YW in Excellence

We held this early in November and it was a wonderful evening. All our young women spoke about one of the values and since we have 11 girls, a few spoke on experiences at the temple, with seminary, and personal progress. I was so proud of all the talks and the beautiful spirit of each girl. I really love each one so much. I was super excited about every single talk that night—like a proud mom of 11 young women :)

I also felt like I should be a speaker in the program that night, just to share some brief thoughts and tie everything together. For some reason I felt really calm about preparing my talk and I had almost a month to be thinking about it as I read my scriptures and reread conference talks. We held our meeting on a Sunday evening so I sent my sweet hubby off to his mom's house with all 4 kids for dinner and gave myself almost 2 hours to complete my talk and get ready before heading up to the church for early preparation. I really needed that completely quiet time to pray before our night, and to pray before I finished putting all my gathered thoughts together. Of course once I got to the church it was a crazy roller coaster of setting up and organizing and making sure everything was in place. But all of it turned out so well (minus the part when I realized I had sent Joseph with my car and therefore my keys to the building and YW closet...I borrowed some building keys from a neighbor but I totally made my hubby rush home from his mom's so we could get last minute supplies and decor out of the closet just minutes before the program started. Too stressful!)

We borrowed a darling idea we found here and then worked to make ours sweet but simple. I'm really happy with how it all turned out and that my new presidency and I can check off our 2nd big event together (after youth conference...do you sense that YW is kind of taking over my life? This is such a  huge calling. Awesome and I love it, but it's truly huge.)