Leap-Day Silliness

February has been kind of a bummer month on my blog. So to celebrate Leap-Day, and the end of February 2012, here is a game.  It is called, What do you see?

Look at the pictures and tell me what they mean/are.  Write your answers on a piece of paper and then post them as a comment. I will also post what I think of when I see them.  Compare our answers.  Are we alike, or am I just weird?

A

B

C

D

E

F

Pedals for Hope

If you are someone who reads my blog regularly (there's about six of you), then you might remember that I write about Pedals for Hope every year in May.  Pedals for Hope is one of my very favorite things about Entheos Academy—I find it very exciting.  But after last year's ride, I heard a nasty rumor that they may not do it again. And, truthfully, last year's assembly fell a little flat, and I never did find out how much money the kids raised.  I wonder if the problem is that it has become more a school project, rather than a student project. I think it would be very sad if they dropped this activity, and I believe that the excitement could be revived if they wanted to do it.  But what do you think it would take to bring back their enthusiasm?

Well, anyway, I wrote this paper for my English class last summer, and I've been meaning to post it here, since I never did write about last year's ride.  This is kind of a cumulation of my past years' Pedals for Hope writings, along with interviews of some of the people who got it going to begin with.  I hope you enjoy it. :-)

PEDALS FOR HOPE

Pedals for Hope assembly 2010
Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News

The air of Entheos academy is thick with anticipation and an eager buzz comes from the classrooms. In the large common room a few teachers wait, setting up chairs and making last-minute arrangements for the upcoming ceremony.  Soon children, teachers, and parents fill the room; the teachers are hard-pressed to keep their students quiet in this atmosphere of palpable excitement. When the main student body is seated, one teacher and twenty-three students, ranging from kindergarteners to ninth-graders, boldly march across the room and take their seats in front of the eagerly waiting crowd, where a man and a woman stand, their hands poised to slash with clean, sharp blades.  They are all about to witness human sacrifice.

Working quickly, the man and woman cut ten-inch ponytails from each girl's head; they shave the heads of three boys who have been growing their hair for a year in preparation for this day.  As they reach forward to cut the teacher's hair, an aide is in tears, "I can't believe Ms. Tere is cutting her beautiful hair—I love her hair!"  With each snip, with each shorn head, with each tail that is held high to the crowd's view, the room explodes with shrieking, chanting and cheering.

It is not a pagan ritual.  It is not an Entheos rite of passage.  It is the celebration of their annual cancer fundraiser, Pedals for Hope.

Entheos Academy lists Excellence, Service, and Leadership as its first values, and Pedals for Hope is their culminating service project every year.  In the past four years Entheos students have raised over $20,000 for cancer research at the Huntsman Cancer Foundation.  It is even more impressive that this annual fundraiser was spearheaded by sixth-graders and continues to be propelled by the students.

Pedals for Hope was conceived in 2008, when Entheos sixth-graders did an expedition—a two month long, in-depth study—about cancer.  Their teacher, Kathy Millar, had set up a similar program in Michigan, and wanted to encourage her Entheos students to start a cancer fundraiser.  She explains, ". . . even though I had the idea and the structure, part of that structure is giving kids the freedom and opportunity to own it.  I don't think it is possible for me to say, 'This is what we are doing,' and then [expect them to] do it.  Kids wouldn't buy in.  So . . . we started at ground zero and let the kids make the decisions."

Google Images

Ms. Millar arranged for field trips to the Huntsman Institute for Cancer where, besides learning about the progression of the disease, the students learned that 550,000 people will die of cancer in a year—literally a person every minute.  Visitors were invited to the school to tell kids of their experiences with cancer.  Lindsey North, an Entheos alumnus and one of those original sixth-graders recalls, "The thing that caught my attention the most was that people said they couldn't believe that it was their family member lying on the bed. It didn't look like the person they knew. 

"It surprised me, and made me want to help."

The more the children learned, the greater compassion they felt for cancer victims and their families.  "We wanted to learn more about how to help," Lindsey said.  "We didn't know how to do it, we just knew we wanted to do it. And our teacher, Kathy Millar—she told us about a place called the Make a Wish Foundation."  Ms. Millar took her students on a field trip to the foundation in Salt Lake City, where they were introduced to the magical fairy-tale room that Make a Wish uses to begin their process of granting one wish to children, up to eighteen years old, who have life-threatening diseases.

