About Me

Thursday in Pictures

November 21, 2014 by Kathryn

Enterprise upgraded me to this cute little Jeep at no extra charge because of the possible pending snowpocalypse later this week.

Because of some work being done on the plumbing at my in-laws house, we got to drink bottled water the whole time I was there. I even brushed my teeth with bottled water. Whoever said book tours were not glamorous was obviously not me.

And raspberries in Utah in winter for breakfast? Living the high life.

Arriving at KSL Studios in Salt Lake for the taping of Studio 5 with Brooke Walker. None of the other guests had an entourage. I felt sad for them.

I had on my TV interview shoes.

And they gave me a mic.

They did not let me keep it.

They shot it like it was live, pausing between segments just long enough for commercial breaks and adding in titles, B-roll and voice-overs as they went.

Brooke was super nice and easy to talk to. She should do this for a living.

We both have excellent posture.

My sister caught this picture of me right before I went on. Nervous much?

And afterward, we got silly in the fancy chairs.

Then off to see my sister’s office in the Joseph Smith Memorial building. Gorgeous view from her floor.

Afternoon Drops of Awesome talk with friends old and new in Saratoga Springs.

Fun fancy “liquid awesome” Mary Kay stuff from one of my favorite people Myla and a thematically appropriate gift from Sina. Aren’t these cute?

I stopped by the temple where Dan and I were married and recreated this picture all by myself. I miss my boyfriend who’s at home winning Husband of the Year while I live it up in the UT.

Then fun times with the nieces and nephews at my sister Heather’s house.

And a book talk at my favorite public library.

I love these people.

And the CRAZIEST of all crazy faces. Wow. I straight up look like that sometimes.

An Awesome Book Tour

November 20, 2014 by Kathryn

This week I get to be an author on tour. The sentence I first came up with to begin this post was, “This week I get to pretend to be an author on tour,” but if we’re sticking with the Drops of Awesome belief that in the small moments of doing great things, we actually become the people we dream of being, then today? Tomorrow? I am a rock star author. I am leaving my home to go somewhere different and promote my book. I’m on tour.

Drops of Awesome!

I’ll tell you what there will be on this tour. Books. And good food. And great friends. And LOTS of vitamin C.

I’ve been fighting a cold since Saturday. Oh what a fierce battle it has been, but so far, so good. Thanks to some great advice from people who live on Facebook – *HI PEOPLE WHO LIVE ON FACEBOOK* – I have boosted the heck out of my immune system so the germs keep doing their worst but my body keeps shoving them back down.

This trip is something I’ve wanted to do since I wrote the original Drops of Awesome blog post in 2012. I have family and friends in Utah and a whole bunch of readers there, readers who should be friends and who hopefully will be after this weekend. I went to school there and I’ve been wanting to go back and connect with a bunch of people who have supported Drops of Awesome from the first day I put it online.

When you publish a small book, and honestly nearly any-sized book these days, you mostly promote it yourself. There aren’t big, extravagant book tours and I get it. They don’t really sell that many books. But this trip isn’t about selling books. Okay. It’s a little bit about selling books, as evidenced by the orders placed by Barnes and Noble for my events and the fifty-ton suitcase full of Awesome reading material I checked at the baggage counter. Mostly though, it’s about meeting people. And spreading Awesome. And seeing my new niece in person for the first time. And playing games with my sisters. And buying new clothes so I can be on TV because it is a fact that you can never be on TV wearing clothes that have been worn previously.

A word about the outfit. I love the outfit. The outfit took me three hours of concentrated shopping to find. The email from KSL recommended that I not wear black, white, red, patterns, sparkles… the list went on. Now, all of these recommendations were specifically to help me look better on TV and I’m grateful for them, but, MAN it was hard to find an outfit to meet those specifications. I did. It is accidentally purple. I know. Weird.

Now I talked about how I’m doing a lot of the promotion myself, but I’ve been lucky to work with a publisher that has a small staff of talented publicists who work way too many hours and they’ve helped me out a ton putting this Utah trip together and with other marketing stuff. When I said, “Utah,” they said, “How high?” and then they helped me schedule radio and TV interviews and book signings all in one weekend to maximize the trip.

