After an inspirational workshop at Women's Conference on Sunday about "How to Prepare Your Children to be Missionaries," we decided we needed to follow the advice and talk about our missions more. So for family home evening we went through my very fat mission scrapbook. We had fun! The next night during family scripture prayer Jell announced, "I want to go on a mission when I get bigger." Yes! Success! Then she said, "So I can do lots of silly things like Mommy did." Uh, what? See in retrospect, the problem with mission pics are that they're either taken on P-day, at night when you've worked your brains out, when you're leaving an area or when there's a baptism. None of the day-to-day what-missionaries-actually-do is recorded - just stuff like getting stuck trying to climb over a fence, or your companion ironing your hair with an actual iron, or your district leader making balloon animals in the mtc for somebody's birthday or the elders getting their faces shoved in their birthday cake by a Hispanic member family, or ... you get the picture. So not so much a success (don't you love how kids ALWAYS get the wrong thing out of what you're trying to teach them?) and we might have to do that FHE over again and leave out the pictures. Sometimes visual aids only get in the way.
Oh and by the way, don't ask what they're wearing. My kids tend to look like little vagabonds with their layered looks - Meri added her dress when she was pretending to be Belle, who can't be played in jeans and a sweater. And Jell added the second skirt "when [she] wanted to." I guess where one is good, two is better. Lately, Meri's favorite beautifying tip is to go into the bathroom, stick her head under the faucet, and rub her hair all around till it's half wet and sticking out in a million different directions. Whenever we ask why she did it, she responds, "Because I wanted to look pretty" and does the smile and shoulder shrug seen in the first picture along with a little batting of her eyes. Oh boy. Yet somehow, despite their severe fashion handicaps, they still pull off "cute!"
