Character

Just two weeks ago many juniors, including my self, were asked to send in an application for national honor society. Although this blog may just sound like Maddy being vain, I wrote what they asked me too! Please don't take this as me thinking that I am all that! I can assure you... I am not!


I think to be successful you have to have a love for learning, the confidence to ask questions, the optimism to confront challenges in your day and a willingness to work. I believe these are traits I use everyday.

I like school but it doesn’t come easily for me.  I have to work hard to get a B or an A.  In middle school I struggled with math and missed taking Algebra in 8^th grade.  I vowed to catch up.  As a sophomore I took two math classes at the same time to do so.  It was hard but worth it as I am now in pre-calc and looking forward to taking calculus next year. 

Asking questions is a way of life for me.  Questions help me understand and I have never been fearful of asking them.  In class, I find myself leading the discussion or work on a project to get it completed right. I am usually not the smartest one in the group, but by facing the project head on, I find I learn more and the work is completed faster.  

I have studied music for many years and I love learning new things about singing. This year I decided to take on the challenge of instructing the elementary choir at church. I have enjoyed being the energy for the group to keep these young kids awake and focused on learning new songs.  I have learned how to motivate others and myself. 

Finally I have a positive outlook on life.  You will normally see me with a smile on my face.  School is fun and learning comes easier with a positive attitude.  I find smiling and a positive attitude is infectious and helps motivate people around me.  These are the traits that I would bring to National Honor Society, should I be invited to join.  

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Best things to do for halloween!

Top three things to do for Halloween!

1.)

The number one thing to do on Halloween is go trick or treating! Although I’m sure there are many people in the world that would disagree, this is why I think trick or treating is the best.

All year everyone waits in anticipation thinking about what they want to dress up as for Halloween! Some people dress scary, others sexy, and some just throw something on to fit in! Every house you go to on Halloween is decorated differently! Some have giant spider webs or gravestones, and others have scary music or people popping out from behind pillars. Everyone celebrates differently! Another difference is what happens once the door to a house is opened! Some people make you do a trick for your candy, others in the case of one of my friends houses you must be able to solve a math problem to earn your candy! You never know what awaits you as you step up to house after house on Halloween night! Plus you can never go wrong when people are giving away free candy!

2.)

The second best thing to do for Halloween, is carve pumpkins! Although many people have stopped carving pumpkins because of lack of time or laziness, I think pumpkin carving is a key part in celebrating Halloween! Plus it’s a great way to express yourself in a way that everyone can see! There are so many different ways to carve a pumpkin you just can’t go wrong! On top of that, the luminous light of all the candles always looks way cool in the darkness of Halloween night!

3.) The third best thing to do to celebrate Halloween is roast pumpkin seeds! Although many people don’t even know how, I think it would be a waste to just toss out all of those perfectly good pumpkin seeds! Before cooking the seeds it is important to get all of the yucky orange pumpkin goop off! Then you add a little oil and salt to the seeds and put them in a skillet to cook! Make sure you mix them around and add more salt periodically till they are all lightly browned! This is when they are good enough to eat! And there you go now you have a delicious Halloween treat to munch on while your watching a scary movie on Halloween night!]

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Pumpkins!

I love carving pumpkins! Every year being able to carve out new faces and designs is just so fun! In my family, it’s a tradition to all carve our pumpkins together. All six of us before every Halloween! As stated in my previous blog, I love finding the biggest pumpkin possible to carve into!

This year, with all my siblings away at school and having show choir from 3-9 on Halloween night, Halloween just wasn’t the same. But one of my best friends and I decided that we were still going to carve pumpkins and make the best out of a crappy situation! On the Friday before Halloween, we went out and found two of the biggest roundest pumpkins we could find! We also saw that all the little gourds were selling 10 for only one dollar! After picking out our 10 favorites we scurried back to my house to see who could carve the best pumpkin!

After gutting our pumpkins, we looked though a book that had tons of ideas on how to carve your pumpkin. Ever since I was old enough, I have been carving pumpkins! Yet even after 16 years, I still have not once carved a plain jack-o-lantern into my pumpkin, and this year was no different! I chose to carve a cat face in my pumpkin and even though it was a really tough design, it still turned out really well! My friend decided on a design that had three ghosts and the word BOO! Although she had not carved a pumpkin in awhile, with the help of my pumpkin carving expertise, her pumpkin turned out really well also!

