Our new sacrament meeting tradition

Ahhhh...made it through another Sunday. Sometimes that feels like a huge accomplishment.

Andrew is still not back to 100%. He had a "minor" surgery on Friday to have his kidney stone removed. You never know how minor it will actually be. He had complications in recovery and had me downright scared for a couple of hours there. Everything is OK now, but he is just still really worn out and uncomfortable. Dang. Here the surgeon had me thinking we could be running laps by today if we wanted.

Anyway, I wanted to share something we've been working on with our older kids to improve reverence at church. It has been going pretty well. I got the idea from an article in The Friend magazine a few months back.

I got each of them a notebook from the dollar store
and challenged them to listen to the talks at church.
They need to write something down that they hear
from each speaker.

Whit's are real basic.
She listens for a word and
draws a picture.
This one is the temple.


Sometimes she'll also sound out the word.

And then sometimes she gets distracted
and starts drawing swirlies and pictures of the EXIT signs.
She's a five-year-old girl.

Brandon goes a little more in-depth.
He's supposed to write what the
talk was about or something that he learned.
That takes some listening!
I am so impressed with him.
I'm so distracted with Caroline that I
think he might hear more than me!

My favorite so far has been the second #2 on
this page, "a movie creator and fathers."
Toni, he was paying attention to your talk!

As a reward for their efforts, they earn Big Kid Time to spend with us after we put Caroline to bed. We usually play a board game. Our favorites lately have been Apples to Apples Junior, Cinderella's Enchanted Slipper and

Settlers of Cataan.

It's so fun that Brandon is old enough
to understand and enjoy this game now.
And he's good!
(Whit is just kind of along for the ride on
the weeks we play it, though. She likes
rolling the dice for Andrew and me.)