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This morning, Rebecca, Annie, and I locked the door to our apartment for the final time, finished loading up our moving truck and our car, and began the drive to our next great adventure. Normally, when I end one part of my life and move on to the next, I feel a great sense of excitement. When I left on my mission, for example, I was sad to be leaving my family, but I was also super excited to be learning a new language, be going to Poland, and see how life as a missionary would be.This was going to be a great thing, and even though I felt some sadness, the happiness helped me overcome those feelings. We are headed out to Utah, and there is a lot of positive momentum for our family. I accepted a job as an analyst for Goldman Sachs, which will have great opportunities for me moving forward. I get to use my Polish skills in the job, I'm working on a small team that's doing some interesting work, and I'm sure that working at Goldman Sachs will never look bad on a resume. ...

I love serving in the church.  I've heard people say that having a calling shouldn't be part of your own personal identity, but that doesn't make any sense to me.  When I serve, I give everything I have to the calling, and when I do that, I feel so much better about myself and about life in general.  The few times that I haven't had a calling (generally when I first move into a ward), I feel a bit lost, but I'm full of anticipation of whatever new challenge will be given me. A have a lot of favorite callings.  Organist. Gospel Doctrine teacher.  Seminary teacher.  I even loved being Primary President, but it's been so long that those memories feel far away.  Across the board though, leading Singing Time in Primary makes me the happiest.  I love that calling, and if I could do it the rest of my life, I would! I've now been teaching seminary for 3 1/2 years (yep, another chapter coming to an end), and I also teach Gospel Doctrine.  These ca...

With only a few weeks left before we head out to Michigan, Glo is closing a lot of chapters in her life, and with her being our last child, we are too. Yesterday (Sunday), Glo and I left church after sacrament meeting to head to the second-to-last lesson with Amy in Philadelphia.   I was worried that John would disapprove of us going for so many reasons, and don't think that I didn't feel incredibly guilty doing it, but in a rare sign of instant approval from John, he said to me, "Aris, don't you think we should take advantage of every last opportunity for Glo to visit her 'oracle'?" What a perfect description for Glo's teacher, Amy. Amy has been the greatest mentor to Glo, and dare I say, friend?  Glo's lessons aren't just about notes and technique, but they are about life and philosophy and motivation.  If I could have hand-picked any mentor in the world for Glo, and defined every attribute I wanted in that mentor, it would be Amy, thro...

By accident I posted this under Larisa's name but this is from John Kennedy, the husband of Larisa and the Father of her children. For those of you who don't know it, I am not very good at details.  I often forget details or overlook them and I go by the general feeling I have or get from something.  My ability to see the whole picture quickly works well for me in many ways, but sometimes detail oriented people in my life want more then the overall impression of what is going on. In my general impression type of way, I always compliment my Beautiful, Smart, Talented, Intelligent, Motivated, Artistic, Spiritually mature partner in life, my wife Larisa.  However, she sometimes wants more detail being the detail oriented person she is.  So while the list is not all inclusive and I will probably miss some things, I wanted to do a top 100 reasons why I am thankful she is the mother of our four great children.  These are in order I can think of them and not in the...

There's no easy way to describe what mama is for our family. We oftentimes have a "birthday season," or this year it feels a little like we have a Mother's Day season as well. Some people might find it ridiculous, because do you really need to celebrate one person for an entire week? While I would argue that you should celebrate someone every day, as much, as you can, if they mean something to you, I think mama deserves some greater recognition whenever a holiday comes along for her. Mama is, quite simply, the lynchpin of our family. While we would still be a family if mama wasn't around, things would invariably be different. We wouldn't end up doing something like Celebration of the Egg, where all of us take joy in various methods of destruction of an oblong white sphere. We wouldn't have countless pictures of our family spending time together, all of which evoke happy memories of spending time together. I don't think that the love present in our in...

I HAVE to put a picture in this one, so at some point, that will happen 😁 I have a month in between when I graduated and when I start work at Goldman Sachs. While visiting family, packing up our apartment, and hopefully surviving on any money we have saved up 😬, I have sort of reveled in the fact that no one will ever force me to read anything simply because a professor thinks that I need to read it for class. I will largely get to pick and choose what I want to read for myself! Of course, as I'm writing this, I'm sure I will end up reading manuals, reports, and other things for my job that will probably be long, dull, and that I will read "because someone said so." At least I'll get paid for it? With that in mind, however, I've also realized that if I want to learn things about the world, I'll have to motivate myself to read about them. Reading the news? Like I said before, not a problem. If I want to know about anything that isn't mainstream, h...

This past week, I received one of the most FAH-BU-LOUS compliments I've ever been given.  And it wasn't even said directly to me.  Here's how it went down: We all know this person, right? We all know that when I'm reincarnated (and have already had the experience of having a family and being a member of the church), I'll come back as Amy.  She is everything that I wish I could be if I was willing to sacrifice pretty much everything.  And goodness, she has. Last week during Glo's lesson, Amy's daughter, Victoria, became the subject of conversation, and how, at the tender age of six, she's already moving into double digits in math class.  Great things are expected of Victoria--she already speaks Japanese, English and Spanish, and she's probably somewhere in Book 2 of Suzuki already.  Somehow, Glo volunteered that she remembered learning her multiplication facts (mostly double digits) as I curled her hair in the morning, and then as we drov...

