Sacrament Meeting - by Warren

There is an hour a week when the family sits together in chairs set up like pews and we pray, sing, take the sacrament, and listen to spiritual messages. It's an important hour for any Latter-day Saint because the entire family is together, and we renew our promises with God.

When Diana was first born, the priorities were simple. We did whatever we could to make her comfortable, entertained, and happy without being too distracting to everyone else. Sometimes this meant walking out of sacrament meeting.



Now Diana is 14 months old, and it's different. She understands more, wants more, moves a lot more, and has some self control.


With many things, she has responded very well to "training." Like, she used to bite when she was angry, but every time she did we gave her an immediate time out in the crib. Now, instead of biting, she blows raspberries. I put "training" in quotation marks because I think the word implies manipulation, as if she was a puppy or something that lacked self-deterministic power. Of course, to some extent that is true at her age. Either way I prefer to think of it as good communication - since we don't talk so well right now, a timeout is the best way we have to communicate that something is bad.

Anyway, back to the point. Inasmuch as Diana is capable, we want her to learn in her youth that sacrament meeting is sweet. Some Jewish traditions let children chew on pages of the Torah dipped in honey. We let her eat bananas, gold fish, and all sorts of things. Sometimes that keeps her happy in sacrament meeting and sometimes not.

We recognize that our relationship with Diana is much more important than any particular technique. But, right now, we have two basic rules for Diana. They have had mixed success, but we realize that we've done her a disservice not being very consistent with her. (In part, by not communicating with each other as well as we thought.) One, if she moves more than an arm's length away from us, we will bring her back as lovingly as we can. And two, if she screams we will immediately bring her out to the hallway and give her an un-fun, thirty second time out in the corner, constantly repeating in word, tone and facial expression, "No shouting."

The truth is, we are still struggling. Sunday at church is hard for Diana. We are less consistent about sleep, food, water, and freedom than the rest of the week. Perhaps, the only thing harder on Diana is being in the car seat. Diana is a great baby and we're very blessed to have her. Some people reading this blog have their hands full with plenty more than our one angelic daughter. How do you handle Sunday sacrament meetings?