This Life I've Found

I have thoroughly enjoyed reading everyone's 100, and I finally finished mine. It was sort of crazy trying to come up with 100 facts, and I am not sure if any of it is anything too interesting, but here goes...read if you want...

1. I was born August 12, 1982 as Laura Elizabeth Rhodes (I almost typed Moore).
2. I was a breech baby, and therefore a c-section.
3. I was born with a head full of black hair.
4. It later fell out and came back red. (It is a pet peeve that people say I don’t have red hair. I realize it has gotten darker and at times blonder over the years, but I am a redhead—and that is where Ada’s red hair came from).
5. I am the second of four girls—Ann (27), me (25), Sarah (22), and Kate (20).
6. Last year my students were trying to help me come up with a name for Ada, and they asked what my sisters’ names were. When I told them, one student told me, “those are the whitest names I have ever heard.”
7. This same student wanted me to name Ada, Larmeisha--a combo of my name and her name.
8. Until I was seven I shared a room with all four sisters, and I remember loving it (most of the time)
9. When I was seven, Ann and I moved into separate bedrooms downstairs.
10. Ann and I are only 18 months apart.
11. I love this now, but it made things rather difficult growing up. We fought a LOT.
12. Now we talk on the phone multiple times a week.
13. When I was in the first grade, I won 100.00 in an essay contest.
14. As young as first grade, if asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a poet.
15. In high school I was editor of the newspaper and yearbook staff, and because of this I became very burned out with all things having to do with writing.
16. Therefore, for the first two and half years of college, I was a fashion design major.
17. I loved fashion design, but I CANNOT sew. Junior year, I designed a skirt for a class project, and it was so big, that I had to hold it up while my teacher graded me.
18. In that same class, I designed a jacket that ended up being miniature.
19. While I was spending all of my time in the design studio, I was making A’s in my English classes, and this is when I realized it was time to change my major.
20. So…second half of junior year I became an English major—fashion design and English are two completely different worlds.
21. I once again fell in love with English and the liberal arts—I can’t believe it took me so long to become an English major.
22. In addition to not being able to sew, I also changed my major for personal reasons—I tend to be a little bit of a control freak when it comes to things like weight and fashion. I realized that this was never going to change as long as I continued to immerse myself in a world that worshipped those two things.
23. This is the primary reason I changed my major.
24. This does not mean that I think the world of fashion is bad or sinful—for me, however, it tended to be bad and sinful.
25. I still struggle with being obsessed with weight and fashion, though God has given me such victory over these things—praise God for redemption!!
26. I was a cheerleader from 7th – 12th grade, and I took it very seriously.
27. I made All-American four times.
28. The summer after my sophomore year of high school, I was at a college prep cheerleading camp at Purdue, learning what I needed to know to become a cheerleader in college, and I ended up in the hospital with kidney stones.
29. While in the hospital, I celebrated my 16th birthday, and my junior year started without me. I missed the entire first week.
30. I have had kidney stones twice since then.
31. I have given birth and had kidney stones. Because I had an epidural, I did not feel the full force of my contractions.
32. Based on the contractions I did feel, kidney stones hurt worse.
33. In the heat of the moment with kidney stones, I always think I must be dying. Obviously, it gets better once the doctors give me morphine.
34. By the way, I never cheered in college. I went to the first meeting for tryouts my freshman year, but I was too terrified to actually go through with it.
35. I have had my heart broken more than once, and therefore, I have huge empathy for anyone going through a break up.
36. Thankfully, Scott and I never broke up. We had a very uncomplicated dating relationship.
37. This was the primary reason I knew we should get married.
38. The first thing that attracted me to Scott was his kind heart.
39. We had a conversation nearly a year before we started dating in which we both discussed the fact that we believed any two Christians could get married and make the marriage work. Later, this played a huge role in my knowing that he was the kind of guy I could see myself marrying (you know, the question every girl is supposed to ask about a guy before she goes out on a date;)
40. As Scott mentioned in his 100, he is very passive aggressive, and there are times it makes me want to bang my head against the wall.
41. I spent the summer after my freshman year of college in China with Campus Crusade.
This was the scariest decision I ever made—I did not want to go despite the fact that I believed God was telling me to go. Finally, when it was almost too late, I committed to the trip.
42. It was an amazing and refining summer, and I met some of my very best friends on that trip, including Amy Speakman, Amy Rambo, and Anna Thompson.
43. While on the trip, I took a personality test and learned that I am a melancholy.
44. This means that I become easily depressed, don’t do well with change, struggle with insecurity, and tend to focus on the negative, but this is NOT all it means.
45. It also means that I am passionate, analytical, artistic, idealistic, and a deep thinker.
47. And that I tend to have extreme emotions—I think these extreme emotions often make Scott want to bang his head up against the wall.
48. For the most part, Scott and I are complete opposites. We have very little in common, but this seems to be what makes us work as a couple.
49. The fact that we are both trusting Christ to fulfill our marriage vows for us is the primary reason that we work as a couple.
50. 6 months into marriage, we found out we were pregnant. This was not planned.
51. I called my mother to tell her I was pregnant before I told Scott, and I was crying so hard that she thought I had been in a car accident.
52. Ann was the second person I called.
53. Scott was the third—he was at work.
54. By that night when we were sitting in California Pizza Kitchen, I was excited about the pregnancy. My emotions continued to go from panic to extreme excitement throughout the pregnancy.
55. I did not enjoy being pregnant mainly because I had no control over my body.