After that field trip the Entheos students really started brainstorming ideas to promote cancer awareness.  "We toyed with the idea of selling T-shirts, or bracelets, or necklaces," Lindsey said, "but it didn't seem like something that we could really go very far with.  We heard that other people did runs or bike-rides . . . and so we decided maybe we should do something like that instead.  We came up with the name [Pedals for Hope] because we wanted something to do with bikes, and we wanted to give hope."

That year the sixth grade set a goal to raise $3,000 for the Huntsman Cancer Foundation.

"After we chose [a bike tour] we started looking at, 'How can we get money for this?'  We heard that other groups just went out and found sponsors," Lindsey said.  So with help from their teachers, these eleven and twelve-year-olds began looking for supporters.  Together they composed a letter, which they sent to some local businesses.  Later they called those businesses, and some of the kids even visited them to ask for donations in person.  Kathy Millar recalls, "[The kids] got dressed up and went into town to solicit sponsors—this was their idea and they took it so seriously.  It was beautiful."

Other students spent extra hours after school to make more phone calls.  They followed up with their potential sponsors until the day of the bike ride.  They found a business that would donate T-shirts to Pedals for Hope, and they looked for others who would donate bikes and helmets to use for their tour.

But they had another obstacle to overcome: some of the kids didn't know how to ride bikes.

shutterstock.com

So the students made bi-weekly visits to the Salt Lake Bicycle Collective where they learned all about bicycles: what all the parts are called, how they work, how to make minor repairs, bike safety, and the students who didn't know how to ride learned how.  "We took our bikes to school to practice for the bike ride," Lindsey remembers.  "That year only the sixth grade [participated in the bike tour], so it was important that everyone knew how to [ride]."

The students did get discouraged, but at any given time there was a handful of kids who were excited enough to keep the project moving forward.  Lindsey relates, "As we got nearer to the bike ride everybody finally realized that, 'Yes, it's going to go well, and it's something to be proud of.' And everybody's attitude just changed."

The Entheos students planned a two-stage, two-day bike ride, with a campout on the interim night. But the race got rained out, and after a tumultuous night in the tents leaders decided it was too dangerous to continue; they had to go back home.  Ms. Millar said, "Virtually every kid said something to the effect of, 'I feel like we are letting cancer patients down,' or, 'They go through worse times than this.' At that point I knew they got it—it's not about getting out of school or riding the bike; it's about helping. Their empathy was true and their understanding genuine—I was so proud that day!"

Pedals for Hope assembly, 2009

The next day, May 21, 2008, the weather quieted and the Entheos sixth grade finished their tour on the Jordan River Parkway.  They rode their bikes fifteen miles, sporting bright yellow "Pedals for Hope" T-shirts to show their support for cancer research.  Nine girls had heard of Locks of Love, the organization that makes wigs for patients who have lost their hair.  These girls pledged to donate their hair if they reached their $3,000 goal.  They not only reached the goal, but almost doubled it, earning $5,411 that year.

The entire school was so excited by the success of Pedals for Hope that it has become an annual event.  They extended the bike-riding privileges to the whole middle school; now students have the choice of riding from ten to fifty miles, and several parents and teachers ride with them.  Some middle-schoolers who don't want to ride wait at posts along the trail to give small snacks, water, and, most of all, encouragement to their bike heroes.  The rest of the student body participates in the annual Penny Wars—a competition throughout the school to see which grade, K through 9, can collect the most pennies to contribute to the Huntsman Foundation.  The Penny Wars alone have earned more than $1,000 every year, and the Locks of Love donations have become a highlight of Entheos' annual celebration of Pedals for Hope.

"Beautiful things [happened] at Entheos," Ms. Millar remembers.  "[One year] the kindergarten class raised over $400 in our Penny Wars; they wheeled out two monstrous jars filled with pennies to surprise us after a day [of] riding—it was awesome.  I loved the way the whole school came out, built an arch with their hands, and gave the kids high fives as they returned from their riding day.  [The kids] could feel the contributions tangibly.  More important than what I feel about the money the kids raise is the way they feel—I will never forget the day we unrolled that first amount.  The sheer joy and pride on their faces was contagious—students believed in the cause, worked hard, and in the end . . . they felt empowered.  And that is what this is all about—empowering kids to do good."

