TRYING to be reverent.

Two Sundays ago the speakers in sacrament meeting all talked about reverence. That is a hard subject to listen to when you have two little kids who won't sit still or be quiet and you have no idea how to get them to do either of those things. I felt really silly the whole meeting. At the end the bishop suggested that we talk about being reverent in our family home evenings that week. (He did make the point that he wasn't worried about the little kids as much as the teenagers, but I was!)  So I started researching when I got home from church that evening and we had a family home evening focusing on reverence the next night.

We sang a few songs about reverence from the Children's Songbook and talked about why we need to sit still and be as quiet as we can during church. I got a book from the library called Holler Loudly. I had gotten the impression the moral of this story was that we can be loud sometimes, but there are times we need to be quiet. I hadn't read all the way through the book though, and it did say that very thing one time, but that wasn't really the main message of the book so that was a bust. Ha! Darcy still liked the story though.

Then we played a game I thought up that would give us all (but mainly Darcy) a chance to practice sitting still and being quiet. I set up a row of chairs in the living room and we all had to sit down. We started by sitting still and being quiet for 10 ten seconds. If we got through that successfully we each got two M&Ms. Then we tried 20 seconds. Then 40. 40 seconds took a few tries for Darcy to get through. It was so funny and kind of crazy to watch how hard it really was for her to be quiet and still. We tried 1 minute eventually and we told her she could have even more M&Ms if she could get through that. After a few tries I decided she wouldn't normally be sitting there just staring at the wall with nothing to look at so I gave her a book. That didn't really help. It is really close to impossible for her to be totally silent so she would eventually start humming or making some sort of little noise. The look on her face was heartbreaking when she realized she hadn't done it again. I hadn't known this would be SO hard for her and I did not want it to be a sad experience for her, so we eventually just went back down to a shorter time she could handle. I am determined to keep practicing with her though.

Then we practiced saying different sentences in a whisper voice and got some M&Ms for good whispering.

Wow this was a way longer post than I meant for it to be. I hope we can get better at this soon!

Reverence practice :)