One Month Anniversary

So, tomorrow will be Christy and I's One month anniversary and I have decided that it is time for us to update the blog. Again, I'm at work, so I will have to make this one a words only blog. (As many of you have requested, we will attempt this weekend to post pictures of our house as well as hopefully some of our basketball team.)

This month has been a pretty eventful one for Christy and I. We've painted two rooms in our house, coached a basketball team to a lower bracket Utah South Valley Championship win, given talks in Sacrament, gotten callings in church, and tried to keep up with school along with trying to pick up a share of involvement in politics at the same time. Today is Friday, and both of us are very happy about this fact.

When we moved into our house we simply thought that we were getting a pretty good deal for newly weds. Since that time we have come to realize that we are more blessed than any set of newly weds we know (except maybe our neighbors who are in almost our exact situation.) Not only do we have a great house that we are getting a great deal on, but the Stringhams (the couple that are renting it to us while they are on their mission) are letting us do whatever we need to it to make it our own while they are away. We've now cleaned it up, fixed up a few things that were unsafe or unsanitary, and our latest decision has been to paint two of the rooms. (My plan is that tomorrow I am going to take some pictures of the house and post them on here so that you all can see.) The rooms we painted were the bathroom and our upstairs bedroom (the bathroom was an ugly blue color and the upstairs was annoying yellow.)

The next fun experience of this month was watching the basketball team we coached go to tournament and win the lower bracket. We've been coaching them since Christmas, and we had no idea how much each of us (hopefully as well as the kids) would grow out of this experience. We entered the season with a group of kids that came from all different backgrounds and ability levels. Neither of us had ever coached before. At the end of the season, as we were driving home from beating our kids rivals and Christy and I couldn't stop talking about how great it was to be able to see each of them grow in some way. Seriously, every kid on that team was able to walk away being just a little bit better at something than they were at the beginning of the season as well as Christy and I doing the same. The final game was a great culmination of everything.

The Bishop didn't want basketball to be the only interesting thing that happened to us this month, so he decided to ask us to give talks in church. We were given the whole 50 minutes for just the two of us to talk and because of daylight savings time we almost missed the meeting completely. We had to talk about Temple Marriage and ended up going over by a couple minutes. Christy seemed a little nervous, but I think that her conviction on the topic moved everyone there to realize how important the subject was for her. I was really proud of her. (My talk was okay, but I probably could have prepared a little more so that it came across as something organized rather than causing people to ask, "what has temple marriage got to do with 'colorblindness'?" The majority of the comments we got from people afterwards were something along the lines of "that really made me think.")

After the meeting, the Bishop told us that we had been called as replacement primary teachers. We will be teaching CTR 5 until the regular teacher gets over having a baby.

The last thing that has caused excitement in our lives this last little while is my new hobby: lobbying for change of public policy. In relation to the stuff I've been studying in school I've recently become involved in the gathering of signatures for the petition that is currently being passed around Utah to have the "school vouchers bill" taken to the ballot for voters to decide. Originally I was very much for the bill realizing that it was causing the private schools to have some accountability taken in their educational practices while at the same time giving parents a choice in where to educate their children, but recently have changed my views in a big way. (Christy has been against the bill from the beginning.)

It troubled me that Christy and I disagreed on this issue, so I continued to follow it as it went through the Legislature and put to the Governor to be signed into law. At the same time that all this was happening, at school I had been studying some literature about 'critical race theory in education' and happened upon a great article written about inequality in school systems as a result of public policy.

In this article it was noted that although Brown vs. Education set the precedent of desegregation of schools, since this court ruling there have been different measures that have been made to continue inequality. One of the things that the article brought up was the idea of school vouchers. The writer of the article brought up the fact that school voucher programs are a newly concocted version of an old racial policy generally labeled "white flight." She argued that because the voucher program does not cover the cost of the entire education of the child being taken from the public school system, the only people who are affected by the bill are the ones who have the financial capital to cover the difference in cost, namely: the upper class (the ones who truly don't need the financial help). In essence, I realized that although the bill professed to promote choice and equality, it was a bill that truly only benefits the rich and privileged.

I was so moved by this realization that I recently volunteered to help gain signatures so that the bill will be taken to the public for a vote. Tomorrow I will be taking petition pamphlets around Spanish Fork to be distributed to Utah PTA presidents to be placed in schools to be signed during SEP conferences scheduled to be held this week. (Christy tells me I get a little to passionate when I come to realizations.)

Anyway, that's our lives in a nutshell. Watch for some posts this weekend. I hope that they don't disappoint.