Pedals for Hope bike ride, 2011

It is a beautiful morning; there's a cool breeze, but the sun shines warm on the Jordan River Parkway.  Forty students in matching T-shirts stand by their bicycles, hands on the handlebars, ready to go.  They are getting instruction and encouragement from their teacher, Matthew Edvik.  "The other night the Huntsman Center held an awards ceremony to honor those who have helped them," he tells his kids.  "Entheos is one of only five organizations who received a special award from them."  And with cheering, high-fives, and high hopes, the bike ride begins.

Eulogy for a Home

This is the house I grew up in:

I took this picture soon after Bruce and I got married. 
That's his awesome 1969 Cougar in front of the house.

My parents bought this house in 1966—about a year before I was born. (I've sometimes wondered if I came along as part of celebrating a new, bigger home ;-) )

The right wing and the big front porch were built by my dad when I was little.  There used to be a carport on the right, and the porch used to look like this:

That's my little sister, Denise, taking a big step up.

My dad transformed the carport into two new rooms—the dining room (an extension of the kitchen) and the den—or library, if you like.  I remember trying to walk along the new floor beams—like a balance beam—while Dad was outside building the rooms. For some reason he was singing, "Here comes the bride, all fat and wide . . ."  (Probably I brought up the whole wedding idea that day; I thought his song was funny, but not very nice.)  I remember him working on a Saturday, fighting to piece and put the stone onto the fireplace he'd built; the same fireplace where I gashed my knee open on the hearth and got the very biggest scar I've ever gotten, to this day. (That prompted Mom to keep the hearth covered with a quilt or sleeping bag.)  I remember watching TV in the living room while Dad and Mom hung the smoked mirrors on the walls on either side of the fireplace (very 70's, very trendy).

A surprise birthday party for me.  I'm sitting on the fireplace hearth and you can see the smoked mirrors to my left.

Dad added on the big front porch a year or two after the rest of the addition (long before the above picture was taken). He and Mom and I went up into the canyon at 5:00 on a Saturday morning to get some of the stone that Dad would later put on the walls surrounding the porch (I guess that was OK back then).  The big, flourescent porch light showed Bruce the way to pick me up for our very first date.


We called our porch light "the sun."

I remember when Dad poured the cement for more parking space on the side of the house.  We kept ducks back then, and they got out at night and left duckie footprints in his beautifully-smoothed work.  He was pretty mad, but I thought it was cute.

I played with my very best friend in that house.  I met and dated Bruce while I lived there; I lived in that house for all of my unmarried life.

This morning that house caught on fire.

My mom wanted to make breakfast-in-bed for my dad this morning, because he hasn't been feeling well.  After she finished cooking the breakfast she thought she'd turned off the stove, but actually she turned on the back burner where a pan with oil in it was sitting.  She gave Dad his breakfast, then went back to the kitchen to get her own breakfast and the fire was already everywhere.  It was a two-alarm fire.
Thank goodness they got out of the house safely!

Bruce, me, and Melanie
That's the dining room and den behind me.
(I captured this photo off of the streaming news video—FOX 13)

One of their neighbors, up the street . . . their daughter is a good friend of Lindsey's . . . we got a phone call from them.  Bruce and I got there just after fire had been put out; we talked to Mom and Dad—they were safe.  My brother, Peter, who lives with them, had been in the basement; Mom thought he was sleeping when the fire started.  Apparently he called 911 on his cell phone and let the fire-fighters know exactly where he was; he was finally able to break a window and they helped get him out.  He's being treated for smoke inhalation and a cut on his hand; he should be fine. So, thankfully, thankfully, thankfully the family is all right.

This is the window Peter escaped from; it is diagonally opposite the room he was in when he called 911.  He must have remembered that this room had a bigger window (all the other basement windows are only about 14-inches high by 2-feet wide).
Thank goodness he was able to make his way to it in time!

This fire-hydrant is actually on our property.  When I was little it was my horse, my car, or just a perch where I could view the world (an uncomfortable perch).  When I was older it was a little worrisome when backing out of the driveway.  So glad it was right there when it was needed!

These are some of the bravest and kindest people I've ever met.

