I was thinking that I had failed. Failed in my goal to blog for 100 days—for obvious reasons—the last 14 days in which I have not blogged, but then I caught hold of an enlightening fact.
Ready? Here it is ...
I'm in charge. I make the rules. I set the goals and I decide who can get back on the wagon after falling off. Today I'm deciding that it's OK for me to jump back in. Part of me believes I must come up with content to post-date for the days that I've missed—the perfectionist part. The other part of me is saying, "Just shut-up already and give the girl a chance!" Yes, I suppose it is a bit odd that I'm having all these conversations with myself. Oh well. The good news (for me anyway) is that I'm ignoring the opinion that I must "make up" what I have lost, at least for now. This is because it won't help me today ...

Today has been a good day. I attended the temple this morning and then took lunch (Cafe Rio) up to one of my young woman at the high school. Her name is Abby and she and I are teaching the lesson this coming Sunday; so we needed to meet up and look over all of the possible material, so that we could narrow down what we want to use and develop and share with the others. After that, I visited another young woman at her house—it's early release days at the middle school. She just had a birthday and will be joining our class for the first time on Sunday, so we took her a rose and spent a few minutes getting to know her better. Her name is Maci.

FYI: I'm currently serving as a Mia Maid advisor at church. This means I support the Young Women's presidency in our ward and that I share teaching duties for the 14 and 15 year-old girls. I work directly with the 1st counselor in the presidency. Her name is Tara. She is the mother of one of our Mia Maids, and that is extra fun. I love any opportunity to work and serve with teenagers. I gather from interactions with other adults that some people are a little scared of teens, but I really enjoy being around them and listening to them and helping (if I can) as they navigate the world with increasing amounts of independence. It can be both an exciting and terrifying time of life, but I see so much potential in the girls that I work with. They are smart and gaining confidence and beginning to discover their passions and use their unique gifts and talents. I didn't love being a teenager myself. I was pretty shy and felt super awkward most of the time, but I had great youth leaders that I knew loved me. I'm very grateful for the influence they had on my life at that time. 

All of that to say that I stopped at two stores this morning to buy a single rose (to take to Maci) and learned that single roses are hard to come by in February. There are a variety of bouquets featuring roses and there are dozens of dozens of roses (ha!) and lucky for me today, some of those dozens were on sale. After visiting Maci, I came home and wondered what kind of a vase I could put my newly acquired 11 roses in—I don't have many medium-sized vases—just a really, really "too big" one and a bunch of smaller ones. I decided to get a little creative and put together a "rosy" display on the open window sill above my kitchen sink. And then I thought, "Why not buy myself some roses!" I like them. I really like that they are orange. 

And there you go. 
I blogged. I'm back. 
I sat down and wrote whatever came to my mind and symbolically pushed that procrastination monster to the back of my brain.

At least until tomorrow.