I write from my lovely Adirondack chair overlooking a beautiful mountainous lake. Why from the chair, you ask? Because due to said insurance circumstance I had a last-minute knee surgery last week, and to tie it into family history, I inherited some crappy knees! Needless to say it's left me fairly immobile, and so I write. 
Some exciting news that is blog worthy amidst the crazy-busy family schedule though...I was able to attend the Sunday BYU Family History classes a couple times. I wasn't able to get any pictures because I was too busy exploring the library, meeting new friends, and taking as many classes and notes as I could manage. It's awesome, featuring conference-quality speakers for a price you can't beat--FREE! The topics rotate often, so you can go each week and learn new things. I took an English Research class this last time, and though I've taken 
many English Research classes in my day, I learned a bunch of new information. Plus, networking is fun, meeting other genealogy enthusiasts and many experts. It's a can't miss if you live near enough to take advantage of it. During my BYU Family History visits I was able to meet and talk to Anne Tanner, who coordinates the classes there at the Library. While chatting I expressed my interest in teaching some "mom" focused classes and she loved the ideas, so she plopped me onto the schedule and I've got a class for July, August, and September. I'm ecstatic. I seriously LOVE sharing my passion for this stuff, and I think far too many moms miss out on the excitement of it because they think they don't have time or don't really know where to start, so hopefully I can help a few more ladies (and non-ladies of course--we won't discriminate) outside of my typical social groups. Sunday, July 10th
Sunday, August 28th
Sunday, September 11th
To see the full quarter’s schedule:
So with that in the bag, I also started feeling super enthusiastic about being a Family History Consultant in my hometown. I knew I wanted to do it, but with the family's evening demands, I
wasn't sure how to go about it until it hit me that I could volunteer during the day if I could involve my kiddos. So I immediately contacted the local family history center and scheduled a meeting. You can imagine how thrilled I was to walk into the building and discover that they had had the same vision and had already created a children's family history room, equipped with toys, family history coloring books, and beautiful painted interactive family tree. So we put our brains together and the three of us decided to offer a class to the public geared toward moms doing family history with kids.
Drum roll please...
I’ve been handing out the fliers at all of the kiddos activities, and got the local library to hand them out at their desk, so far the reactions have been a mix of “okay you’re a weirdo” and “that’s AWESOME!”, but mostly the latter. I’m excited! Anyway, prepping both the BYU classes, and the Mommy & Me classes has kept me pretty busy in my spare time, but I'm thrilled about how things are coming together. So I'll keep you posted about how they go. Until then, Happy Summer!
