verb: its what you do.

so, once upon a time i worked at a restaurant and it was awful. after that i made a rule for my entire life about jobs: the only job i will ever have is one i would do even if i wasnt being paid to do it.

i realize that this is not feasible for most people. it is not feasible for me either. it is partially about attitude and partially about choice.  

attitude comes from here:

{It is not what we do, but how much love we put into the doing. If I belong to Christ and at that moment He wants me to be cleaning the toilets, or taking care of the sufferers from leprosy, or talking to the President of the United States, it is all the same; because I am being what God wants me to be, and doing what He wants me to do.
I belong to Him.}

mother theresa

choice comes from the decision to choose to work for less money or a less than perfect schedule to be in an environment that i dont dread going to.

my job now? i look forward to it. i get excited about it. and who wouldnt? i get paid to dance and sing and play with playdough and have picnics in thomas the tank engine tents and throw colorful scarves up in the air and see if who can catch them first and tickle fests and rasberries and be with the sweetest girls in the world. and then im like, how the heck am i getting paid to do this? and last year when i was teaching students with disabilities and taking them on adventures and laughing and crying and growing, i felt the exact same way.

one thing that changed my life was a book i read in Australia about being a twentysomething, and a question was asked: if you could get paid 10 million dollars a year to have any job, what would it be?

and the more i think about it, the more i want to pursue what god created me to do. because money dies with you. and fame only lasts a couple hundred years if youre lucky. 

i just think its really really really important to do what you love at (almost) any cost. and if that isnt possible (or even if it is) i think its just as important to love what you do, regardless. 

{If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lives a great street sweeper who did his job well.}

Martin Luther King Jr.

something from nothing

so, i made this: 

 

and this:

 

 (this flower is more lime than celery in real life, and dont mind no-makeup saturday)

so, i found some old hand me downs that never quite fit right. they were either a color i loved or a fabric i loved so i couldnt part with them, and so they sat in my closet for way too long until this morning. 

i roughly used this tutorial:

http://www.designspongeonline.com/2009/12/party-flower.html 

(by roughly, i mean that i cant really handle step by step instructions and im really impatient so i layered the fabric and free hand cut all four at once for each part. also, i didnt feel like trying to buy matching thread so i ripped a piece of thread out of the article of clothing that i was cutting up and that worked perfectly. oh and i used 10 cent felt for the back. so, total cost: 10 cents.  actually like .01 cents because i only used a little tiny piece of the felt. anyway, my point is that its really easy and cheap and kind of fun.)

by the third one it takes ten minutes a pop. score!