And they’re not the only ones to hook me up. My brother-in-law offered to buy me a plane ticket down there with his bounteous air miles, and my family and friends have offered up so many spare beds, sofas, and air mattresses, I could stay for three weeks and sleep in a different bed each night.

It’s Wednesday night and I’m on a plane from Seattle to Salt Lake City. Sitting alone. Well, not alone exactly. But no one is asking me for snacks or where the potty is, or telling me their ears feel funny. It’s a strange way to travel.

Dan and several of my lady friends are taking care of the kids this week, getting them to their band practices and performances, Cub Scout meetings, music and dance classes, birthday parties and a whole lot of school. I’m super grateful because the truth is? I’m really excited for this time to get away to talk to people about ideas I’m passionate about. What could be more fun than this?

Event details can be found here.

My BYU Radio interview with Kim Power Stilson from earlier today can be found here.

I’ll be on Studio 5 with Brooke Walker on KSL in Utah on Friday at 1:00pm MST. (Link to come)

The pictures in this post are from a recent book talk and signing at King County Library in Duvall. Below are pictures of me making crazy-sauce faces while I speak. You know you want to see that in person! If you’re in Utah, come see me.

This is Happening

October 21, 2014 by Kathryn

Dan, who loves me and works hard to stay on my good side, says I will be a Daring “Young” Mom forever and maybe he’s right. It’s all in the attitude… and the maturity. However at the age of 35, my wrinkles and I are starting to feel just a bit squirmish about giving people my blog URL.

“Um… it’s because I was young once and… mumble mumble… young at heart… trailing off.”

So I’m migrating my digital life over here to DropsofAwesome.com. The stories are the same. It’s just DaringYoungMom.com for old people. I hope you’ll join me.

Infestation – A Haiku

October 18, 2014 by Kathryn

Rotten potato
Curse your awful fishy smell
Fruit flies live here now

The Bad Hotel

October 7, 2014 by Kathryn

We’d been driving for hours and we were tired. I pulled out my phone to find an inexpensive place to stay for the night and I saw a few options. Everything in our price range had Meh reviews so I went with the cheapest one, even though I sort of knew it wouldn’t be good. We drove into the parking lot and it was confirmed. This wasn’t going to be pretty. But I was tired and I decided to stay there anyway.

As we took the rattling elevator up to the second floor with a rough looking man and his dog, I began to seriously question my decision. We walked down the long, dim hallway, noise greeting us from nearly every room and the choking smell of cigarette smoke radiating from the walls.

We locked ourselves into our filthy room, helped the kids brush their teeth, checked for bed bugs and turned out the lights. The room was cold, dark, and noisy from the heater and the neighbors to the right, left, and above us. It smelled horrible. But we’d paid for the room and we needed the sleep before we started out on the road again the next morning. Wanda, a year old at the time, stood up in her pack ‘n play and screamed, reaching out to me and Dan in our cramped double bed. I picked her up. I sang to her. I comforted her. I laid on the stained carpet next to her and shushed her to sleep.

We didn’t get much rest. We had a horrible night. And we paid a hundred dollars for the experience. To put it mildly, we regretted the decision to stay there.

But the rough night was over. What could I do to fix the problem? I could apologize to Dan and the kids for my poor hotel choice, for not planning ahead and for not getting us out of there once I knew how gross the hotel was. I could decide never to stay there again.

What could I do to make the problem worse and ensure we stayed miserable for years into the future? I could decide that it was a tragedy that I’d chosen such a skeezy road trip hotel because since I’d chosen that hotel once, we were doomed to stay there every road trip for the rest of our lives. I could talk about how awful it was non-stop and decorate our home to match the hotel just so that every day I would remember what a bad choice I’d made. I could turn that hotel into the focus of my life.

Now that seems ridiculous, but how many times do we let our mistakes determine our entire future? Or even enough of our future to make us waste one day or one week in crippling regret? I recently said some things I regret. Stupid things. Thoughtless things. Things I thought were funny during a moment of heightened stress. I apologized to the people involved. I prayed and asked God to forgive me.

