December 1, 2010

Dear Grace,

            Life has been pretty crazy lately. I’ve been fighting to keep up with school, but honestly, my procrastinating has gotten terrible! Seriously, I sit down to do a stupid worksheet and get distracted for 45 minutes singing to my iPod and watching videos on youtube. I know, I know, I just need to buckled down and get my lazy butt in gear. Can you blame me though? I’ve got senioritis like nobody’s business! Fortunately, next term I’m TAing for a couple of classes and, lucky me, I get to take choir for my last semester of high school! Yay! I talked to the choir teacher, and he was really cool about it, so I’ll be good to go at the end of January, when the term ends.

            So I’ll be jumping around on topics. So first of all, a couple of days before Thanksgiving, Ally Bullock called me and asked me to tend her kids while she and her husband Ryan went to a play, so I said I would. Holy Cow, Kira (her daughter) is a little terror! She got into EVERYTHING! I gave her a water bottle to drink out of, and while I was sitting on the couch watching her, she turned, looked at the decorative basket on the coffee table with the fake vegetables in it and said, “Pumpkin!” and dumped the whole water bottle on it. Fortunately my best friend, Andrea, was there with me and came up with the ingenious idea to blow-dry the thing. Fortunately it worked, so we thankfully suffered minimal water damage.

            Oh! Funniest thing ever in psychology the other day! So it had just snowed outside one day, and there’s this kid in my class who never shuts up, and the teacher is always getting mad at him. So the day it snowed, my teacher went outside while he was talking, came back into class, and threw it at the guy and hit him square in the back! Oh, it was epic, and it totally made my day!

            A couple of weeks ago I got to perform with my dance company at the festival of the trees and the gingerbread festival, and that was fun because I got to lead the Santa Baby dance this year, so that was fun. And then last Sunday I got to sing a solo in sacrament meeting, and a guy in my ward named Brother Bagley liked it so much that he asked me to sing again this Saturday for a meeting, so that should be fun. Oh, and speaking of the Bagleys, Me, my friends Hannah and Alyssa, and Sister Bagley have all changed our names to celebrity names. Hannah is now Reese Witherspoon, Alyssa is now Sandra Bullock, Sister Bagley is now Taylor Swift, and I am now Drew Barrymore. Be jealous J.

            My internship is the freaking shiz! I’ve been going to it for the last month or so, and every day I’ve gone in, I’ve seen a different surgery every time. Here are some of the things I’ve seen: Sinus, lower bowel, hysterectomy, two knee surgeries, a hip replacement, two or three spinal surgeries…anyway, it’s been extremely fascinating to me. oh, and can I say that it’s NOT the delicate, careful process you think it is. Grandpa describes it as “Gutting a deer,” and…yup, that pretty much sums it up. On knee replacements they cut you open and peel your knee like an orange, and they practically kill you on hip replacements! Holy crap those things are brutal! No wonder people are so sore after hip replacements.

            Well, the people at Timpanogos Hospital are so friendly! I still can’t get over how nice everyone there is. It’s made my experience so much more fun and educational.

            Sad story! Britney and Brianna both quit from Sonic! Now me and Tonya and the three cooks are the only people still working there since I started. So yeah, I’m super bummed about that. Plus, on top of that, my hours have been cut drastically because my boss wants to keep labor down, so now I’m working like 3-8 hours a week, so I might have to find myself a new job as well.

            Thanksgiving was great, as always, because Grandma is the best cook in the world, and we had Michelle and Jessica (Josh’s fiancé) to help us, so that took a lot of the stress off of Grandma. We had a lot of family over, and we all ate until we needed to go into a turkey-coma on our food-coma beds, haha. After a few hours, we all went up to Grandma Dayton’s house to have pie, where my Aunt Cynthia and Uncle Mark and I sang around the piano for a while. Then my cousin Daniel’s friend Alex and I sang together for a while because he has a really good singing voice (which was SO refreshing to me! I rarely get to hear any good male singers, so that was exciting to me). Then Grandma and Grandpa and I all ended the night by watching Christmas Vacation, which is always good for a laugh.

            This week a new movie called Tangled came out, and I’ve seen it twice already, haha. It’s the Rapunzel story, with a slight twist on some things in the plot, but it was very cute and really funny, and I think it’s one of the best movies Disney has done.

