At dinner tonight

At dinner I asked Rachel to bless the food. First she tried to make Toto say it by repeating each phrase she said in a doggy voice. I interrupted and asked her to say the prayer by herself.

"But Toto wants a turn," she insisted.

"But it isn't very respectful to Heavenly Father to have a stuffed dog praying to him at the dinner table. Will you please do it? Just you?"

Somehow I finally convinced her to say the prayer solo—she's a tricky person to convince to do anything so I'm pretty proud of myself for succeeding without having her morph into a superhuman fit-throwing machine. Once she started, though, she wouldn't stop. She just kept praying and praying and praying.

My favourite part was when she said, and I quote, "...and I'm thankful for Toto and for my Dorothy dress. And please bless that my mom will do the laundry so I can wear it again..."

I took that as a hint and am doing laundry right now.

There is no guarantee her Dorothy dress will be folded in the morning but at least it will be clean and dry, barring any fatal catastrophe in the laundry room.

Auntie Em stopped by this evening to work on her wedding plans. I finished her invitations today and so she looked over them and Morgan looked over them and I looked over them and Karen looked over them and I think Reid looked over them—he gave them a cursory glance, anyway—so hopefully everything is as it should be. (But I think I'll have a third party look over them before we print them just to be on the safe side; we're all a little too close to the project).

Anyway, it just so happened the she showed up shortly after the girls and I had sat down for dinner. She claimed to be full...but it could have just been my cooking...

While Emily was explaining that she had already eaten Rachel turned to Emily and asked, "So, did you eat chicken feet?"

"What?" Emily and I asked together.

"On your mission," Rachel explained. "Did you eat chicken feet on your mission?"

"No," said Auntie Em. "I just ate regular ordinary food."

"Well, Uncle Jacob eats chicken feet on his mission!"

And that's true. But it's not true for every missionary. So we had a little discussion about how not all missions are the same—Emily went to Nauvoo and she ate what they eat in Nauvoo; Jacob is in Peru and he eats what they eat in Peru. It's just how we ate different foods when we lived in Egypt than we typically eat here. And that's okay.