This week, my friend Matthew Gude told me that he read this blog and now feels bad about himself.  However, he has fully committed himself to the challenges from this point on!  What Matthew said brought something to my attention: the challenges are not about winning and losing, they are about trying.  It sounds cheesy, I know, but what a great week to talk about this because… I failed this week’s challenge!

I know what you are saying, “How could she?  She is the one who came up with this challenge in the first place.”  And I agree with you 100 percent.  Although I did not give this challenge any effort, I did learn something.  Time management is something I need to work on.  This lesson is more important than anything I could have learned by actually completing the challenge.

With that in mind, I still want you guys to be trying your hardest to complete these challenges!  Last week’s was obviously on the difficult side, so this week I present you with a more light-hearted task: read the newspaper daily.

My family receives the Kansas City Star daily and I enjoy reading it.  However, late nights of homework and broken alarm clocks have made for short mornings recently.  This leaves little time to read the newspaper, but I hope this week’s challenge will get me back into the routine and you guys starting the new regiment.  The benefits of reading a daily newspaper are countless and if you want to increase those benefits, try the following:

• read a little bit from each section of the paper.  If you just stick to FYI or Arts and Entertainment, you might as well have read People magazine.
• complete a puzzle or mind game.  Crosswords, Sudoku, the newspaper has tons of games that are fun to play and increase your mental acuity at the same time!
• discuss what you read during school.  Theology and history classes are great places to debate current events with peers.  By hearing others’ perspectives on issues, you will understand the topic on an in-depth level.

If you do not receive a daily newspaper at your house, take advantage of STA’s library where we have subscriptions to the Kansas City Star and USA Today.  This challenge should be fun and easy for most of us, so to make the week more exciting I am going to add a bonus challenge: tell your friends about this blog.  If you like doing these challenges each week, chances are that your friends and family will, too.  Heck, I mean I already have some readers at Rockhurst so I hope that every girl at STA will read my blog, too!  Let me know how both of these challenges go by commenting or e-mailing me at [email protected].  So let’s have some fun this week, read newspapers, talk with friends, and conquer these challenges!