But the next day I still felt awful. How could I say those things? What did those things say about me as a person? How could my friends ever look at me the same way again? Should they ever look at me the same way again? These thoughts of shame and regret cycled through my head over and over again.

So because I was so upset about my mistake, I decided to live in that mistake for as long as possible. If it was a bad thing and I didn’t want it to be part of my life, then why did I let it take up so much time in my thoughts and in my heart? I had done everything I could to fix it… Except let it go.

By focusing all my energy on my poor choices, I was magnifying their negative effects in my life. I was decorating my house with pictures of the bad Hotel.. And I was succumbing to the inevitability of booking a room there again.

“That’s where I always stay. It sucks but I stay there.”

When you are bogged down by the things you’ve done wrong, you start to believe that you have no choice but to do them again, that it’s just the way you are, that you’re somehow defective or incapable of changing. If, after all, you spend your time dwelling on them, you aren’t changing.

Now, do I want to completely wipe the bad hotel from my memory? No. Not exactly. I want to remember it just enough at the back of my mind so I avoid going there again. I don’t want to think about it, but if the experience is buried way down deep in my brain, it can pop to the surface if I ever drive through that town again and find myself looking for a place to stay.

Next time I’m hanging out with my friends and I come to a place where I can go for a cheap laugh or speak words of love, I hope I remember just an echo of what the cheap laugh felt like and I hope I make a different choice. But for today, I need to let it go.

Today is so much bigger than yesterday’s mistakes. Today is a thousand choices waiting to be made and the first one will be to live where I am, because with the next choice I make, where I am can be a pretty beautiful place.

Please Sir, Will You Buy My Book?

September 9, 2014 by Kathryn

We’re so close, I can taste it. I guess I could actually taste it, if I wanted to. Although Drops of Awesome: The You’re-More-Awesome-Than-You-Think Journal doesn’t release for another week, I already have my copies in all their deliciousness.

That was an exciting day. Laylee said that me opening my box of books reminded her of George McFly getting his first box of books at the end of Back to the Future. I take that as the highest compliment.

I would also take it as quite a morale boost if you would pre-order Drops of Awesome on Amazon today. You can buy it any day but we’re trying to see how high we can get the Amazon rank to climb, so today would be especially helpful.

I love the book. The ideas within its pages have changed my life multiple times. Let’s call those times “course corrections.” And I really want to see the book and the movement spread throughout the world.

We need to start defining ourselves by who we are and what we do, not who we aren’t and what we don’t. We need to celebrate our victories, no matter how small to help us build momentum to do even greater things. And we need to know that a new story starts this instant. If you are taking positive action now, then you are the person you want to be.

Below is a preview copy of the journal. I hope it inspires you as you read and you want to share it with your family and friends. I can’t think of a more perfect gift for the sister, mother, friend, teacher, or dude who isn’t afraid of pink in your life. Who doesn’t want a gift that says, “I think you are amazing. I want to help you see just how awesome you are?”

I want you to see just how awesome you are! Please take this journey with me.

This Big Yellow Car Came and Took My Children

September 2, 2014 by Kathryn

Well, it starts. School. More specifically middle school. Queue the silent scream. This person is far too old and far too tween-ular for my liking. I still like her, but like I said, the silent scream.

Things take longer in the morning when your destination is middle school. You have to panic because your curls “look weird” and then you have to de-weird them. You have to wear lipstick for the first time. That’s right people, LIPSTICK, because you are old and mature and… SILENT SCREAM.

In middle school you wear runners bigger than your entire body was when it exited your mother’s womb and a backpack that is heavier than your current body weight. You have to check and recheck your backpack and ask your mom to walk you to the bus stop on the first day, only to get to the bus stop and realize, “Hey. Why is my MOM here?!”

So this is her back-to-school bus picture. From behind the trees. With Laylee super tiny because I didn’t have a razzi lens on my Windows Phone camera.

She will do great. Me too. At least the screams are currently silent.

