families

  As I was getting ready this morning, Jenna came to me and said that she had found a lost potato and that she wanted to find out who lost it. I just smiled at her. She ran away, and I continued what I was doing. Of course that wasn’t the end of her adventure. She came back and this time was holding the potato. I think I laughed out loud and asked her what she was doing with the potato. She was still busy looking for who lost it. At this point I followed her downstairs. She opened the pantry and returned the potato to the bag. I said, “Now the potato is back with his friends”. To which my almost three-year-old replied, “No mom. He’s with his family now.”

  When we take walks (which is not very often now that it’s so hot) we look for animals. It is not uncommon to see bunnies, ground squirrels, lizards, birds and of course people out walking their dogs. The bunnies are our favorites. You only get a quick look at them before they scurry off. We like to keep count of how many bunnies we see. Jenna always announces if the bunny is the mom, the dad, the brother or the sister. She is commonly concerned if we only see 3 bunnies, because someone must be missing. And heaven-forbid we only come across one bunny. We hear about that ‘sad and lonely’ bunny for the next few hours, and how he/she must be out looking for her family.

  I would like to think that her sense of family was something she picked up from David and I. We are often talking about family and looking at pictures of our extended families, near and far. Now that she can understand better, it is fun to quiz her to see if she understands family relationships. We ask her questions like, “Who is Uncle Jeff’s sweetheart?” (Aunt Lisa), or “If Auntie Rissa is baby Ammon’s mommy, who is his daddy?” (Uncle Mark). She does really well most of the time, and of course better with those that she’s seen recently.

   Often at bed time we sing ‘Families Can Be Together Forever’ and I have just now gotten to the point that I don’t tear up hearing it. I like to bear my testimony to her at every chance I get that we get to be a family forever because Heavenly Father loves us and wants us to be happy, and because David and I were married in the Temple. I love watching her learn and grow in this understanding of the gospel, and I hope that she remembers it and helps teach her younger siblings.