Happy Anniversary

Eric and I celebrated our third anniversary yesterday, well, actually we are celebrating today since Sunday is always such a work day...

Yesterday was my last day with my primary class and six girls who've I've really come to love. Fittingly, the lesson was on the building of the Salt Lake Temple and on keeping ourselves worthy, or building a strong foundation of virtue, to be able to enter the temple. It was extra special because I got to spend some time thinking about my own ceremony three years ago and I got to (try) and share with them the sacredness of that event: how the Spirit blessed Eric and I with immense peace all day long, how everyone was stressed out and worried and some even near frantic (my mom tore a huge chunk of lace off my dress and started resewing it the morning of because it looked crooked to her) and how we just had this immense peace all day long, let alone the sweet spirit in our marriage ceremony itself. The wind was blowing like it often does in the desert but I hardly felt it as we took pictures outside later.

In the last rhetoric class I took, we talked about public and private reasons (while studying Arendt? Habermas? I honestly don't remember) and motivations for policy making. Same sex marriage came up, Mormons did not (this was before California's prop 8 and all). I found myself struggling to articulate properly the reasons for a temple marriage to my girls, even though they are phenomenally faithful and mature at 12 years old and all have solid testimonies of our church's doctrines, I mean, I even challenged them to memorize the Proclamation on the Family, for crying out loud (which all of them did and I which their prize was their own, personalized "wordle" I gave them yesterday like the one below).
In this context, the real "private reasons" don't lend themselves to much systematic description and use in a logical argument, which of course drives me crazy. If I can't even adequately describe the importance of a temple marriage to myself, how can I bear testimony of that to others? Well, I did the best I could to my girls and I hope the Spirit filled in the gaps.

And that, I guess, is the disadvantage of rhetoric, public policy and the world at large: only sanctioning and using one way of knowing....

Blah, blah, blah, this post is supposed to be about my anniversary and my dear, wonderful husband. He hasn't even had a full week off from finals yet, and he's been such a tremendous help and support around the house, an awesome Daddy, and the sweetest husband. He keeps telling me he's selfish, but I rarely see it. I'm so blessed to have married such a meek, enduring man. Christmas was over before we knew it (I'm not ready for it to be over!) and now we are catching our breath from a long semester and thrilled just to do normal family/couple things together.

My sister is taking Jane for the bulk of the day and we are spending it making our bedroom a retreat, putting things up on the walls, finishing all kinds of little organizational and pretty projects, so we can properly retreat to our room in the coming seasons of craziness. We are more than happy to stay home!!