Then there is Magoo. He has never cared about fashion. Or, I should make a correction, he has always cared about fashion just enough to know that he wanted no part of it. The look of horror he gave me last year when I suggested he wear a button-up shirt to school picture day curled my toes.

“Why can’t I just wear an Angry Birds shirt like a normal person?”

He doesn’t want to stand out, doesn’t want to be uncomfortable, doesn’t want to be seen as someone who cares about what he’s wearing.

But then this year we took him to H&M for back to school shopping and somehow this happened:

It was love at first sight and I found myself spending three times more on a pair of jeans for him than I ever had before. Because when a person who wears track pants and a logo t-shirt every day of his life begs you to let him look like a Newsie the first day of school, you say, “How high?” and jump up to that cash register. (This only works when you are employed, which we are. Yay! I’ll be blogging about that soon.)

Even Dan agreed. We needed to buy the outfit for our sudden fashionist-o. But then he asked, “Do you think he’ll really have the guts to wear it the first day of school?”

I had no idea but I was willing to take the gamble. And it paid off. He is even now on the bus to learning land, dressed like someone who’s misplaced his street urchin boy band. Out of two kids at his bus stop this morning, only two of them gave him a hard time for wearing suspenders. So that’s something.

I don’t care. The cuteness cannot be stood for.

I had a moment this morning where I was praying over my breakfast and it ended up being a way long prayer about the kids and school and all of my wants and desires for them. It’s swallow-you-up raw, that surge of emotion you get when you think about your kids and their happiness and future. I can’t express in words how badly I want them to be happy.

And off they go into the breach and I start the countdown to summer all over again. I will miss my friends.

What Happens Next?

August 11, 2014 by Kathryn

If you’re reading a good book, chances are, terrible things are happening to the main character. She’s making bad choices. People are mean jerks, doing things to make her life harder… or end it. Bad things are not good. You can’t change what’s happened in the book. So, why even keep reading?

I keep reading because I want to know what happens next. I keep reading because I know that no matter what has happened in the past, the future can always be brighter.

In life, you keep going because you decide what happens next. Minute by minute, choice by choice, you could be creating the world’s greatest comeback.

As we left for our vacation this summer, I was in a foul mood. Everyone was moving too slowly. My kids, my husband, the car in front of me on the one-lane road out of town. I wasn’t nice. To anyone. The car descended into gloomy silence and I sat at the steering wheel fuming. At first I was mad at everyone else. Then I was simply mad at myself.

We had just begun an all day road trip and I had been an impatient jerk, hurting people’s feelings and setting a horrible tone for the journey. Then I asked myself, “What happens next?” Because really that’s all that matters. It took me about an hour to cool down, but the next words out of my mouth were an apology and after that the next words were positive. Eventually, I was ready to create fun and the road trip turned out to be lovely. I’m so glad I didn’t throw in the towel just because I’d been a jerk for ten minutes but I came REALLY REALLY close to deciding the whole day was a wash.

Every hero has her low points. But what makes an inspiring, enduring hero? She keeps going. She knows that everything she’s been through can be raw material to make her stronger, better and more heroic. She tries not to make the same mistake twice, but if she does, she tries not to make it a third, fourth, fifth, or thousandth time.

This is a journey and the end has not been written. Keep reading!

This is My Jam

July 24, 2014 by Kathryn

This is my jam.

It was a hot jam but now it’s a cool jam.

It is definitely a slow jam. It took several hours yesterday to make.

Since Magoo eats jam like some people breathe air, I decided to make about 40 pints this summer, strawberry, raspberry, and blueberry. This kid spreads jam thicker than the bread. Lately, he’s decided that it’s easier to simply hold the jam jar upside down over the bread and pour it out.

I ordered the blueberries for this jam PLO* and they came in yesterday right at the height of my Drops of Awesome-induced email writing frenzy. So, I would take breaks from writing email to make jam and then take breaks from making jam to write email, with Laylee helping me in every capacity.

What child labor laws? Clicking the “invite” button on Facebook repeatedly is her favorite.