56. I struggle with having to be in control. This is something that I have to turn over to the Lord on a daily basis.
57. I did, however, enjoy labor. I thought it was a very cool experience. (I should add that I had a very easy labor, which included an epidural and only 30 minutes of pushing)
58. I did not enjoy the days following labor because Ada would not nurse, and the nurses in the hospital guilted me into giving her formula in a bottle.
59. Because of this, nursing was a struggle for the entire five months that I did it, and I am now very interested in learning about baby friendly hospitals.
60. While in graduate school, I tutored Auburn football players. As a result, I got to know both Kenny and David Irons. Kenny is extremely shy, and David is crazy. They are both very nice guys. I absolutely loved that job. It prepared me for my first teaching job.
61. My first and only year of teaching was at a Performing Arts School, where I taught the district kids, not the performing art students.
62. My school was considered “at risk”, which meant that many of my students were difficult to deal with in the classroom.
63. I really stood out in the classroom, since I was this little 5 foot tall white girl from Alabama, but I grew very close to my students, and strangely enough, I was able to manage the classroom fairly well.
64. I was a floating teacher, which meant that my classroom consisted of a huge bag packed full of everything I needed to teach a class. I just carried this bag from classroom to classroom.
65. I played the trumpet in the middle school band.
66. I quit band in the 8th grade so that I could be an office worker.
67. In my senior class who’s who, I was voted most dependable.
68. I used to be able to start at one end of the football field and do back handsprings (almost) across the entire field.
69. If I tried to do a back handspring now I would break my neck.
70. In the 5th grade I played rec league basketball, and I was so short that if I ever had to shoot a free throw, my coach told me to do a granny shot.
71. In 6th grade I wanted a pair of white guess jeans overalls. I received a huge bag of hand me down clothes from a family at church, and there was a pair of guess overalls (not white) in the bag. I told my dad that the Lord had heard what I wanted and provided, and I was very serious.
72. Scott and I started dating after weeks of running together my senior year. Scott overheard me tell somebody that I wanted to run a 10k, and he told me he wanted to train with me.
I later learned that Scott liked me and was looking for a way to get to know me better—turns out Scott hates to run, and we never ran the 10k.
73. We really haven’t run together since those first few weeks of dating.
74. Lindsay Luginbuhl Krupicka also ran with us, and she and Scott often talked about dogs.
75. Because of this, I thought Scott liked Lindsay, not me.
76. I’m not really a dog person, which I hate to tell people because I know it makes me look like a mean person. I try to act like I like dogs when I am around them, but Scott says that people can see right through this act.
77. I do think that there are many beautiful animals, and I don’t mind watching television shows about them. I just don’t really want to have any pets.
78. My favorite animal is a tiger—not because of Auburn, though I think it’s cool that Auburn’s mascot is my favorite animal.
79. The summer after my sophomore year of high school, I turned my hair blonde using lemon juice.
80. This completely fried my hair, and I had to cut it short.
81. In high school I was the flyer on my cheerleading squad, meaning I was the one who went up in stunts.
82. One day while falling from a stunt I broke a girl’s nose.
83. I became a Christian when I was four years old. My mom was giving me a bath, when a friend of hers called to tell her that her son (the friend’s son) had become a Christian. I began to ask questions about it, and I prayed to receive Christ that night. I had a very simple understanding, but I believe it was real.
84. I was very legalistic in high school, and looking back, I think that my actions revealed that I was finding my identity in my “goodness.” It was not until my senior year of high school, when my brother-in-law became my youth minister (he was my youth minister first, brother-in-law second) that I first began to grasp the truth that even me at my best was complete filth compared to Christ.
85. I am still learning this truth, and I find my actions often reveal that I still find my identity in things other than Christ.
86. I believe that only in Christ can we find satisfaction. Everything else—money, looks, fame, success, family, marriage, whatever—will always come up short. I believe that even the good things in life exist to point us towards Christ, and if we are relying on them rather than Christ they will lead to death. It is only in Christ that we can find life.
87. I can read strangely fast, and I often finish books in one sitting.
88. I literally will read anything. For example, if I am sitting in a chair, and I see a children’s book sitting beside me, I will pick it up and read it. I have even been known to do this with things like the backs of shampoo bottles.
89. I really enjoy writing poetry, but I don’t do it often because it overwhelms me.
90. My favorite poet is William Carlos Williams.
91. Langston Hughes is a close second.
92. I dream of being a published author one day.
93.But I doubt very seriously that it will ever happen.
94. I have only been out of the country twice—once to the Bahamas and once to China.
95. I so badly want to go to England.
96. In Jr. High I started writing a young adult novel, and got through maybe four chapters. The book was basically the story of what I wished my life was like as a 7th grader.
97. My main character was pretty, popular, lived on the beach, and went to parties with cute boys. Such depth.
98. I am not a stay at home mom because I love staying at home with Ada; I am a stay at home mom because I feel like it is what God has called me to do.
99. I miss teaching so much that I often dream about my students and my old office at Pebblebrook.
100.However, I really, really mean it when I say that I am so thankful for Ada and how she has changed my life.

And now I tag Milla (I know you've already been tagged, but I planned on tagging you anyway, so I am still going to), Jane, and Lindsey Slagley. No pressure girls. I realize that you probably have much more to fill your schedule with (such as teaching, Elisha, and Kate) than typing 100 facts about yourself, but I chose you three because though I know you, I feel like there is lots more to learn.