When I was in kindergarten, I met a young boy named Chad. We were in school together for many years, and grew up near each other. In junior high, I participated on a school geology trip to Colorado, and my teacher asked for volunteers to carry my nebulizer up the mountain (I was severely asthmatic). I am not 100% sure if Chad volunteered or was asked to do it, but he shouldered the extra weight in his pack all the way up Engineer Mountain so that I could climb it too.

In high school, I met Lisa through drill team. Lisa frequently had a smile on her face, and her eyes crinkled up as her smile got wider; she was always kind to me. As fate would have it, Lisa and Chad got married, and they had two beautiful daughters.

Fast forward... now Lisa and Chad's daughters go to the high school where we went to school. And their daughter Madison spends a lot of time in room A-104, where the journalists work on the magazine and yearbook, where I also spent a lot of time as yearbook editor.

When Madison called me to ask for advice on getting experience in the real world for her writing, I offered her an internship for the summer. I'm very excited to present to you Madison Ward, who will be writing for my blog once a week, focusing on movie and book reviews. Please welcome her!

Here's Madison's official professional bio:

Madison Ward is a seventeen-year-old girl who lives in Elkhart, Indiana and is the Editor-in-Chief of Elkhart Memorial High School’s student magazine, GENESIS, and yearbook, MONOLITH. She strives to work with both copy and design in her future careers, both editing and writing/making pages and, when writing, enjoys reviewing movies and books like she will be doing on this blog. At her school, she previously played basketball, but has this past year has gone back to soccer and hopes to letter in it before she graduates.

She is looking forward to her senior year, but is also a bit nervous and worried about what will come of it. She loves reading, watching TV and movies, listening to music, traveling, and reviewing and designing for all of those things. She also appreciates running, when she’s in shape, and attempting to bake, which so far hasn’t succeeded at all. She hates slow people walking through the halls at school, better yet, any hall, the phrase ‘lol’, and unfair situations, too long to explain. Although writing and designing are the professions she wishes to pursue, she has been told that she could also make a living as a comedian, a lawyer, a psychologist (which is actually her mom’s profession), and/or a detective, if that tells you anything about her personality.

She wants to help make people feel the things she feels when seeing or experiencing something and she feels like the only way to do that is to tell them about it so they can experience it, maybe with a new, added perspective, or design an advertisement or a label that will make them stop and try it as well. She strives to make a comfortable future for herself, where money isn’t an issue along with the added bonus of the entire white picket fence package, but also just strives to get through the day with only one morning cup of coffee, which probably doesn’t help her four feet nine inches height. Her favorite color is yellow and she loves the sun, with the occasional thunderstorm, and her goals for this summer include getting tan and buying a new wardrobe for the year, along with some skin and hair products, because why not indulge? She has loved avocados before they became such a popular trend and vanilla ice cream is her everything.

Introducing Madison Ward!