Grey Hairs and Starving Children

So, the other day I found a grey hair on my head – and it was mine! I couldn’t quite believe it. I’m only 26. I told my mom, and she jokingly said that where there’s one grey hair, there are more. I told her I probably have four – one for each of my boys.

On another note, yesterday we were at church and I was in the third hour Relief Society class with Camden. Camden just turned 17 months old, and we are looking forward to the day one month from now when he will be old enough to start attending the children’s nursery class at church because he is ready to be with the other kids (and it’s rather difficult to keep him entertained in our classes anymore, so we’ve end up spending a lot of time out in the hallways at church lately). So, yesterday I was in my Relief Society class and I had already had to take Camden out in the hall a couple of times, so I was trying to make him happy so I could stay for at least part of the lesson. He found Ava Lundgren, and little girl who is two or three months younger than Camden, and he was very happy when Cassidy, Ava’s mommy, offered him some of Ava’s marshmallows. The problem is that Camden is just like each of his older brothers – once you give him food he will insist on consuming more and more of it, rapidly, until there is none left (and will likely be very put out once he has finished that you didn’t think to bring more for him). Now, this is not because we starve our children, although I’m sure it appears that way to the innocent onlooker.

I admit that I had forgotten to grab the snack container out of the diaper bag before that church class started, but any normal child would have been content by that time. In the earlier church meetings Camden had already consumed a couple of slices of homemade whole wheat bread, vanilla wafers, some of his brother’s animal crackers, puffed fruit baby snacks, yogurt-covered cranberries, and two cups of water. So, when we went into Relief Society, of course Camden quickly ate all of Ava’s marshmallows, then he motioned to Cassidy that he wanted more. Tiffany Egbert came to his rescue and offered him a packet of fruit snacks, which made him happy for the 2.3 minutes that it took him to finish off the bag. And soon after that we were out in the hallway again. You would think that if a child ate this much all the time he would be overweight (or at least content), but neither is the case. In fact, my three older boys eat as much as (or more than) Michael and I do at almost every meal. I guess they got their Daddy’s metabolism. I keep thinking, though: What are we going to do when we have four or five hungry teenage boys all at once who eat like this?

"I Don't Eat Things With Feet"

So, Kolby had an assignment to give a talk for his primary class in church yesterday. The talk was supposed to be about the scriptures and how they teach about Heavenly Father and Jesus. We asked Kolby what his favorite scripture story was, and his response was, “the part about the Lamanites.” (For those of you who are unfamiliar with The Book of Mormon, the Lamanites were a tribe of people who were the enemies of the Nephite tribe, who mostly did not follow the commandments, and who loved war and contention – so Kolby’s choice of a the Lamintes as his favorite people in the book was a rather funny one). So, here is the talk that Kolby helped write and presented in front of the other children at church yesterday:

“I like to sing “Book of Mormon Stories” with my family. I like to read the scriptures because they teach about Jesus and Heavenly Father. I like everything in the Book of Mormon. I read the scriptures with my family at family home evening. My favorite part of the scriptures is when it talks about the Lamanites. I also like to read about when Jesus was born. And some scripture stories I like are Noah and the Ark, Nephi building the ship, and Ammon and the sheep. Reading the scriptures makes me feel good inside. We should read the scriptures because Jesus commanded us to.”

So after we helped Kolby prepare his talk the other night we were reading the children’s scripture stories with the pictures and Kolby wanted to read about the Lamanites. So Michael found a chapter that had several illustrations of the Lamanites and one was some men hunting for a deer. So in the middle of our scripture reading, we ended up having a long conversation about that illustration. Kolby asked what they were doing to the deer, and Michael said they were going to eat it. Kolby thought that was gross, and he said that people don’t eat deer. We told him that some people do eat deer, and he let us know that he does not eat deer. “I don’t eat things with feet,” Kolby added. Michael asked him if he ate chicken, and he said yes. And when Michael explained that chicken have feet too, Kolby said that he doesn’t eat their feet. After we explained to Kolby that the people were not going to eat the feet or the outside of the deer, and they would only eat the inside and cook it so it would be healthy for them, he told us that he would eat deer too.