Agency: An object lesson

Today about 4ish I was thinking that I'd better figure out what to do for FHE while I was fixing dinner.....

Just about that time Samantha Grace came up and asked if she could prepare the FHE lesson. I was thinking that was a pretty good idea. We had been looking at her Faith in God booklet on Sunday and she knew she needed a couple more goals to complete.

She decided she wanted to choose "Agency" as her subject and I directed her to the place on the bookshelf where we keep our different FHE manuals, lesson packets & flannel board stories. She chose the original church distributed FHE book and looked in the table of contents for something about Agency.

She found her lesson on page 31 "we can choose". She got everything ready and was very proud of the fact that I hadn't done a thing to help her this time. Usually we plan it together with me trying to get her to lead out but offering ideas and help. This time it was all her and it made her so happy.

She tends to get a little take charge when she has the lesson and Mark has to remind her that he is still conducting and hasn't turned the time over to her yet.... She also tends to expound ALOT when she has the floor. A LOT.

When Mark turned the time over to her after song and prayer she proclaimed that she had done the lesson all by herself. Sensitive Dad said "I'm sure it will be great as long as there's no long-drawn-out stories!"

She raised her eyebrows, looked him right in the face with a little smile and promptly replied in a sweet but serious voice "oh, there's gonna be a long drawn out story!"

To which you couldn't help but laugh with surprise at her gumption and Mark's face.

We talked about choices. We made lists of choices. We talked about how we can't always choose the consequences of our choices. We read some scriptures.

Moses 4:1-4 (reminded me of Madeline L'engle's 'A wrinkle in time' That book makes me think about what Satan's world would have been like)

D&C 50: 24, D&C 93:28 and my favorite of the evening 2 Nephi 28:30

" For behold, thus saith the Lord God: I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little; and blessed are those who hearken unto my precepts, and lend an ear unto my counsel, for they shall learn wisdom; for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have."

I had a nice little learning moment pondering what I am losing for letting things slide more than they should lately...... If I'm not actively seeking than I'm losing. I need to get back on track with my personal study. When my mom and sister were here, they were discussing some New Testament stuff that I had no clue about... I seriously need to get on the ball.

And there was a story about a man in a Nazi prison camp. Surprisingly... it was neither long nor drawn out. She did a great job.

For her object lesson she had made 2 kinds of no bake cookies: chocolate and peanut butter. We got to have 2 cookies but we could only choose one kind and had to stick with it. Thus displaying the power of both choice and consequence. Mason didn't think the cookie object lesson was good enough so he came up with one of his own......

I will explain.....

After the closing prayer Mark suggested that we have a family activity of going to the library to pick out a movie to watch. We thought that was a good idea.

On the way there, the 3 youngest were very silly in the backseat. We counseled them to "settle down!!!!!" to no avail. On the way into the library I specifically had to talk to Mason twice about his behavior. "We're in a public place. We don't yell. We don't run. We need to settle down" Once we made it to the movie section in the basement the silliness returned full force. There was no thought of settling down and acting appropriate. I heard screaming and turned to see Mason on the floor with his hand clasped to his face. I went over to shush him because let's face it... sometimes he really overdoes it to get attention. It's a baby of the family thing. I pulled his hand away and saw it covered in blood. I still didn't get too excited, assumed it was a bloody nose and then saw a gash next to his eye. I started to get a little excited at that point. It looked deep and wide and painful. I dug around in my purse for a handkerchief I keep in there for just such occasions and clamped it down on the bleeding and got him off the floor.

My first thought was to get him cleaned up so I could get a better idea of what I was seeing. We walked, wailing loudly, into the bathroom. When the blood was washed from his hands and face I showed Mark. He was certain we should head to the Instacare for stitches. He sent Carly to the checkout desk while I led a screaming Mason out of the library.

Hey... we went to the libarary for a movie. Bloody gashes do not deter us.

We drove to the Instacare and checked in. It was a quiet night so we got right in. He was shaking a little and worried about how much it was going to hurt. They put some numbing gel on it, got our story, took his weight and pulse and sent us to wait in a little room. We talked a little bit about how his "agency" got him there....

We also talked a little about how blessed we were that he didn't cut his actual eye, it was so close. We took a moment to say a prayer of thanks that his eye hadn't been harmed and then Mark told him the story of the 3 little pigs while we waited per his request. The Dr. came in and numbed him up further with some injections around the cut. He didn't seem to feel it much. He laid down on the little bed and was very calm through the entire procedure.

He ended up with about 8 stitches, 2-3 inside because it was such a deep gash and then about 6 on the outside. I think he's going to have a black eye tomorrow.

This is our first experience with stitches and hopefully our last!

Ouch.

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Morning after update:

Looking more puffy and black and blue. He actually looks worse in person than in the pictures.

He said "I sneezed and it really hurt"

I bet it did.