I'm so glad I get to teach Activity Days! It's really where all my best stories come from. And I sure love these kids.
A couple of months ago, I was making cookies with my kids, and someone didn't want to follow the recipe. (Not me.) The gospel analogies started to flow, and eventually it turned into a pretty hilarious activity.
We arrived and I plunked down the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies on the counter. I gave them bowls, told them we were making cookies tonight, and said go. They looked at me expectantly. Finally someone signed, "Where's the list?"
"Oh, you don't get one."
Blank looks while it sinks in...
Lillian, as the only girl, and the most experienced baker, overcomes her worries first and grabs some butter. She bravely unwraps it...
I start overhearing comments like, "Do you think 1 or two eggs?" "Maybe 2 or 3 tablespoons of sugar?" I, of course, sign all these so everyone can enjoy the funny things they're saying. After a bit, everyone has something. "Taste mine for me." What - you're afraid to taste your own? Yeah, I am too...
They all looked more like cake batter than cookies. And they all tasted more like paste than cookies. Everyone adds more stuff. Mostly sugar and butter. "Guys, try butter! It's like magic!"
Ready to go in the oven! Specimen one looks like cookie dough with about 5 chocolate chips in it. Specimen 2 looks like muffin batter. Specimen 3 looks like pancake batter. Specimen 1 goes in the oven for 20 minutes. Specimen 2 for 5 minutes. Specimen 3 for 10 minutes.
Specimen 1 came out over-baked, but tasted like (crispy) cookies. Good job! Specimen 2 tasted like sweet bread. Specimen 3 tasted like really thin sweet bread. Not bad for making it up yourself :)
While we ate the cookies, we talked about how life is like cookies - we can try to figure it out ourselves, or we can follow a recipe. The gospel is God's recipe for the best kind of life cookies. And of course, we talked about how when we mess up, we can fix our life cookies through repentance.
The kids were all really proud of themselves for figuring out how to make cookies by themselves (of course, they had all the right ingredients pre-selected for them...they might not have done so well if they'd had to guess all the ingredients!) But I think they recognized that it would have been even tastier with a recipe - and even more so with life!
Thursday, May 30, 2019
Monday, May 13, 2019
Branch Temple Day and Mother's Day
Saturday was ASL temple day. We have them once a quarter. One of the sisters I minister to was going for her own endowment, and I really wanted to be there with her. Marriner is an ordinance worker, and had planned to go up without us, and give a bunch of the car-less people rides. In the end, the best solution was to leave all the kids home while Mom and Dad went to the temple. This was a big deal - we left at 7am and got home 9pm. I would like to shout out to the world that We. Have. The. Best. Kids. EVER. We can't believe how fabulously they did. We came home to a house perfectly clean, and a cheerful Lige (who was the only one still up) telling us how good everyone had been. Oh, and a typed shopping list for Dad with the things they needed him to go buy for Mother's day. Sam, especially, was a super-helper. Our hearts are full of gratitude for the kids sacrificing their own interests to allow their parents to both go to the temple!
We took 3 people to the temple with us: Abby, who was receiving her endowment, Jackie, who was doing baptisms for the first time as a fairly recent convert, and Jeanette, who took the train from Fredericksburg, stayed at our house Friday and Saturday night, then went home after church today. Marriner remembered interviewing Jackie recently, but somehow the recommend hadn't been printed, so he did what any good branch president would do - he interviewed her in the back of the minivan on the way up! :) Quiet language for the win! Actually, at one point, Jackie was having a hard time understanding something Marriner was trying to explain and Marriner tapped Abby and asked her to help interpret.
This, by the way, is called a "CDI" - a certified Deaf interpreter. (Except Abby is just a DI, not CDI...) When someone has a hard time understanding a hearing signer, they will understand a Deaf signer better. So you'll go through a chain of 2 interpreters to get the message across. It's a fascinating thing, and it was interesting to see a situation where it was useful! This was a concept I didn't quite get for a long time - why a hearing interpreter wouldn't be good enough. But I get it now. Hearing people are always going to think of language as words. People who grew up deaf think of language as pictures, and sometimes all those words are hard for them. Just like talking in images is hard for hearing people!
The temple experience was fabulous in a lot of different ways that we won't gush about here. On the way home, Marriner sat in the front with me, so we got to talk, and everyone in the back fell asleep - we were tired. I tried to talk to the people in the back a bit, but I got car sick from turning around (Marriner was driving) and eventually had to just ignore everyone in the back. I will confess that I feel really guilty talking in the car when we are with Deaf people. It just seems so rude! But I made a rule to not sign and drive, and if I'm not driving, I get so car sick. Driving is just not meant to be a social thing for me.
We called Lige to let him know when we would be home, and had a funny conversation with him:
Phone: ring, ring
Lige: No! You need to put away the silverware in the drawer, not in the dishwasher. Nope, that one over there. Ok, now get up on the step stool and
Mom: Lige??
Lige: Oh, hi, Mom.
Mom: Why were you talking to someone else when you answered the phone??
