It took two short weeks of sitting in Sunday School together for Dick and I to paint ourselves as faith-deficient troublemakers. (At BYU, this length of time was usually unnecessary; everyone knows that English majors like to ask critical questions.) The teacher today was very nice about it. He probably made a mistake in acknowledging that we had a point; others in the class were not about to make that mistake.

And I remembered, after several years in primary, why it is often simpler to save my questions for later, if one does not want to be treated like a . . . well, like a faith-deficient troublemaker. (When in fact one is merely curious and intrigued by inconsistencies.)

Anyway, by the time Relief Society rolled around, I was properly chastised. Chrysanthemum, having taken Dick’s spot, may have heard mutterings, but mostly I was good.

Our lesson was a discussion of New Year’s resolutions, based on the three goals in the Introduction to Relief Society: increase faith, strengthen families and homes, and serve the Lord and His children. So far, so worthy a list of endeavors.

With each goal there is a quote from last year’s Ensign or Church News. The quote under “strengthen families and homes” is:

Although parenting is hard work, it is made a little easier with the gospel, said Joselyn Akana . . . from Hawaii. ‘It helps me when I have the gospel to anchor me in the caring of my family,’ she said it is important in mothering to consider what a mother should look and sound like. The key to motherhood, she said, is having patience and relying on the gospel for guidance” (Lisa Christensen, “Convert Says Gospel Helps with Parenting,” Church News, June 13, 2009, 15). [sic]

I agree with a lot of this. Parenting is hard work, and the gospel makes it easier by infusing it with eternal significance and providing both interesting examples of parenting and the desire to be a good parent. And I believe whole-heartedly that the key to motherhood is patience. What dominated our discussion, though, was the middle part, that:

it is important in mothering to consider what a mother should look and sound like.

If you have read this website for any amount of time, you know that I am rather preoccupied with what a mother should sound like, or rather, my regret over too often not sounding like what I think a mother should sound like.

But, no. We discussed what a mother should look like. The teacher (also our great Relief Society president who I personally love not only because she drives Sally to school every morning) started by saying her mother always got up 30 minutes before the rest of the family, no matter how early that turned out to be, even on camping trips, to do her hair and have full makeup on before anyone saw her. And (this is why I love her) she said that that always seemed like a huge waste of time to her, and that she is personally much lazier, etc, but now (and this is where things took a downturn) she thinks she maybe  should definitely be doing this.

Several sisters shared similar stories and proclaimed the virtues of treating motherhood like any other job (you’d get dressed up for a real job, right?) and having lots of mirrors in your house so you could check your hair and lipstick and your shirt to make sure you looked good all day, especially if your husband is retired and can see you anytime.

The 15-minute to one-hour power session of cleaning the house, grooming the children, and having dinner on the table right before dad comes home was extolled, and the testimonial given that if we only cared for our appearance we’d feel better about ourselves, and don’t our children (and husbands) deserve to see us looking our best?

I think about this a lot. I think about what my children, my daughters see when they look at me. I think about what they deserve, what they need, what will equip them best for life as they look at me. Especially when Susan makes some statement of discovery and description in the car about how being a doctor like grandpa or a writer like daddy are boy jobs and being a mom is a girl job.

Of course, being a mom is a girl job, and in some ways I do it it the traditional girliest manner possible. But I want Susan to know that girls can be doctors or writers too, and sometimes I worry about how I can ever really teach that to my daughters if all they see me doing is being a mom. On the other hand, I want them to see that I value them and our family enough to devote so much of my time and energy to being a mother. If this is the girl job I choose to show them, then what a mother should look like becomes fraught with meaning.

What should a mother look like?

Should a mother look like a clean home and dinner on the table and clean-faced toddlers and Mary Kay cosmetics?

In some ways (surprisingly), yes:

A clean house is worth pursuing because the cleaner and more organized things are, the easier it is for kids to play, create, and feed themselves, which leads, of course, to a messy house, but it’s a worthwhile cycle because the more the kids can do for themselves, the more I can do (and the more they are learning and growing), not because with a clean house I can be “unafraid to open the door if someone drops in.”

A table set for dinner when Dick arrives home and happy smiling children is worth working towards because it means the girls have learned to cheerfully help in the kitchen and that we have successfully worked together to create something we will all enjoy, not because it means I’ve worked behind the scenes to set a pretty stage.

Three daughters groomed for church or school (or dad’s homecoming) is a triumph when it means I have exchanged meaningful words with them while the hairbrush was in my hand, not when it means I’ve harped impatiently for them to JUST HOLD STILL.

And the Mary Kay cosmetics? Few things feel better than a hot shower after a hard workout or hours spent languishing with the morning sickness in bed.

Some things do, though. There are days, too infrequent, when Dick comes home and I look up from the book I’m reading or the story I’m writing, and I see the clock says 6:30 pm, and there are legos and Barbies on the carpet, paint and glitter glue on the table, clementine peels and yogurt containers all over the kitchen. Perhaps wet snow clothes are draped over chairs and I am smelly and muzzy from forgetting I even have a body. Dick is unperturbed (I chose well), and I wonder if I look then as a mother should — lost in thought.

