Mama's Helpers

I love it when I have projects where my children can help me in my calling. For one thing, the hardest part of having a demanding calling is that it takes my time away from my family. Also, I think it is really important for my children to be involved and to see how much their leaders and teachers do behind the scenes to help them have wonderful experiences. Lastly, it's just fun and they are really helpful!

We were prepping piggy banks for a missionary activity I had planned for Primary. Oh, my goodness I was so excited for this activity. My favorite Primary activity as a child was a Missionary activity, plus we had two new Elders leave for their mission a month before. Really we started planning this before they submitted their papers, that's how excited I was:-)

Cute Ginger stacking the banks! They all tumble down.
Rose was an expert at packing all 100 banks back into the box.
Pretty girl!
After Nathan woke-up and came downstairs he helped us too, if you call helping making the biggest tower possible.
After he got that out of his system he started helping me put the stickers on the banks.

After we finished the banks we started cutting up sheets of stickers for the kids to use to decorate their banks.


So where was Ken and Darin during all of this? They were out camping, of course! Every time I have a major activity it seems like Ken has some sort of scout overnight.

Which was fine, I really didn't need his help this time because we had so much fantastic help from our ward members!

We had four couples "Mission Presidents" come in and speak to the kids in their rotations about what it was like to serve their missions. They did a superb job and brought in tons of objects, pictures, clothes, food, and their special Missionary Fire and Spirit! You could really see the impact of their discussions with the children. Each child had a chance to attend two different missions and for the third rotation they decorated their Mission Bank and made care packages to send to our elders.

I wish I would have taken a picture of that one because Darin and his friend Brandon did a great job helping the children glue candy on their notes to the Missionaries. They were so patient with all of the children and worked very hard for nearly two hours.

Here are the care packages the children made for the missionaries. They drew or wrote little notes to them and then glued a little piece of candy on them. It was such a successful activity and I loved seeing the children on a Saturday! The best part came on Sunday when a bunch of them bore their testimonies. Or when I heard sweet accounts from their parents about how they were ready to go out tracting as soon as they got home.

We also encouraged the children to invite friends to the Primary Program about a month later and we had our biggest showing ever! They invited neighbors, friends, and many teachers! It was fantastic. We normally have around 280 in our Sacrament Meeting and on the Primary Program day we had 368. I was so proud of how fearless they were in sharing their testimonies!

I had told the Mission Presidents who helped out with the activity that the purpose of our activity was to "encourage the Primary children to be a missionary now and to prepare to serve a mission in the future." Those couples certainly fulfilled that purpose and much more, our ward is so blessed!