Lige: I thought it would take longer for you to pick up.
Mom: But we called you....
Lige: So?
(note: on my to do list this week - teach my children about how to use a phone.) (Ok, in his defense - he explained that sometimes cell phones take a long time to connect. So he was thinking of that. Not totally ignorant about how phones work.)
We will move on to Mother's day now. The branch was very creative - instead of giving the women flowers, everyone took a flower to represent their own mother - red if she was still alive, white if she'd passed on. I think it helped us turn our focus outward on a day that can be...a little self-centered.... The Primary kids sang two songs, and they all sang like angels, and signed so clearly. It was fabulous. As Sacrament meeting started, Ellis leaned over and whispered (because that's more discreet) "I forgot my piano music!" I'd totally forgotten that she was playing the piano for the Primary! She could use the Children's songbook to play one song, but the other one she'd learned a simplified version. She looked through every copy of The Friend magazine in our church bag, hoping we'd brought the one with her song in it, then finally we decided to just do her best playing the full version. It was good enough. The kids sing so much better when they have piano accompaniment instead of recorded! They're so much more engaged. So it was worth it to me, and I'm grateful Ellis was brave.
My talk went really well. I'd struggled trying to express some of my thoughts in ASL during practice, and I prayed for my hands to be loosed. It wasn't perfect, but it was a hundred times better than where I'd been earlier in the morning! I paid tribute to all the mothering contributions women without children make, and talked about how to be a mother when you don't have any children. There were a lot of wet eyes, including mine. In the second hour, the YM/YW taught Primary so the teachers could go to RS. Lige and Ellis did a great job teaching Sam's class, and Marriner made it through singing time, pausing for a heart-to-heart with the big kids about learning ASL - the language of their fathers.
We took 3 people to the temple with us: Abby, who was receiving her endowment, Jackie, who was doing baptisms for the first time as a fairly recent convert, and Jeanette, who took the train from Fredericksburg, stayed at our house Friday and Saturday night, then went home after church today. Marriner remembered interviewing Jackie recently, but somehow the recommend hadn't been printed, so he did what any good branch president would do - he interviewed her in the back of the minivan on the way up! :) Quiet language for the win! Actually, at one point, Jackie was having a hard time understanding something Marriner was trying to explain and Marriner tapped Abby and asked her to help interpret.
This, by the way, is called a "CDI" - a certified Deaf interpreter. (Except Abby is just a DI, not CDI...) When someone has a hard time understanding a hearing signer, they will understand a Deaf signer better. So you'll go through a chain of 2 interpreters to get the message across. It's a fascinating thing, and it was interesting to see a situation where it was useful! This was a concept I didn't quite get for a long time - why a hearing interpreter wouldn't be good enough. But I get it now. Hearing people are always going to think of language as words. People who grew up deaf think of language as pictures, and sometimes all those words are hard for them. Just like talking in images is hard for hearing people!
The temple experience was fabulous in a lot of different ways that we won't gush about here. On the way home, Marriner sat in the front with me, so we got to talk, and everyone in the back fell asleep - we were tired. I tried to talk to the people in the back a bit, but I got car sick from turning around (Marriner was driving) and eventually had to just ignore everyone in the back. I will confess that I feel really guilty talking in the car when we are with Deaf people. It just seems so rude! But I made a rule to not sign and drive, and if I'm not driving, I get so car sick. Driving is just not meant to be a social thing for me.
We called Lige to let him know when we would be home, and had a funny conversation with him:
Phone: ring, ring
Lige: No! You need to put away the silverware in the drawer, not in the dishwasher. Nope, that one over there. Ok, now get up on the step stool and
Mom: Lige??
Lige: Oh, hi, Mom.
Mom: Why were you talking to someone else when you answered the phone??
Lige: I thought it would take longer for you to pick up.
Mom: But we called you....
Lige: So?
(note: on my to do list this week - teach my children about how to use a phone.) (Ok, in his defense - he explained that sometimes cell phones take a long time to connect. So he was thinking of that. Not totally ignorant about how phones work.)
We will move on to Mother's day now. The branch was very creative - instead of giving the women flowers, everyone took a flower to represent their own mother - red if she was still alive, white if she'd passed on. I think it helped us turn our focus outward on a day that can be...a little self-centered.... The Primary kids sang two songs, and they all sang like angels, and signed so clearly. It was fabulous. As Sacrament meeting started, Ellis leaned over and whispered (because that's more discreet) "I forgot my piano music!" I'd totally forgotten that she was playing the piano for the Primary! She could use the Children's songbook to play one song, but the other one she'd learned a simplified version. She looked through every copy of The Friend magazine in our church bag, hoping we'd brought the one with her song in it, then finally we decided to just do her best playing the full version. It was good enough. The kids sing so much better when they have piano accompaniment instead of recorded! They're so much more engaged. So it was worth it to me, and I'm grateful Ellis was brave.
