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It is incomprehensible to me that in four short years, John and I will no longer have children living at home.  I feel as though we are just starting to get the hang of this parenting thing and I wonder if the knowledge we have gained as parents will ever be put to use again. With that thought in mind, I would like to share some of these parenting gems with my young 20-year-old self.  I was trying to figure out everything on my own, and I definitely made some mistakes along the way. Don't expect perfection from a human being who is still learning to spell. I held to the mentality that if my children weren't perfect, they wouldn't be anything in this world.  This way of thinking stems from being a perfectionist myself, and it's unfortunate that I have only recently realized that it's an unreal expectation.  Children have brand-spanking new bodies, including new cranial matter, and they are thrown into a world where they have much to learn:  social cues, ...

I'm not trying to brag.  Facts are facts and numbers are numbers. Ethan is really smart. I know that most of us know this, but occasionally it's nice to see it on paper. Ethan is applying for the Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs scholarship.  If he is given it, the tuition for his senior year of college and his first year of any Master's program will be paid for.  It's a pretty big deal. He needed me to find his SAT and ACT scores from high school, scan them and send them to him.  Kudos to me for keeping all that kind of stuff organized so that I could pull them out within seconds.  Of course, I had to wade though the many score reports from SAT Subject Tests and AP tests.  Man, he took a lot of tests. Here's what I saw: Hmmmm, I wonder why he was offered scholarships for almost every college to which he applied. He's really, really smart.

I would think, after having been through college auditions with Mark, I would have this process down to a science.  Nope.  College applications and auditions are like snowflakes--no two are the same. Johannah is applying to five different schools for viola performance:  Baldwin Wallace Conservatory, The University of Michigan, The University of Illinois, Penn State, and BYU.  I won't say if the order listed is any indication of which colleges she actually wants to attend....and which she doesn't. Last summer, I sent Johannah to BYU to a music festival.  I've written about it before, but to sum up the experience, the festival did nothing to spark any kind of interest in her attending BYU.  Little did we know that the "straw" hadn't quite broken the camel's back.... At the festival, Johannah (and the other violists) were told by the professor that they would have a better chance of attending BYU if they auditioned in person .  I'm not sure if she...

Due to some special circumstances, I have been called as the girls' seminary teacher.  Don't think this job isn't incredibly intimidating to me, because it is!  While I'm a pretty good teacher for youth, I am no kind of scriptorian.  However, it was an inspired decision, and I'm glad to accept the challenge. The girls and I have been meeting together for a week now.  Sometimes we meet in the morning, and sometimes it's easier on all of us when we meet in the afternoon, or evening.  It doesn't really matter--we get the lessons done, and we have a great time learning together. The lesson for today was Mosiah 28-29, and the main focus of the lesson is the idea that with true conversion to the gospel, one will feel an increased desire to share the gospel.  It felt to me that a returned missionary would be the best person to teach this lesson, so I asked Ethan to do it.  I mean, c'mon, not only was he a stellar missionary in Poland, but he worked at the...

In the words of Mario, "Here we goooo!" The winter/spring season means one thing for the Kennedy family:  music festivals!  We haven't gone a year since 2008 without at least one Kennedy child being involved with PMEA (Pennsylvania Music Educators Association) in the spring.  In fact, the Kennedys kids LOVE PMEA, because they are really, REALLY good at it.   First, the kids must decide which PMEA festival(s) they will attend:  chorus, orchestra, or band.  Some of this depends on which ensembles they are a part of in school.  For my own personal records (and because Glo is feeling the pressure and keeps asking me this), here's how I remember it shaking down: Ethan:  2008 (chorus--district, regionals); 2009 (chorus--district, regionals, All-State) Mark:  2009, 2010, 2011 (chorus--district, regionals, All-State; band--district, regionals, All-State) Johannah:  2012 (orchestra--district, regionals); 2013 (chorus--district, reg...

Three years ago, John sold his Honda S2000.  We had a lot of cars at the time, not enough garage space, and quite honestly, not enough money for them all.  He did it without even thinking about it, because he had a friend who basically walked up with a check in hand. Is there such thing as "seller's remorse", because John had it, and he had it bad. He loved that car.  Not only is it cool looking, and super fun to drive, but it helps John survive one thing that he hates more than just about anything:  driving. John doesn't like tight, cramped spaces, and he doesn't like sitting for long periods of time.  None of that is a worry however when he has the top down on the S2000.  In fact, he drives with the top down in even the coldest weather--he just blasts the heat and goes! The painful part of selling the car was that we would see it all the time--driving around the high school, parked in the church parking lot, cruising along the highway towards Alto...