When we finished carving our pumpkins, we took millions of pictures so we could show off our pumpkin carving skills to all of our friends! We put both of the pumpkins out on the front steps of my house and put candles in them! Both pumpkins looked so much cooler once they were all lit up. So of course, we had to take more pictures!

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Dancing!

If you have read my earlier blogs on singing, then you may have gathered that I teach the preschool through 5^th grade Sunday School choir, at my church. Every week I try to switch things up, sing different songs, do different warm ups, anything that will help me keep the kid’s attention. This last week however was interesting in itself, and will probably be a class I will not soon forget.

This last Sunday at church there was an African Methodist church visiting to show us how they would traditionally conduct their services. They opened the service with some African music calling to God. But what really fascinated me was all of them looked engaged. Not one of them looked tired or bored throughout the entire service. On top of that they were all having fun, and saying hallelujah every time something really spoke to them.

After the service is when my class begins. It started off as it would any other week. But shortly after I had started teaching, the children of the visiting church all came to sing with us. They followed along with the motions and tried their best to sing the choruses. It was so cute! I decided it would be fun for them to sing a song for us, rather than the other way around. A little girl came up and said she had a song she wanted to share. Her little brother came up with her and they started singing the Itsy Bitsy Spider. They were so adorable.

After they were done singing, I asked them to go back to their seats so we could sing another song. The little girl did as I asked but her brother just stood there, about a foot away from me, looking straight up. When I asked him if he wanted to go sit down, he just looked at me and shook his head no. Then not knowing what to do, I asked him if he wanted to stay up by me. He shook his head yes and never took his eyes off me for the rest of the class! The whole time while I was working on the song with the other kids, he just stared. As we sang No Mountain High Enough, all I could think about was how cute this boy was and when he started to dance it was a sight I will never forget.

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Creepy Crawly Critters!

Arachnophobia. Arachnophobia is when someone is extremely scared of spiders! I suffer from this phobia, at an extreme level. One night when I was little, my dad was putting me to sleep and while standing next to my bed he suddenly whacked the side of my mattress with a newspaper he was holding. I, being alarmed, asked him what he was trying to hit, he said it was a fly and I believed him as any other young girl would have believed their father. The next morning however I awoke with an itchy spider bite on my left cheek. It was on my face!!! I would never again believe my father when he said he saw a fly.

Throughout my life I feel as if I have had many, not so good run- ins with spiders. When my neighbor and I were walking up to her garage to get inside, 5 huge spiders crawling all over her garage code pad greeted us!!! Let’s just say it was not a happy greeting. We then repeatedly tried to hit the spiders, but all they did was fall to the ground and start running at us! I am simply just too young to die!

Another one of my very scary run- ins with spiders was just this last summer. I had just finished watching a very scary movie and I was feeling quite paranoid. When I walked into my bathroom to take a shower, there was a huge black spider crawling up the wall! After my brother killed it, I slowly walked into my bathroom hoping there would be no other spiders. And there wasn’t, as far as I saw. The second I stepped into the shower I was greeted by yet another spider! They were after me!!! I then called to my brother again and when he came up to kill it he started pushing it toward my face! I being scared as can be, jumped in the shower and closed the curtain! He proceeded to throw the Kleenex, with the spider, into the shower, turn off all the lights and close the door! I screamed bloody murder!! What if the spider wasn’t dead! What if it started attacking me! I literally stood there pressed up against the wall screaming my head off and bawling my eyes out for almost 3 minutes before my sister came upstairs to help me out.

I can never go near a spider again. Just a few months ago, I was walking out of a restaurant and I happened to look down and there was a “ginormous” spider crawling up my shirt toward my face! I ran in circles like crazy and smacked my stomach about 5 times before I was confident the spider was either gone or dead.

I HATE SPIDERS!


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Big Fat and Orange!

How does your family find their pumpkins for Halloween? Do you go to Hy-Vee or some other store to pick one out of a crate? Do you go out to a pumpkin patch and roam the field until you find the one perfectly round pumpkin that you just want to carve into? Or do you not get pumpkins at all!? Well until recent years, my family did none of these options.

When I was little, my siblings and I always wanted to get the biggest pumpkins possible for Halloween! If you’re a big Halloween person, then you know that the best way to get the biggest pumpkins is to plant them yourself! So for many years, this is how my family got our pumpkins! When you grow your own pumpkin, you don’t have to worry about paying an arm and a leg for that beautiful 3 foot by 3-foot pumpkin. Also, it’s only a short distance from your house so you don’t have to spend an entire afternoon searching, and you don’t have to carry it very far!

