"You know that exciting feeling in your stomach, not like anxious, but your body is just like, What the heck is life?! That's me right now."

No Pants Wednesday is back for it's 5th year-- shout out to Emel and Colleen being the original NPW team back in our Broad Ripple days together. I love that other teachers play along and students like Jayla who want to do NPW too. 

We're working on 5 Paragraph Essays in class this week and Wednesday we wrote outlines for our support body paragraphs. To make things more campy, I made all of my examples about CILTs from this past summer. I'd throw out names to the class and have them pick someone for me to write about each period.

Fit Bit is hands down the greatest athletic motivator of my life. It's become a habit to run after school each day to up my step count. I'm trying to run a different route each day so I can explore new parts of Fishers. 

Wednesday night I was barely away from school before I headed back for Meet The Teacher Night and our Camp T Field Trip Info Meeting. Something about this night just makes me feel so young--it's odd. It makes me realize I've been here for awhile now when I'm seeing parents for their 2nd or 3rd child that's been in my class.

Thursday doesn't mean FBC quite yet, but I did get to hang out with some fantastic girls. I led a cabin of 12 8th grade (now freshmen) girls at Wyld Life camp this summer and I'm so thankful that we get to live life together all year long. Coordinating reunions with all 12 of them is complicated, so this year I want to try to have more times when I'm hanging out with small groups of them. Tonight that meant hanging out with Meric, Maddie and Cami.

Shauna Niequist writes, "I want you to invest wholly and deeply in friendship, God's greatest evidence of himself here on earth. I want you to live with wild and gorgeous abandon, throwing yourself into each day, telling the truth about who you are and who you are not, writing a love song to the world itself and to the God who made every inch of it." I think we lived that out well today. 

I'm so thankful for real conversations, never ending chips and queso, walks to Target for steps, uncontrollable laughter, shared memories, surprise adventures and good friends.

I got a message from one of these girl's moms afterwards, thanking me for spending time with them tonight and just for being their YL leader. Her words so sweet and just what I needed to hear. As YL leaders we're called to walk through life with our kids, to point them back to Christ and to be someone in their corner. It's my favorite thing, and the most life-giving, to do.