New Year, New Church

A few months ago, we got the earth-shattering announcement that our church services were going from 3 hours down to 2 hours at the start of the new year, to allow families more time to study the gospel together. This didn't mean we got to sit back and relax with our extra hour, we needed to use it!

With Marriner being the Branch President, we weren't sure how this was going to look in our family. For one thing, I think we're pretty good at teaching the gospel to our kids already. And Marriner could use the extra time to visit and minister to Branch members. But we realized that nobody wanted to meet with him in the morning, so we decided to save 8:00 for family gospel instruction.

Last night, Ellis was up in the middle of the night with an upset stomach, and as I was helping her get settled a phrase I didn't even know I needed came to my mind. "Pajama Church." Maybe it came to mind because I knew it was going to be tough to get everyone up and going by 8am if we were up in the middle of the night with sick kids. Or maybe God is just way more fun than I am. And Marriner was maybe a little sleep deprived, so it seemed like a good name to him, too! Thus, Pajama Church was born.

What did we do for Pajama Church? We sang a song (because we like singing) and said a prayer, then I taught about what the New Testament is (that's our course of study for the year) and we did a little activity from the lesson manual about the parable of the sower, to help us get ready to be responsible for our own learning.

I liked the way it changed our Sunday morning from sitting around and reading while you wait for your turn in the shower to doing something together. Even though we had to wait our turn for the shower after the lesson was over, people were reading scriptures, looking at the lesson for next week, and other much better activities.

One thing that really made Pajama Church successful was Ellis's Family Home Evening lesson on Monday that introduced the topic for the week and invited everyone to read about it during the week. She put together a chart with a section to read each day, and if you reported on what you read to her, you got a star on her chart. This was great for Sam, who read scriptures by himself for the first time in his (short 6 year long) life this week. It was great to see him really trying to understand what he was reading so he could answer Ellis's questions.

I think I like this idea of introducing the topic to the family on Monday, studying individually throughout the week, then having a lesson Sunday morning to cap it off and prepare us for sharing what we've learned at church. I'm not sure it's sustainable, but I really want it to be.

The other part of my life that changed today was our Primary schedule. Now we only have 1 hour of Primary! I spend that hour teaching singing time to the little kids, then the older kids. I LOVED having my two groups split up for the first time. I love being able to be cheesy with the little kids without the big kids rolling their eyes at me. I love singing with the older kids without having to put on a circus performance to keep the little kids engaged. And what I loved best was going home right when the kids started to get tired and hungry :)

My sister-in-law, Katie Ann, gave me the great idea for singing with the little kids today. Our theme was "Come, Follow Me" which is really important. But I knew the little kids just wanted to sing "Head Shoulders Knees and Toes" and other such songs. I mean, half of them went to Nursery last week, where they got to play the whole time. So Katie Ann's idea was to have them practice following the leader on all the wiggle songs. Ah! We had a great time.

This week was Martha's first week in Primary (coming from Nursery). She was just excited that our friend Michai was going to be her new teacher! And Michai was fabulous. But she commented after that she'll have to get used to some of the songs that have really weird actions. And I thought about all the actions I've done my whole life, and I had to agree, they don't really make sense unless you grew up with it :) But we'll get her used to them fast! We have an odd mix of ASL and traditional little-kid actions mixed together, sometimes I'm worn out trying to get all the actions in. But the kids don't care about the ASL, they just want to jump on "Jesus wants me for a sun-BEAM" And I guess that's just fine.