The Battle of the Biggest Bookmark and more....

I never fought over anything stupid when I was a kid. At least not that I remember. My mom assures me that we all fought over dumb things.

I am not writing this to put down my kids at all. They are great kids. I'm writing this because I'm pretty sure there's a lot of over parents out there that can totally relate to the silly things kids fight over.

We are trying to consistently read scriptures with our kids every night. We have a stack of scriptures that I got off the clearance bin at Deseret Book that we keep together for family scripture study. Several weeks back, Rachel discovered that Caleb had a bigger bookmark in his scriptures. The bookmarks are just index cards that I've ripped in pieces. Well, Rachel snuck and took his bookmark because she thought it was bigger. So then Caleb took it back. And the battle went back and forth a few times. Tonight, Rachel decided to "one-up" Caleb. She found the index cards and got herself a new, whole index card. So, what do you think Caleb did? He got himself a whole card. But then he realized that his was now the same size and not bigger. So he decided to tape some index cards together. That way he would have a giant bookmark. After some time out, and probably not the best scripture study time, the kids cooled off and went to bed. Guess what?? Tomorrow I am going to buy some real bookmarks. And they are all going to be identical. Either that or we are going to have to rotate who gets the biggest bookmark, just like we have to rotate who gets the favorite seat in the van. Probably next, they will find something else to fight over at scripture study time. They've already fought over who gets to read more verses. So we always make them read the same number of verses.

On a positive note, today was Stake Conference. I usually dread Stake Conference because it is so hard to battle the kids for two hours.
In all the years we've been married, we've never gone to the adult session on Saturday night. Yesterday, Dan stayed home with the kids, and I went by myself. I really enjoyed listening to talks without any distractions. Today, we went to the regular session of conference. For the first time in 10 years, we did not have to take our kids out in the hall at all. If you know Alex, this is actually quite a miracle. He doesn't even sit through regular church. I am really thankful that I got to hear two entire meetings.

Today while we were driving, our kids were pointing out the beautiful blue sky. They all had a different spot in the sky that was their favorite. It was amazing how many shades of blue were in the sky at the same time. Its been a long time (partly due to the smog) since I have seen such an awesome sky!