OK, that was too much of a threadjack. Sorry.

2.Yes your kids are sucking the youth out of you because when you were little you did the same thing to your parents!As for keeping up with them…it isn’t possible, but they do help give you an excuse for exercise without joining a gym! :]

3.Yes yes and yes! {so long as your family is also involved and enjoys it!} :}

4.My son prays on the rocking chair upside down, rocking back and forth. He thinks better while he’s moving! He often prays pretending to be Bastien or Atrau from Neverending Story! :} {this is his most recent favorite character} I firmly believe Heavenly Father has a great sense of humor. Aferall, He created us didn’t He?

5.I once refered to “wholesome recreational activities” as making love or having sex with my husband! LOL When we were watching the movie Charly together one night for FHE, my husband and I were busting up at Charly as she told the Relief Society sisters that making love with her husband is a great wholesome activity that they do to strengthen their marriage. I have said that before and we couldn’t stop laughing… the shock on their faces was hysterical! Only in the mormon church can you have an entire hour’s long lesson on strengthening your marriage without ever mentioning sex!! LOL Please!! We had a lesson like that just a week or two ago actually and it was like the pink elephant in the room! I still haven’t ever figured that part out…

My husband would love to watch a P&P marathon with you. He was home sick one day, and I went out to run some errands. When I got home, he was already up to the second disk. (Which makes me believe he put the movie on the second I walked out the door!) Ever since then he’s been more open about his love of BBC costume dramas. Which is reason #548 why I love him.

Topic? Since I’m not in a “leadership” position for the first time in 7 years, I skipped the broadcast altogether and took my girls to the zoo instead. My husband missed it, too, but that’s because he was at work, working overtime so I can be a SAHM.

And thanks for that thought, Tracy M (#20). If you were my Visiting Teacher, I’d serve expensive cupcakes (www.sprinklescupcakes.com) and make sure we all had a good laugh every time. That’s about all I could offer at this point.

My stake showed the meeting twice, with explicit instructions that they hoped doing so would make it easier for parents with small children to attend. (By the way, Norbert, I have nursed a baby on the stand in stake conference, and you can ask the stake president’s counselor who was sitting next to me if he was even aware I had a baby with me! I recognize that few women are as brazen as I, though, so thank goodness for streaming video in the privacy of our homes.) Yes, it could be argued that the counsel to spend more time with the family is incongruous with yet another meeting, but on the other hand — come on, people! It’s two hours on a Saturday!

I know it’s easy for me to say from where I sit, but I did think they paid more than lip service to people in other than the cookie-cutter circumstances. Elder Oaks, after all, was raised in a single-parent home.

Sister Beck did say that if you have four children under age 6, it is insane to attempt more than a couple of minutes of scripture study at a time. I found that very sensible and compassionate. She also spoke about the need to be flexible. I appreciated her insight about our view of “support” being backward: rather than talking about how well ward members supported an activity, we need to ask how well the activity supported the ward members.

When the discussion turned to homemaking (and Elder Holland’s sons changing diapers), though, my husband and I couldn’t have been the only ones thinking at Sister Beck, “Come on, you know you want to say something.”

Oh, by the way, I have a daughter who sometimes prays as a pirate.

(Ironically, meetings about how to raise children are probably easiest to attend by those without them…)