Addendum to my last post...

I don't think that I mentioned in my last post that I love Primary...

Just thought you should know that I love the children in my ward...and loving them helps me be so much more patient than I ever was with my students when I was a school teacher.

I am so blessed to work with these sweet, precious children and I am overwhelmed by the absolute love that I feel that Heavenly Father has for them.

Tonight we had a stake leadership training meeting and it was so wonderful!  They talked a lot about children being under attack by Satan.  It is our job to help them build up their armor so they can protect themselves.  Because no matter how hard we try to protect them, we can never prevent the attack from coming.  They have to be ready to withstand it without us.  It is a scary thought.  They said our first priority is our own children and then we need to help the broken, struggling families.

The thing that stood out to me the most from the meeting and talks was from the 2nd counselor in the stake Primary presidency.  She is the mother of three boys and she says that whenever she goes out with all three of them together she always gets "oh, three boys...don't you wish you had a girl?"  With great emotion she talked about how much she loves having three boys.  She says the world is developing a strange attitude about boys.  Boys are expected to be rough, tough, messy and crazy.  She then talked about how vitally important it is for us to develop our scouting programs within our wards because this is an inspired program that will help our boys grow into strong, good men and prepare them to serve missions.  Of course it is impossible to think of boys and scouting without thinking about my own two boys.  I want to do everything I can to help them grow and develop their testimonies.  What a huge responsibility!

At the end of the meeting they had a special musical number with 10 senior Primary (ages 7-11) boys from several of the wards in our stake.  They sang the new theme song for the year I Know that My Savior Loves Me (I LOVE this song - I can not listen to it without feeling such a strong feeling of my Savior's love).  Click here if you want to listen to it.  To be honest, it was not musically good.  It was totally obvious that these boys were so nervous to be in front of all of us women - and they had to sing (what briberies must have gone on at home we will never know...), but the spirit was so strong.  Most everyone was crying by the end.  After that, a member of the stake presidency stood up and told us that the statistics in the church show that only 3 of those 10 boys will serve missions!!  That seems unthinkable.  He said that if they could get even 5 of the 10 to serve missions they would be able to open 150 new missions!  Well, that tells me I have a big responsibility - to prepare my own two sons and to help our sweet primary boys be prepared too.

I think this portion of the meeting was especially important to me because I have been having such an incredibly hard week with Stephen.  I feel at such a loss sometimes with how to deal with him.  He is such a good sweet boy a majority of the time but I just feel like I am not doing something right because he has such a hard time in certain situations.  (Some of the worst tantrums you have ever seen).  We need to change some things around here.  It is not going to be easy, I already know.

P.S.  They called a new set of Primary teachers today - hooray!  And....they called a new Primary Chorister!!! Double hip-hip-hooray!!!!  I am so excited because the new chorister is going to be GREAT!!  She came along to the meeting tonight (she was asked to sing a solo for it - BEAUTIFUL!) and I gave her a ride home - she is so bubbly and a total crack up!  I was laughing the whole way home - it made me feel like I was in high school again hanging out with a bunch of girls.  I already know the kids are going to love her!