FHE x 3

Tonight for FHE we went to the stake centre to help strike the set—the final nail in the coffin of the musical. I should probably do a final blog post on the production (and I'm sure I'll get around to that eventually). Right now we're feeling relieved that it's over but are also missing all the action.

Rachel cried herself to sleep on Saturday night. I had to remind her that we had this FHE planned for Monday, and she has a stake Activity Day Girls activity on Saturday, and we have a little cast party in a couple of weeks—all wonderful times to see her new friends. She was really mourning the end of the show.

She took a shower after we got home on Saturday and left me a note in the shower thanking me for making her try out and do the musical. Side note: is there anything more rewarding as a parent than that? Side note #2: Andrew got this "AquaNotes" thing that he saw because he always has such great ideas in the shower, and while he has written down a few ideas of his own it's mostly been used for the girls and I to write notes back and forth on (which is fun and, though not its intended purpose, useful in its own right).

Anyway, Andrew wasn't 100% sold on attending this cast FHE since we've already invested a billion hours in the musical and he was sick of driving to the stake centre and all that was planned was cleaning up the big mess our cast had left behind. But the girls were both adamant that we attend, so we did. And we had fun helping clean up our big mess. I'm always amazed at how many hands make light work—a lot more people showed up than I'd expected (yes, treats were promised; we brought cookies) and it felt like no one did very much but all together we dismantled the set, cleaned the stage and gym, and packed up everything in an hour and a half. Quite remarkable!

We came away with a few souvenirs: my socks from Me Ol' Bamboo, a tray from Toot Sweets, our head shots, a copy of The Suppression of Children Act, and a bamboo pole, among other little trinkets.

Here's Zoë doing her best impression of the bamboo dancers:

Brother Austin gathered us all for a little lesson at the end. He asked us what was so bad about Vulgaria. On little girl raised her hand and said, "Toby," which was funny because that was her line in the play, basically ("We don't like Toby."). Another little girl suggested it was the Baron and Baroness. Someone said, "There were no children."

The answer we eventually got to was that it was hopelessness.

Everyone felt like there was nothing they could do about the situation they were in and so no one tried anything. But then they found out that through the use of TEAMWORK they were able to make things better.

We talked about how we always have a choice of whose side to be on, and that we can choose to be on the Lord's side.

It was a pretty good lesson.

Almost as good as the lesson we had yesterday.

We had to have a little FHE yesterday evening because Miriam had been working on a lesson about kindness all week this week and didn't want to put it off until next week.

She set her lesson up on a cookie sheet (copying a format Rachel had employed a few weeks prior):



"My lesson is about kindness," she said. "The 13th article of faith is about kindness, too, so if you know it say it with me. Just a part of it."

We knew which part to read because she had it on the cookie sheet.

"Doing good to all men means being kind," she informed us.

Then she pulled out a paper egg she'd made.

"This is a kindness egg," she said. "We have two weeks to fill it up with kindness."



"So, everyone gets a piece of paper and a pencil and you have to draw a picture of something you'll do to be kind this week. And you can write down your thing, too, if you want to."

Benjamin's paper is MIA. He was going to play Star Wars.

Rachel is going to make dinner one night this week:



I am going to sing lullabies to my children every night this week because I will be here for bedtime every night, in theory, since I won't be sneaking off to rehearsals.



Andrew is going to thank all his children:



When he said that the kids all thought he said "spank" and it caused a bit of an uproar (because that wouldn't be very nice), so now we've been joking about giving the kids a big "thanking."

We're going to thank them so hard!

I don't know what Miriam's going to do, but I guess we'll find out because her kindness egg has been taped to the wall, just waiting to be filled up with acts of kindness. We'll see how that goes because my love heart from February is mostly empty. Not that we weren't loving to each other. We just forgot to record anything...ever.

Here's Rachel's lesson from March:

She worked really hard to fill out that pedigree chart and then proceeded to give us a pop quiz on the birth dates and death dates (and places) of all our grandparents. Fortunately, I'd helped her compile the information so the dates were rather fresh in my mind. It was a harder quiz for others...

She then talked about the importance of temples and shared a funny story from our family history that she found in our Hancock Legacy book. This story is from Uncle Earl's history. His nickname was Duke, so perhaps that's why she chose to read about him. I don't know why she chose him, frankly, but it was a cute story to stumble upon:

In the spring they would go out at 6 am to hoe sugar beets until their mother hung a white towel on the clothesline. Then they knew it was time to go home and get ready for school.

When the clock stopped it was set by guess and sometimes when Earl went to school he wasn't sure if he would be on time. He and his brothers and sisters would run until they saw someone else walking to school. Then, if it seemed okay, they would walk. One morning they could not see anyone else going to school so they ran all the way. The school was very quiet and all the classroom doors were closed. So they went to the office thinking they were late. The office clock said eight o'clock and school started at nine! 

Uncle Earl was nearly 15 when my grandma was born, so she never had the privilege of running to school with him.

It was a beautiful lesson. I was impressed with how well she'd organized it and carried it out. It makes me so happy that my girls want to help teach our family. Benjamin wants to help, too, but his lessons are a little random right now...