Alyssa and I went up to Salt Lake City the other day for kicks and giggles. We took her GPS, (whose name is Gloria) but Gloria is retarded and doesn’t know how to give accurate directions, and the smog is so thick here that we got lost three times on the way up. When we finally got there, we went to the parking structure that had been free all summer and found out that it is open in the winter, and they charge ten bucks. So we thought we’d be sneaky and go get temple parking at the conference center, but then we remembered that you probably need a temple recommend to do that, so we ended up driving back and paying the ten bucks.

So by then we had missed the first two movie times we had been hoping to catch and ended up settling on an 8:30 show. In the meantime we went to dinner at the luxurious food court McDonalds where we played on the coin-operated kid rides and took pictures of my awesome Santa socks. Did I mention that I now collect cool socks? Yes, I have a lot of pretty freakin’ sweet socks now, so I’ll have to send you some pictures soon, haha.

After dinner we shopped around a little bit, and then we went to the movie. Alyssa said she wondered if Rapunzel would dethrone Jasmine as her favorite Disney princess. After the movie was over, she said, “Yup. Jasmine has officially been dethroned.” And I have to agree with her J.

After the show we walked up to Temple Square to see the lights, but we were too late and the gates were closed, so we walked back to my car and on the way there we got cussed out by a hobo, which I found both insulting and hilarious at the same time.

Grandma and I went to The Forgotten Carols last week, and it was awesome! I just love going to that show, the spirit is always so strong there. My favorite part of the show is at the very end, when the composer has everyone in the audience link arms with one another and sing We can be together forever someday. There was something so special in that moment that I can never describe. As I linked arms with a total stranger next to me, I felt a special kind of love for her, and for everyone in that auditorium. For all those people that I’d never met before, I felt a familiar connection to. I knew that they were my family, that we were all children of God, and that I had known them in the life before this. I was touched to be reminded that we will all be together again with God and with Jesus Christ in the next life.

Then, as I felt this and thought of this, I got choked up because I started thinking about you and your mom and Garrison. Somehow I knew—I don’t know how or when it will happen—but I just knew that we would be together forever someday.

There was another thing about that show that truly touched me was when there was a scene where the main character encounters some homeless people, and how she is repulsed by them. The homeless people then sang a song about how they are the same as the Christ child, and how He, too, had been homeless when he was born. It had never even crossed my mind to make that comparison before, but Christ really was homeless in his first hours of life, born in a lowly stable, with no home and now place to go to.

The last song that I loved was sung by the main character, where she said, All I ever wanted, all I ever dreamed of, everything I hoped and all the things I prayed for couldn’t hold a candle to what I’ve been given. I’ve been given what I need…Even when I didn’t understand, when I thought you had no heart, thank you for rejecting my demands and always giving me the better part… I feel like this so much lately. I’m always asking for things and getting angry when I don’t get them. But then later on, I see that God has given me things that have always made me infinitely happier than what I had first asked for would have. I’m always so grateful when the Lord chooses not to answer my prayers in the way I want or when I want him to, for “rejecting my demands and giving me the better part”.

I’ve been given things throughout these last three years of my life that are so precious to me that I wouldn’t trade the struggles I went through to get them for anything. I never could have imagined what God was giving me during those hard times, and all I knew was what I wanted right then, in those moments when it was the most hard for me. But now, as I look back on these three years, I thank God for those trials and for the person he has molded me into today. It’s strange how things are changed when touched by love.

This Christmas will be so weird without anyone but Grandma and Grandpa and me here. Michelle and Ryan and the kids are down at his parents this year, so we won’t have any little kids in the house this year. I talked to Grandma and Grandpa about this, and told them about an idea I had. I want to do Sub-for-Santa for someone’s family this year, instead of having just the three of us waking up and exchanging a gift with each other. I think that giving a real Christmas to kids who need it will mean a lot more to all of us than spending the money on ourselves would.

Hopefully that will work out and we’ll find someone to give Christmas to. Grandpa suggested that we go work in a homeless shelter kitchen on Christmas morning, and we may end up doing that. But whatever we end up doing, I hope that I’ll be able to maintain that same magical Christmas feeling I’ve always felt on Christmas morning.

Well, I’ve said enough in this letter. I love you, Grace, and remember Grandma, Grandpa, Kurt, God, and I all will always love you. Merry Christmas!

Love Always,

                        Katie Jo