Mama is completely dedicated to her kids. I don't know that anyone noticed, but the examples I used yesterday about making something happen all day involved mama doing something for the four of us. That might have been something fun, like Ireland, or something stressful, like saving Mark from the whole storyline life thing, but it was all about us. When I was first deciding where to go to college, a big discussion was money. Was it really worth it to go somewhere where the tuition would be a HUGE cost, even though the education would be a little bit better? In the end, it came down to American or BYU. I liked both schools, but BYU was significantly cheaper than American, even with scholarships. Although it represented a significant sacrifice on the part of my parents, my mom always stood by me making whatever choice I wanted to make. When I chose American; she was good with it, and always came to pick me up freshman year. I distinctly remember one time where she dropped me off ...

This next one is going to be weird, because it's not a memory associated directly with mama. It is, however, something that I completely attribute to her. Mark and me, after Mama's amazing planning! I am a person who loves to have a plan. While that has manifested itself in my need to have goals and a vision for where I want my life to go, I often try to have some kind of schedule for myself. For example, when my mom worked it out so that Mark and I were on the same flight from Chicago to Traverse City after his mission, she went so far as to give me an alternate plan for him arriving in Traverse City, because she knew that I would want to know the plan not only for myself, but also for Mark. Sure enough, when I asked what his flight schedule looked like, she told me he was going through Minneapolis two hours after me, instead of going through Chicago like me. Tricky, tricky....#weboflies This attribute completely comes from mama. I loved being able to ask her what the ...

I am an avid news junkie. While my favorites (just because they're fun) are ESPN and local Michigan sports news, I would say I tap on my BBC app before I go to Facebook. It's gotten to the point where if I add one more app to my "News" subsection on my Iphone home screen, I'll have to swipe just to see all of my news options. Being as connected to the news as I am, I consider myself pretty well-informed politically, and these last few months have been hard with the new administration. While having a job offer revoked is one reason for me to not like things, I also don't agree politically with a lot of what is going on. Today's firing of James Comey represented yet another strike against our current president in my book, despite my personal views on what Comey has done over the last year. By all accounts that I have heard, he was a good FBI director and tried his best to be nonpartisan. All of this aside, I have always appreciated being able to talk to ...

Relief is an interesting feeling.  The dictionary defines relief as "the removal or lightening of something oppressive, painful, or distressing". Let's talk "oppressive, painful, or distressing".  As much as I try and compartmentalize the stress I feel from our home not selling, I believe those compartments are overflowing much like Glo's t-shirt drawer after a couple of years.  As much as we try and stuff just one more t-shirt in, it's full to capacity, and it takes a purge to return it to normal function.  The stress is oppressive, and there have been too many times in the past few weeks that John and I release our feelings of stress on each other.  We don't mean to, but in all honesty, the pressure builds until it can't go anywhere else...except on each other. In order to save tens of thousands of dollars, and in preparation for renting our home (if it doesn't sell), we've decided to move ourself.  This means Glo and I are stuck in...

One of my favorite shows is Brooklyn Nine-Nine, an office sitcom about a police precinct. It's hilarious. The head of the precinct, Captain Holt, is super stoic, rarely cracks or understands jokes, and doesn't like to have a lot of fun. One of the best examples of this occurs when one of the detectives, Santiago, is trying to connect with Captain Holt on a stakeout and says they should grab some food while they are together. Captain Holt responds: "No need, I brought these." He pulls out what looks like a granola bar and explains: "Nutrition bricks. I have original, no flavor, and whole wheat, no flavor." He is 100% serious about those nutrition bricks.  I think that if my mom or I were Santiago, we would not be able to contain our horror in this moment. We LOVE food. While this can result in some overeating problems (I cannot stop eating Oreos, for example), it also means that my mom and I appreciate any and all delicious restaurants that we encount...

*SQUEEEE!*  Prom!  We didn't think it would be part of our lives this year, but Glo's friend, Cole, ended up asking Glo to prom. Cole gave Glo about ten days to get ready for prom.  Not ideal, but considering the other option was to not go at all, we were totally about making it work! Cole and Glo have been "dating" since last fall.  They really are just really good friends who happen to love movies, television and animation, and so the best way to spend time together is to go to movies and the comic book store together.  They go out together at least once a week, and when they have a day off school, they spend it at each other's house.  There's never been any kind of hand holding or "breaking the touch barrier" at all, so saying they're "dating" is in the loosest way possible.  So the invitation kind of came out of nowhere. In fact, Glo wasn't even going to say yes initially.  She's heard really bad things about prom from...

As my mom, my dad, and I were driving home from the temple, we did one of those silly Facebook quizzes that asks you questions about your significant other, and you answer them as best you can. One of them was: "What does your spouse collect?" and Papa had a hard time finding something that Mama collects. If anything, Mama usually gets rid of stuff, to which Glo can recently attest. :-) Mama, however, had a pretty good response to this question She said that she collects memories. You can see that this blog is a great example of this, as it has been going on for several years and is full of experiences that we have had together as a family. So, for Mother's Day, I wanted to post some of the memories that have made me who I am, all of which connect to my mother and are attributes that come specifically from her. :-) This first one is pretty straightforward from her: a passion for sports. While my dad loves sports, he's much more into playing sports. Watching a sports...