My talk went really well. I'd struggled trying to express some of my thoughts in ASL during practice, and I prayed for my hands to be loosed. It wasn't perfect, but it was a hundred times better than where I'd been earlier in the morning! I paid tribute to all the mothering contributions women without children make, and talked about how to be a mother when you don't have any children. There were a lot of wet eyes, including mine. In the second hour, the YM/YW taught Primary so the teachers could go to RS. Lige and Ellis did a great job teaching Sam's class, and Marriner made it through singing time, pausing for a heart-to-heart with the big kids about learning ASL - the language of their fathers.
Monday, May 6, 2019
A fabulous service project and other uplifting things this week
Every year in April, each ward in our stake is supposed to sponsor a service project. Due to some last-minute cancellations, Marriner and I found ourselves brainstorming possible options last Saturday for a project scheduled for the next Saturday. Not an ideal situation, I know. We thought of a cemetery a mile and a half from our house on a little postage stamp of land, sandwiched between Aldi, the post office and the school bus lot. The cemetery is pretty much abandoned, and thoroughly overgrown. I didn't know it was there until one time I walked from Aldi to the post office and noticed it. By some good luck, the internet told us which church had originally owned it, and we even happened to have a friend in that congregation. Marriner called, found the person who gave us permission to clean the cemetery up, and emails were sent telling everyone to bring their mowers and weed-eaters.
Meanwhile, I'd observed that mowing a field that probably had poison ivy in it wasn't really kid-friendly, and emailed the other moms in the branch, asking if anyone wanted to have a kid project at the same time. So while the dads and big kids went to hack their way through the jungle, the little kids stayed home and made muffins and colored thank-you cards. When the muffins were done, we took some over to the cemetery workers, then we delivered the rest to the fire station just down the road. The fire man in the station clearly understood his role as a community ambassador, and graciously invited the kids in, gave them a tour of the fire truck, and thanked them warmly for their kindness. The kids felt great! (Which goes to show what a powerful thing accepting service can be...hmm...there's a great little side-lesson for me!)
We returned to the cemetery and found a night-and-day transformation. It wasn't exactly pristine, but at least it was kempt. But the coolest part was seeing everyone dusting off a dirty headstone. It had been knocked over and buried under the grass for who knows how long. Someone had found a hidden headstone, and after that, the kids used shovels and pitch forks to poke into the ground, listening for the "thunk" of rock. When they'd find one, they'd dig it out, get the grown-ups to lift it up, then wash it off a bit. The last one they found was over 100 years old, with these words inscribed on the bottom: "Gone but not forgotten." Pictures were taken for Find-a-grave and Billion Graves, and we hope that this person will be remembered in even more ways. Everyone admitted to being a little touched to see these people remembered in a small way. In another instance, Brother Spanbauer finished a section, then felt like he should go back, mowed a little more, and found another little grave. It was wonderful to feel the influence of the Spirit as they worked. As everyone finished up, Ellis and Lillian picked dandelions and buttercups and put them on top of the headstones. "Gone but not forgotten."
The little things that combined to make this such a touching service project are too many to be listed: finding a contact for the cemetery so quickly, good traffic, beautiful weather, with the rain holding off until we were done, nobody coming down with poison ivy, even though there was plenty in the area...we felt the hand of the Lord over and over again. I don't know why He particularly wanted this project to succeed, but I know it blessed and lifted my spirit, and I'm grateful for it!
On Sunday, we invited all the branch Young Adults over to watch the Worldwide Devotional. Not so long ago, we were the Young Adults, and we remember how great it was to be invited to the Bishop's house. So even though we have a little house with lots of crazy kids, we decided to invite them anyway. We had ice cream before, and had a great time chatting, then watched the devotional. It was about marriage. Marriner and I had a great time. It was pretty enjoyable to us to sit back and enjoy not being in that phase of life any more :) The talk was wonderful, and after the devotional the YSA's started asking us questions about how we decided to get married. It led to a whole big follow-up devotional (Q & A format) from President and Sister Merrill :) It was neat to be able to be a living testimony of how great an eternal family is, and to support what Elder Cook taught by our example. We were very glad we had invited them over. And I'd like to give Lige credit in the permanent record - as the devotional started, we asked him to put away the ice cream and toppings, so it wouldn't melt. We came back and found the kitchen cleaned to a sparkle. What a sweet act of service!
In Sacrament meeting earlier that day, Sam and Lillian had shared their testimonies. Lillian was trying to encourage Sam to not poke her all through sacrament meeting, and convinced him to go share his testimony instead. She helped him practice what he wanted to say, then he showed it to me. But when he got up, he was nervous and a little jumbled. We asked the YSA's if they'd been able to understand what he'd said. "Ummm...about half" was the answer. Which is pretty good - that's as well as he would have been understood in English, too! Then they added, "But Lillian - she sure has some flair!" "Lige, he seems like a very serious signer." Yeah, they nailed their personalities just perfectly!
So, that's the week in a nutshell! Now Marriner (who is reading over my shoulder) is telling me to go to bed, so I'll talk to you all next week!
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