...it's kids futures...and that's what makes me so nervous. I don't know that I want that kind of pressure, especially when I know that I will soon have my own family to keep me plenty busy.

Trying really hard to make lemonade.

My life the past few weeks have been ridiculous. Like, if I wasn't experiencing it for myself I would think I was making all of it up.

About two weeks ago, our apartment manager barged into our apartment without knocking and saw our cats. We had chosen to not tell management about them, for obvious reasons (every apartment in provo hates pets), and we didn't really feel bad about it because they are potty trained, clean, haven't damaged anything, and don't bark or bother the neighbors. We knew the risk, and we took it, so I guess we can't complain. The thing that is annoying is that if she hadn't ALSO broken the contract by barging in without knocking, she never would have found them.

Well she threw a hissy fit about it, said we would have a week to pack up our stuff and go, oh, and by the way we would also be responsible for paying through the rest of our contract even if we weren't living there. Luckily we are not morons. We told her straight up that we know that she legally couldn't do any of that without going through the courts. Once she realized we knew the law, she told us she would "start the eviction process", though we're pretty sure that the property owners are far too lazy and greedy to 1) go through all that hassle of time and paperwork while 2) losing out on our diligent rent payments. Our guess is they'll probably post a couple notes on our door, and if they ever get around to filing for a hearing about it in court, by the time it's settled it will be time for us to move anyway.

A few days after that wonderful piece of news, I was on my way to campus one morning and got rear-ended pretty badly.

By a professor, no less. It doesn't look that bad, but there is a lot of damage that is barely visible. It is costing around $4500 to fix my poor car :( Luckily the other guy's insurance is paying for it. It has been stressful, but I am glad that no one was hurt.

The day after the accident, we came home after taking my car to get fixed, and our apartment smelled strongly of gas. Our management had left a note on our door saying that they came to mess with our gas during the day when we weren't home. We checked the pilot lights, they seemed to be fine. We aired out the apartment for hours, and by midnight when we were ready to go to bed, we could still smell it very strongly. Since gas is supposed to dissipate within 15 minutes of exposure to fresh air, we knew their was an active source where it was coming from. We didn't know what else to do other than call the fire department.

By the way, the funniest part of this story is that we literally live across the street from the fire department. We watched them all get into their truck, turn on their lights, and drive one block to our parking lot. They came up, all in their firemen garb, even with air tanks. They swarmed into our apartment and smelled the gas, and pulled out their little gas detector machine. If I wasn't so tired and irritated with our apartment complex, it would have been comical to watch.

Long story short, we found out that our downstairs neighbor hadn't been home all day, and his pilot light never got turned on, so his gas was leaking into our apartment through the vents and our open windows. Just to be safe, the fire department called the gas company, which took an hour to get there. By the time they left, it was 2:30 am, and I had class bright and early the next morning. Needless to say...I did not get much sleep that night.

You know that oh-so-cliche saying, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade"? Yeah...easier said than done.