Love is in the air

We had a Primary activity this morning that I was in charge of. The theme was "Love" and we had 4 different classes. In the first class "Love the Savior", I was going to show the movie "Finding Faith in Christ", but last night I decided that would be a good sharing time for tomorrow since the song we're learning is "Tell me the stories of Jesus" and the movie shows a lot of the stories about Jesus...perfect. That eliminated preparing a sharing time for the older children this afternoon. Our primary president's Mom is dying of cancer and she hasn't been to church for about 3 weeks now and she isn't sure when she'll be in full swing in Primary, so I have been in charge of Primary. Things are working out, although we miss our President dearly, so when I get an idea to show a movie during sharing time, I go with it, especially since I have spent the last few days getting ready for our activity. Which I will now get back to. We started with "Love Your Neighbor" where my Mom had written up ways to serve and show love to our neighbors, like rake their leaves, walk their dog, etc...and the kids played pictionary on the chalkboard with those ideas. They had a great time! Then we moved to a different room for "Love Your Family" where the kids made coupon books which included different chores the kids would be willing to do for their families. I found a 100 piece puzzle titled "The Life of Jesus" in our Primary closet, so I had the kids put that together for "Love the Savior" in a different room after they were done their coupon books. That went well although Zoe wouldn't let Eleanor put the piece on that she wanted to, which caused Eleanor to cry. The last class was "Love Yourself" where the kids decorated sugar cookies and treated themselves. Emily's teacher, Patti made the cookies and brought the frosting and sprinkles, which was a huge help to me. We had a small turnout for our activity, but I think everyone who was there had a good time and was glad they came. I got this activity idea from The Idea Door website.

After the activity, Patti took Zoe & Emily to the video store to pick out some videos, then they went swimming at the Y, and then to her house for a sleepover. I'm glad they're having a fun ending to their vacation.

Eleanor & I were looking at a photo album earlier when we came across pictures from a Stake Youth trip to the Hill Cumorah pageant in New York that I went on as Young Women's President and Patti went as my counselor. Patti looked different in the photo with longer hair and no bangs. And Eleanor pointed out that her hair wasn't painted gray! And the same could be said about me.

Matt called Eleanor Emily this evening (which happens often).
Eleanor: "My name is Eleanor!"
Matt: "Whatever." (This is his typical response)
The two E names do get mixed up a lot and the same thing happens to me and Zoe, so get used to it Eleanor because it will happen many more times. We do know who you are...really we do.

My goal this afternoon was to get Kate switched to a forward facing car seat. It's funny how switching Kate's car seat has not been anxiously awaited like it was with Zoe and probably most of the other kids. This is a big deal. No more infant car seat, which means no more taking the seat in and out of the car, we get to see Kate's face instead of the back of her head, and she'll be a big kid in the car just like her siblings. But this transition of seats has barely been on my mind. Maybe because it required digging a car seat out of the shed, which first would require tromping through a lot of snow, and then finding the straps to go to the seat, taking Zach's seat out of the car to adjust the straps to fit Kate and adjusting the seat that was in the shed to fit Zach. There's a lot of work involved here! Well I did tromp through the snow, found the car seat in the shed, and brought it inside. I brought Zach's seat inside. Matt took the cover off the car seat that was in the shed and washed it and it is now drying by the heat vent. That is how far we have gotten on my goal and I doubt more progress will be made in the morning, so Kate will have to take one more ride to church facing backwards and we'll have to put Zach's car seat back in the car for him to use, then we'll take it out again to adjust it to fit Kate later on. At least we're making progress.