While the jam cooled, I ran out to my other jam session, a bucket-list hip hop class with my laydeez. When I say “bucket list,” I mean list of things to do before I turn 40, because I only have five years before I can never say, “I’m not forty yet,” again. I don’t think I’ve ever said it before, but five years from now, I will be never be able to say it truthfully again. So, before that happens, I need to do ALL the fun things.

And this summer one of those fun things is breaking it down with my crew.

These are the ladies who go to the Step Up movies with me… in costume. These are the ladies who just last night took turns performing our hip hop routine in pairs. Between the 6 of us, we have 23 children. None of us have ever taken a hip hop class before. These are the ladies who were available for this particular session and who happened to be around when I started begging people to take the class with me so I wouldn’t have to take it alone.

If I ever take one again and you’re reading this, you’re invited. We are not an exclusive crew. If you have an abandoned warehouse we can borrow to practice our moves, you are invited times ten.

White mom hip hop class. Because it’s never too late to close your eyes and pretend you dance exactly like your young, super fly hip hop instructor.

*We’ve started referring to things we purchased before the end of our time at Microsoft as Pre-Layoff or PLO. I don’t know why we think this is funny. We are pretty much laughing our way through this entire layoff. For example, when Dan was updating his LinkedIn profile one night, we were a little overtired and silly and he started filling in his resume with Facebook-Ad-Style-ClickBait headlines.

“This Software Engineer just finished an 11-year stint at Microsoft. What happens next will AMAZE you,” as his summary.

“How this Software Engineer got amazing results using just these 6 weird old tricks,” as a lead-in to his bullet list of skills. There are 10 listed.

“What Obama Doesn’t Want You to Know About Dan’s Career at Microsoft,” a link to a PDF of detailed information about what Dan did at Microsoft for the last eleven years.

Then he changed his current position to July 2014-Present Senior Software Design Engineer at Not Microsoft. The best thing about this was how two days later all of his contacts got an email suggesting they congratulate Dan Thompson on his new position at Not Microsoft.

If you can’t laugh your way through a layoff, what’s the fun of having HR misplace your job? Am I right?

To Market To Market

July 21, 2014 by Kathryn

So, if writing a new book is like a honeymoon and editing it is like going to marriage therapy, then marketing a book is like begging your friends to tell everyone in person and online how awesome your marriage is and if possible give you money… because you truly believe that publicizing and selling the heck out of your marriage will help people be happier.

That’s where I am this summer.

Let me start by saying I love this book. I would go so far as to say I heart it. It’s like I took my Drops of Awesome post, broadened its audience appeal, wrapped it in marshmallow peeps, shot it full of healthful organic steroids, sent it to design school, sprinkled it with fairy dust, and squished it into a journal.

I want you to buy this book because I like you. I want you to buy this book so you will like your life more and so you can stop trying to figure out what to buy all your lady friends for Christmas. I a little bit want you to buy this book so I can justify sitting in front my computer eleventy-hundred hours each week and so I can afford to fly out to where you live and meet you.

During this process, I am learning new things all the time. For example, I knew it was a good thing if people bought my book. But, I did not know that if everyone bought my book on May-tember 49th at precisely 3:65pm, it would be EPIC.

RE: Amazon ranking.

I think.

These are mysteries of which you need never have knowledge, lest you publish a book or lest you want to help market mine.

So do you? Huh? Huh?

I am putting together a Book Launch Team for Drops of Awesome: The You’re-More-Awesome-Than-You-Think Journal. The book comes out in September and I would be grateful to anyone willing to help promote it. If you sign up to help, you will get… FREE EMAIL!!!

Basically, my PR friends from Familius and I will let you know what promotional action would be most helpful at any given point and in return for helping out where you can, you’ll get an early look at some of the content and my undying love and affection.

Also, I will incorporate all of your names into a piece of high-level preschool-style word art, which I will hang on the wall in my laundry room for at least one week.

Please leave a comment below if you’re willing to help me. I’m so excited for this project to make its way out into the world. I know it can do a lot of good. With your help, it can do a more lot of good than if I work alone.

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