You hear about fires on the news, even get to hear the 911 calls.  You might think, "Oh, how sad!"
But now I know the reality of it: That was my brother terrified for his life on the call (linked above).  My dad has Alzheimer's; he and my mom went to stay with my sister, Melanie.  Dad keeps asking why he's there in his pajamas, and every time they tell him the house caught fire he cries as if hearing it for the first time. (They've decided to "remind him" that they are staying with Melanie while the house gets remodeled.)

And this is my house:

All my family, and my cousins' family on the front porch —July 1976



the front porch



This is me on my bouncy-horse, in the living room.

Christmas morning in the living room (before the remodel)

the living room
You can see the fireplace; the "smoked" mirrors really did get smoked before they all broke.

the west end of the house—the addition my dad built

the dining room (from the back yard) and the deck that my brother, Paul, and my dad built—where we had summer parties

My brother, Gregory, just inside the side door (dining room).

the pot that started it all

the spice cupboard on the wall, just to the right of the stove
Considering its location, it survived amazingly well.

If the bathroom doors were open, I'd run around and around the house.  When I had the measles I ran from my bedroom (in the front of the house), through the other bedroom, through the bathroom and into the kitchen to throw away my popsicle wrapper; I was so excited to be let out of my room for even that long!

This is where my parents slept. It was my bedroom, growing up. You can still see the butterfly wall-paper that I chose.  This room is the farthest from where the fire started, but the mini blinds were totally melted from the heat.

It's the house I grew up in.  I played there with my seven brothers and sisters and my cousins, lived there with my wonderful parents and my grandma from Brasil.  I loved and admired the beautiful figurines my mom had collected—many of them she bought while she and my dad lived in Germany. I played with the wooden elephant—with real ivory tusks—that my mom brought from Brasil.  I had friends over to play there; I got the doll-house that my dad built for me there.  I practiced the piano there.  I was always so proud of the great work my dad had done on our house—"My dad made the biggest and most beautiful house in the neighborhood."  We celebrated birthdays, holidays and weddings there. My sweetheart courted me there; it's the house I moved from when I got married.  At one point or another almost all of my married siblings came back and lived there with their children for a while.  Bruce and I lived there while my parents served a mission; Jason was born while we lived there.  A lifetime of books, photos, collections, mementos, home . . . all gone.

But my friend Jessi is right:  Everyone is OK; houses can be replaced.  I am so, so grateful that the family is all right.

And now we move on.

Sad, Sad Day

Call me heartless, but I never imagined I would spend the day crying my eyes out over the loss of the dog.  Then again, I never imagined that I would have to take him and have him "put to sleep" at the ripe, old age of five years.

The last time I wrote about Tucker I was a little concerned about the way he was eating—or not eating.  He was still gobbling down people food with no problem, and even eating his dog food if it had only the tiniest bits of "goody" in it.  So I wasn't really sure what to think of him.  He might snub his food for a couple of days, and then I'd get worried and break down and give him something yummy to tempt him into eating.  I was kind of frustrated that he was being so stubborn and naughty, but in the back of my mind I kept worrying that this really wasn't normal.  Then I discovered that if we put his dish on the kitchen counter, poured in a little water and let him hear us stir it in with a spoon he would eat the dog food.  So I went a couple more weeks thinking he was just silly and stubborn.

But by the end of last week he started vomiting all his dog food.  From Friday night to Saturday morning Bruce and I could see a dramatic change in Tucker.  He was very listless and he didn't even show any interest in his food—or anything else; he didn't even bark or growl at a knock on the door.  We couldn't take him to a vet, so I looked online to see how to treat a starving dog.  Mild people-foods like rice and eggs—about 1/2 cup every hour, and after a couple days we could try some high-quality puppy food.  We did the rice and eggs for him, but we had to coax him to eat the first dish.  That perked him up a little, and the next hour he was very happy to eat more of his special, home-made food.  But by Sunday morning he didn't want to eat, he vomited all his rice, and he wouldn't drink his water either; he was stiff and seemed disoriented.  He was vomiting again this morning.

In the end I had to take him to be euthanized; I slept badly last night, anticipating this. In the end, all that's left of our dog is a receipt.  And I've been crying all day.   I drove straight home from the Humane Society, and as I walked in the door I automatically looked to where he usually waits for us to come in, expecting him to be there.  Poor Tucker!  I feel horribly sad.