She gets the first vision

On Friday we only had sacrament meeting because they are painting our building. It hasn’t been painted in about 17 years and that’s a long time to go without a fresh coat of paint in Egypt. Because they are painting everything is in boxes right now, so there are no toys in nursery, no props for primary, no extra copies of the Book of Mormon in the library, etc., etc., etc.

So after sacrament meeting we all went home to, in the words of Brother Barton, “make the most of the additional time together to enjoy other sabbath [sic] appropriate activities.”

Rachel was in quite a mood from having stayed up late the night before so we were happy to rush home after only 1 hour of church. We came home and popped in The Restoration. Rachel sat all the way through it, amazingly enough, but I wasn’t sure she was getting much out of it. She kept saying “boy” and “neigh” and “moo” and other little words each time she saw something she recognized. I kept trying to explain the story to her in the simplest terms possible.

“Yes, that’s a boy! It’s the boy Joseph Smith. Yes, everyone is praying. They are at church. Joseph Smith wants to know which church is true.”

But then a horse would show up and she’d “Neigh!” and wave her hand in the air, brandishing an invisible whip and all my efforts would be wasted.

Soon I gave up trying to explain the movie to her and settled in to enjoy the rest of the film myself. When the movie was over we got out the nursery manual and gave Rachel the lesson on Joseph Smith, which she seemed to enjoy, but mostly she just wanted to get to the coloring page.

I traced it for her and then we colored it together and talked about it some more.

“Where’s Joseph Smith? Yes, there he is. Where’s Jesus? Yes, can you say Jesus?”

“Jeejush!”"

Even then she didn’t seem to be really getting it. She mostly wanted me to tell her which color her “col-cols” (colors/crayons/pens/felts) were.

 

And then tonight Rachel was postponing bedtime by asking to “col-col” so I set the timer for 5 minutes and told her that when the timer went off that we’d have to stop coloring and go to bed. While we were in the middle of drawing an “R picture” about everything that starts with R, Rachel pulled out the picture we had started coloring on Friday. 

She pointed to Joseph Smith and folded her arms. Then she unfolded her arms, waved, and said, “Amen! Hi, Jeejush!”

So something is sinking in. Sometimes it’s just nice to know that she really is learning.