Personal Progress

I promised I'd post about this. After all, it is kind of a big deal. There were 8 10-hour projects plus several 2 week time investments for other qualifications along the way. Onward, blog post!

When I was a young woman (because I'm so old now that I can't be called a young woman), I did the old version of personal progress. This meant I had 40 hours of service to do plus many smaller projects and that I could only earn my award as a Laurel. Two weeks or so before I earned my award, they changed the program to the personal progress program that is in effect today. I figured I'd done all the work on the old program, so I was gonna get the award for the old program. And so I did. (I tried to find the old program online, and even with Super Deg's internet skills, this alluded me. Sigh!) This is what my original medallion looks like:

So off I go on my merry way, when my young women leaders tell me that since I stuck with the old program, they'd give me the new medallion. It looks like this:

Well, life continued, and all these hundreds of years later, I got the brilliant idea that I should do personal progress again. The new program allows any woman who is 12 or older to earn her young womanhood award. Well, I fit in that category, don't I? So me and my brilliant idea - off I went. I hope you don't mind a picture overshare as I tell you about my 8 projects. I'm only gonna show you 7 because the 8th was to read the Book of Mormon, and taking a picture of myself reading it seemed weird.

Anyway... project #1:

Value: Faith. I gathered all the family history information to make a family fan chart that goes back 8 generations from my parents. It has names and birth/death dates. There wasn't enough room for locations, but I did find all that, too. And in the process, I found a lot of temple work that needed to be done, so I've been able to work on that, too.

Project #2:

Value: Divine nature. I made something for my home that I could display that showed off a talent that God has blessed me with. If you've been following my create-a-torium blog, this will be familiar to you. These full-size canvases are an abstract family portrait, and as we add more peeps to our family, I will add more birds to the tree branch.

Project #3:

Value: Individual worth. I taught swimming lessons to both this little cutie and his cousin. I did so for no charge, and I was able to see them progress with their skills as swimmers and this helped their general self-confidence. And heck, they were just so dang cute that it was hard to resist hanging out with them!

Project #4

Value: Knowledge. I have been developing my cooking abilities (also seen by the amount of stuff on the create-a-torium blog) and have been putting together easy, fun, fast recipes that I can use with my family. This allows me to be a better wife and, one day, a better mother.

Project #5

Value: Choice and Accountability. I altered a lot of clothes so that I could be cute and modest. I only took a picture of this t-shirt, but I fixed at least 10 pairs of pants and 6 shirts. Oh, how cute!


Project #6

Value: Good Works. I gathered recipes and put together a bunch in a cute book and I spent time preparing healthy meals for a friend who has asked us to help him with this. It's really rewarding to know that you spent your time helping others in a way that's also fun and rewarding for you as well.

Project #7

Value: Integrity. I did this one for both of my parents, but the one for my mom I did as a project for personal progress. I gathered stories from all 5 siblings of our favorite memories and lessons we learned from her and made her a scrapbook of these for her 50th birthday. That way, we were all able to share with each other the values we learned from Mom and we were able to share that gratitude with our mom.

So, long story short, here's the medallion for this version:

It's not about the medallions, though. It's about the personal growth and the progress that I made in my journey to become more of the person that I want to be and that the Lord wants me to be. And I'm gonna totally recommend to all of you that you do the personal progress program.

But wait! What if you've already done it? No worries! Have you ever heard of the Honor Bee? You get to do the whole program again, plus some additional work, and you get this medallion. And for you nay-sayers who are thinking that that's lame and who wants to do all that for a dumb medallion, well I say to you, I'm not going to start working on that for the medallion, I'm going to do it for the same reason I got this version of the personal progress - to have a means to become a better person. I think it's working... :)