Lately

I'm well on my way to being caught up with life on this little blog. Sort of. I remembered this morning, even though I didn't really forget, why I keep trucking along. Brandon and I thinking back to potty training William and Marie. I looked back at this lovely blog to see when Marie finally mastered the art of elimination. In the meantime, I passed many lovely posts that recorded memories that would have been, well, forgotten otherwise. The beauty of record keeping. I'm not perfect at it, but every little bit is worth it.

Speaking of potty training, Anne finally decided it was time to be done with diapers. She decided this about two days before we took our annual summer voyage to California. I ignored this decision, but she had to be in charge, of course. While in CA, she requested to be taken to the potty periodically. Each day, the requests increased. By the time we came home we moved her into underwear and that was that. Three accidents, so far, over the course of 3 weeks. That's well within the margin of error, if you ask me.

Without a brilliant segue, I'll just skip to William. An incident with William today is on my mind and I want to document it. William and Marie squabble. Boy do they squabble. {shudder} The Eyres only suggestion for sibling rivalry is the repentance bench. Been there done that. It works okay. It definitely helps me to not feel the need to mediate the fights. My goal, however, is to lessen the fights. (Side note: This is totally pay back for all the sibling rivalry I put my parents through when I was a kid. My older brother and I were terrible. And then I moved on to my younger sister. It was rotten.)

Back to trying to lessen the fights, I've been asking the kids to either a)do a job together as a consequence for fighting (doing service for the family restores the peace, if they fight we add another job until the peace is restored) or b) tell me three things they could have done or said to their sibling instead of _________________. When the kids got in the car for church they almost instantly started fighting. We used option B for this particular fight, for obvious reasons. When the kids struggled to come up with things they could do instead of fight in the backseat, Brandon suggested William could compliment Marie on how she looks. William is very hard-hearted about complimenting Marie because he doesn't think he should like girls at all (typical 7 year old boy), so the discussion turned to our willingness to speak kind words to our family and the fact that Marie isn't a girl, she's his sister. I told William that he can and should compliment his sister. It is not like complimenting a girl in his church or school class, it is very different. We got to church and the discussion ended and the topic was all but forgotten.

Until, during Primary, when I wasn't playing the piano, I was reading a talk by Richard G. Scott. The Sanctity of Womanhood. I came across this paragraph,

As a brother, you can have a powerful, positive influence in your sister’s life. Compliment her when she looks especially nice. She may listen to you more than to your parents when you suggest that she wear modest clothing. Simple courtesies like opening the door for her and building her self-esteem will encourage her to find her real worth.

When it comes to the Gospel, I do not believe in coincidences. Stumbling across this paragraph confirmed to me what an important principle this is in our family right now and in the future. I am printing this quote and putting it up in William's room. I'm grateful I came across these words when he is only 7, for in the future, when it really truly matters ... when Marie is in the front lines of the battle, this will be a part of his very being.

And now I need to go to bed. I was going to wake up early tomorrow morning because I was going to go to bed early tonight. Oops. From potty training to sibling rivalry to womanhood to bed. Good night!