Some other things my family would do for Halloween was to carve our pumpkins together! One night about 2 weeks before Halloween, we would cover our kitchen table with newspapers and crowd around to carve the hardest designs we could imagine! All 6 of us going crazy with our ice cream scoops, giant spoons, and fingers seeing who could gut their pumpkin first! Then we would gather the seeds from the guts of the pumpkin and roast them on the stove with salt! They made a perfect snack for when you’re carving your pumpkin! After we were all finished, we would find the perfect candle to put inside our beautiful jack-o-lantern!

This is what I miss. I miss carving my pumpkins with all of my siblings, and having the biggest pumpkin on the street! I miss seeing 6 jack-o-lanterns sitting on our front step! I miss being together as a family with that healthy competition. These are the things you miss when you’re the youngest and all your siblings are off to far away places for school. This is when you realize how lucky you were to have fun family activities when everyone was around. This is when you realize how great your life was before all your annoying siblings left.

IADC

My Father is a lawyer. Because of this job my father has to represent people in court who have been accused of committing a crime. These people are called the defendants. Although I believe my father is very well known in Cedar Rapids, it always helps having people who will send clients in my father’s direction. This is what the IADC is good for.

IADC stands for International Association of Defense Council. The purpose of this organization is to allow lawyers all over the world to meet and network. This is helpful because let’s say my father here in Cedar Rapids was asked if he knew or recommended any defense lawyers in New York. Since he is part of the IADC my father knows many different lawyers from New York whom he could recommend, and the lawyers he knows in New York know many lawyers here in Cedar Rapids as well.  This is why the IADC is useful.

Every year the IADC has a big gathering. This gathering has meetings and knowledgeable guest speakers for the lawyers in the family and is always held in fun interesting places so the rest of the family always has other activity’s to choose from. Because there are meetings every year and they last about two weeks you really get to know a lot of the members. I myself have made many good friends through this organization who I still have contact with throughout the year! Because of the IADC i have good friends in Tennessee, Florida, Austria, France  and England. It's so fun being able to meet these people and be able to learn new things about their culture.
Since my father has joined the IADC he has attended many meetings only bringing me to 3 of them. He has been to Italy, West Virginia, Barcelona, and Canada. This coming summer our trip is going to take us to North Carolina, and the year after that is Hawaii! Although going to all the resorts is fun, the best part is definately being able to spend time with all my new friends!

EH!

The most recent time I have taken a vacation out of the country was last summer in Canada. Although it was very similar to american society, there were still a few key changes! For one, the views were amazing! On our trip we were able to go to two water falls, drive through the mountains, and take a ski lift to the top of a mountain. Although all those were great, I think one of the coolest sights we got to see was when we traveled peak to peak. The Peak to Peak was a gondola ride from the tip of one mountain to another. The gondola traveled 4.4 kilometers. The Peak to Peak breaks three world records. It has the longest unsupported span of 3.024 kilometer, the highest lift of its kind at 436 meters, and completes the longest continuous lift system on the globe!


Although seeing all the fantastic sights was great, we also had a chance to do so many fun and cool things on our trip! One of which was bear watching! At 6:00 in the morning we stumbled into a van and were driven up the mountain. On our trip we saw about 8 bears and one baby bear up in a tree! We also got the chance to witness to a mother bear protecting her cub, so the male bear wouldn't kill it! Another activity we got to do was zip linning! It was so much fun being able to zip through the air! It felt as if you were flying! We were zipping and zapping over the mountains and rivers below! We were going upside down, backwards, and spinny!


One of the other families that is a part of the IADC, (read my next blog!) met us in Seattle for two days before driving up to Whistler, Canada! While going out to dinner one night, we found ourselves in the "best" Chinese resturant in town and our order was taken by a man would would say fried rice, as fri ri and sweet and sour chicken as swee and sur chicaan. Let's just say we all had trouble keeping a straight face! We also got to go on a bike ride around a big lake! After renting our bikes we started our ride and were lucky enough to find starfish and other creatures of the deep!


Although our stay in Whister was only a week, we still had so much fun staying in our hotel (known as a castle) walking around the ski village (were Olympians spent their extra time during the Olympics), and having snow ball fights! I can't wait to go back to Canada and say "EH?" once again!