Ich Bin Ein Berliner!

    Well sort of. I'm not a jelly doughnut (which incidentally appears to be something of a misconception...), but I am living in Berlin – or rather I will be by this time next week. This might be coming as a surprise to most of you since I've been worse than usual at keeping in touch.

    So I can hear you all thinking “What have you been doing with your life lately, Courtney?”

    And to that I would reply:

    In December I finished up all the things at BYU and I now have an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts – Ceramics, and a Utah Art Education teaching certificate. My last year and a half of school was more crazy than I bargained for. I made a lot of ceramic sculpture and put together my final show (which you can check out here). The next semester I took a lot of classes that ended up being much more work than expected including my curriculum class which was totally awesome, but I wish I could have spent the whole semester on just that class... I finished up with a bang by doing my student teaching in Washington, DC which was awesome! I loved teaching in the inner city. I'm more excited than ever to be a teacher, however, that last semester finishing my Teacher Work Sample, planning lessons, and living in a new place when I was already pretty burnt out, left me feeling like this:  

    The moral of this story (and by moral I mean conclusion) is that my parents had to come mop me up off the floor at the end of the semester, squeeze me out into a small container, and carefully transport me to the mission home in Virginia where I have spent my time recovering and trying to figure out what I should do now that I am a collage graduate, grown-up type.
    The highlights of my time here have been Christmas with the WHOLE family (even Joseph who was pretty much home from his mission just in time to come open presents), teaching my mom and sisters how to throw pots (that means this:

not this:

although the second option is a lot of fun), eating ice cream from Brusters (which I've been missing since I lived next door to one on my mission in Indiana), and - despite being mostly anti-social and a short-time resident -making a handful of friends I'm really going to miss .

    So as I contemplated the universe here with my family, I was trying to decide where to move and what to do, and the only conclusion I came to was that I couldn't dive right back in to something crazy (read: grown-up; see also, responsible). Then one day my mother told me about a post on my aunt's Facebook wall saying that she had a friend in Germany whose wife is going to have twins soon and they are looking for someone to help them out with their 3 year-old son and 2 new born babies.

    One thing lead to another and here I am, getting ready to board an airplane in New York on Saturday. Sometimes I wish I was actually ready to settle down and be grown-up, but usually I'm just excited to be going on an adventure to a far away country where I don't speak the language and I get to play with/slave over 3 cute babies - don't ask me how that's less crazy than getting a job, it just seems right.

Dr. Seuss once said (wrote):

“You have brains in your head.

You have feet in your shoes.

You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

…

You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.

About some you will say, 'I don't choose to go there.'

With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,

you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

And you may not find any

you'll want to go down.

In that case, of course,

you'll head straight out of town.”

~Oh the Places You'll Go

    So the actual moral of this story is that if growing up is hard, just put it off one more year and go on an adventure to Germany.

Communicating With Me In Germany:

    Just to make it clear, I won't be taking my phone with me, so you will have to contact me for the time being through E-mail & Google Hangouts (CPerry17@gmail.com), Facebook, and/or Skype (you should be able to look me up with my e-mail address). I will give out a phone number if I ever have one and/or my snail-mail address for any interested parties.

    I will try to do much better at keeping in touch in the future and I'll even try to update this blog with all my awesome German adventures!

    And so my quest starts here for just the right street for my head full of brains and my shoes full of feet.