“I want to look pretty for me. I don’t love the way I look when I get up in the morning. But I’m not gonna go to great lengths to look good. I’m not gonna get Botox or get a facelift. I’ll put a little eye cream under my eyes and try to smooth it out a little bit, but if it takes me more than 30 or 45 minutes, I’m out. I’ll do the bare minimum for school so I don’t look super tired or something, because middle schoolers are brutally honest.”

“I don’t know if being a woman is any different than just being human. We’re all human and in this and flawed and unique and individual. To me being female doesn’t make me any different than someone who is male … besides the genetics of it, I suppose. I can make life. My body has that capacity. But dads also support life. I think we’re all in this together.”

“When I run or ride a horse … in those two moments I can completely chill.”

“When I hit 30, I was crushed that I wasn’t farther along in my life. But it was ridiculous because I was married, doing great. I didn’t know it then, but I was about to have a little boy.

I don’t want to get old, to be totally honest. I don’t want to get physically old. I don’t mind gaining wisdom. But I don’t want to not be able to lift weights or go on a run or ride a horse. Nobody wants to have crow’s feet and extra wrinkles. I’m already fighting gray hair.”

“The idea that we need to serve others in what we do in life and just always looking for how we can help is something that my parents ingrained in me. And it’s the smallest things … helping neighbor, helping another 4H kid. My parents would do anything anyone asked of them to the point that I have to watch what I ask from them, because they’ll drop everything and show up. I knew that was a part of who I was from really early on. So, teaching fits that really well.

There’s also this intellectual side of me where I need to understand the big picture and the smaller details and have a problem to solve, have a place to improve, never satisfied. Teaching is that.”