By George, I think she's got it!

By about mid-November I was already tiring of trips to Costco. Don't get me wrong, driving twenty minutes to a giant warehouse and fitting 3 kids into a giant cart just to buy a couple of giant boxes of milk so that I don't have to pay the giant price tag other stores enjoy charging me for the same item is barrels of fun, normally. But it has been raining Christmas there since the beginning of October! And as much as I LOVE Christmas, my kids love it too. At least, they love telling me how much they want this toy, and that toy, oh, and that toy for Christmas. Trips to Costco have become very tiresome.

Anyway, in mid-November, I decided that Tim and I needed to come up with some way to remove the selfishness bug from our children and teach them how it feels to serve others during the holiday season. Almost one month, one Thanksgiving, and one trip to Maui later, I still had not come up with anything.

Thank heaven for Joy School. I had the pleasure of teaching this week, and our current unit on sharing and service included a lesson plan where we arrange a visit to a rest home to perform a small nativity program. It was quite an experience. Despite the fact that I had to twist arms to get the kids successfully through several practice runs at my home, it went superbly well. They sang their hearts out, were not shy about giving the "grandparents" the Christmas cards they had prepared for them, and I only had to carry one Joseph around the stage to do his part. It appeared that they had experienced the joy of giving of themselves.


I knew that the lesson had been ingrained when I had just finished my prep work for dinner and went to join the girls up in the play room. I walked in and found it completely spotless. Shocked and delighted, I exclaimed, "Wow! What happened?" Anna was beaming with pride and said, "Mom, we wanted to surprise you. It's called service." I told her how happy I was and, seizing the teaching moment, asked her how it made her feel inside, to which she responded, "Good, but my body is still kinda tired from all that work."

Later that day, we were driving up the street to take dinner to a family in our ward(congregation, for those of you not as familiar with Mormon lingo) whose mother had just had a baby and Anna exclaimed, "Mom, you're doing service too!" One can only hope that the lesson sticks next time we go to Costco just for milk and instead of getting bombarded with demands as I try to skirt past the toy section, I am greeted with silence. Wishful thinking...