Daily Archives: April 19, 2018

Sunday mornings at our house were always hectic and chaotic while trying to get everyone ready for church.  My husband usually had church responsibilities that took him away from home Sunday mornings and it always seemed I had a new baby or was pregnant a good many of those crazy years, which meant I was extra tired!  Somehow we always had the 9:00 church schedule when I had a new baby which added to the difficulty of getting there on time and since my babies always nursed every two hours I had to feed a baby twice before actually getting out of the door.  It was stressful but I found a few things that helped Sunday mornings to go a little smoother.  Most of the time I got up earlier than my children and got myself ready in the quiet of the morning, and that left me free to  help my children after I got them up.  I usually made a simple breakfast which helped entice my non-morning children to get up, and I didn’t worry about cleaning up until after we got home from church.  After church I confiscated socks and shoes and put them away so they would be easy to find the following week, which actually worked most of the time.  Any older child that was ready was assigned to brush the hair of a younger brother or sister and help get his or her shoes and socks on them.  I read once that it sometimes helped to have your children pick out their clothes the night before and I tried this and found my kids changed their minds by morning, so it didn’t work so great for me.  The biggest thing I did to help everyone be ready on time was to set my ready-by time one half hour before church began.  So if church began at 9:00 I tried to be ready by 8:30 which then gave me time to look for lost shoes, missing ties and deal with any problems that came up.  One time one of my daughters had a talk to give and had gone outside after she was ready for church and had taken her talk with her.  She set it down outside somewhere on our 4 acres and couldn’t remember where she had put it.  That half hour even gave me time to deal with that as we frantically looked for, found her talk and got to church on time.  I think one of the reasons I tried so hard to be on time was that I was aware we were a large group and caused a commotion when we entered late, which detracted from the reverence of the meeting.  I also felt quite of bit of stress to be on time and if we were running late I found myself yelling at everyone to hurry up which is ironic to go to church yelling at your kids. It doesn’t do much to create feelings of reverence and love to enter the building having been yelled at.  Most of all, I really liked having about 10 minutes to enjoy the music and shift my thinking from chaos to reverence and focusing on the sacrament.  It didn’t always work and sometimes no matter what I did there were bad mornings where nothing seemed to go right.  But the sweet thing was that most of the time it did work.