I think I do.

In the past couple of weeks, Spot and Susan have each asked me if I had a baby in my tummy, and I reminded them that I do not anymore. When Spot asked me, we were sitting on the couch, and I saw again the pregnancy test I’d taken the night before, the test that had neither a plus, nor two lines nor a “pregnant” in the test window.

I couldn’t honestly remember whether I’d had a period in November, but I do remember one occasion when Dick convinced me to leave things to chance. On Saturday I impatiently bought another box of tests, figuring that the leftover sticks in my medicine cabinet were maybe expired. Turns out it’s helpful to read the instructions, even after many years and five (now six) pregnancies. In case you ever need to know, on the Equate brand pregnancy test, just one line in the test window is a positive.

I am terrified. Weepy, excited, wary, passing regretful for the three-kids-getting-older routine we have. I don’t know if I can handle another miscarriage.

And I have proven (to myself) that morning all-day sickness is mostly psychological. This is the latest that I have ever discovered a pregnancy (not very late: 9 weeks at most, and probably less), and as soon as I did, mild, all-encompassing nausea descended. Smells are smellier, and I am so tired. I feel like lying in bed, abdomen motionless, for the next seven to nine months.

I want to thank you in advance for understanding if I don’t respond to comments or emails as regularly as I would like in the coming months. I have a feeling that my mixed emotions/ambitions for blogging will get even mixed-er this year, but my appreciation for your friendship and your encouraging words are one thing I am not at all mixed about: they mean a great deal to me.

*Movie trivia. Big smacking kiss and restoring of my faith in humanity if you know that movie. (And my family doesn’t count, since we watched it on Christmas Eve.)

On Monday Susan almost got ran over by a minivan in the parking lot of Costco. It was lunchtime, I had just picked up the girls from preschool, Susan was in dire need of the potty, I was in a rush to pick up some photo prints and get back up the hill (nine miles) to run the carpool for Sally’s early day at school. I held Spot’s hand and walked steadily between the crowded aisles of cars. Susan lagged behind as my thoughts ricocheted.

(What should we have for dinner? Spaghetti? I should plan next year so that I have no shopping, even grocery shopping, to do the last week before Christmas. Why did Hillary Clinton promise climate change aid to countries like China when we have a huge trade deficit with them, and surely this has already been discussed and pointed out online, or could I write a post and be brilliant? I really need some caffeine today, better grab a fountain coke here after I get my membership card replaced. Why have I not had a period in two months and yet I’m not pregnant? Early menopause? I wonder what the samples are today. Maybe we won’t be able to do any shopping besides the prints and churros, to make it in time to pick up Sally.)

A lady in a blue minivan shouted, not terribly unkindly, “Ma’am!” and I stopped. “I almost hit your daughter. She was out in front of me and I would have felt terrible (hand on her heart) if anything had happened.” I was struck a little bit dumb by this, as I often am when suddenly confronted by a stranger in public. I turned at the first sound of her voice and saw Susan a couple feet behind me, angled closer to the moving cars than Spot and I were. I guess I didn’t react with enough visible horror, because the woman turned to Susan as I moved to take her hand. “Little girl, you have to stay right by mommy because I can’t see you out my windshield and I could have run you right over. You have to be more careful.”

I thanked the lady, and marched on, impressing on Susan the seriousness of the near-accident once we were safely inside, making our way to the bathroom. I was glad, obviously, that the lady didn’t hit my kid, and though it irritated me a little that she would take it upon herself to instruct my kid in front of me, insinuating that I wouldn’t have done the same once we were away from an audience, I might have done the exact same thing, especially with the rush of adrenaline that such a close call often floods the body with.

I really couldn’t tell you the number of times my children have been lucky enough to cheat death. We have forgotten to fasten seat belts or car seats, turned our backs on full tubs of water, left electrical outlets unprotected, crossed the street without benefit of a crosswalk, read a book while children played freely at the park, looked over the precipice at the Grand Canyon, and flown in airplanes.

I think most mothers (if they’re honest) could relate similar terrifying near-miss stories. But sometimes children die as a result of accidental, temporary parental inattention or distraction. Like the recent drowning of Military Mom’s two-year old in the family pool. Shellie Ross was vilified online for having tweeted right before her son was found in the pool, and then again later asking for prayers as she waited in the hospital.

The saddest instance of accidental, preventable death I’ve ever heard of happened in my sister’s old neighborhood. A family with six small children came home from church, and the kids played in the family room while mom prepared dinner just a few feet away in the kitchen. The baby, a six-week-old, was in her baby carrier car seat on the couch while a toddler played nearby. Somehow the car seat got knocked off the couch, and the baby strangled in the unfastened straps.

I think it’s easy to assign blame or fault in these cases, just as if Susan had been struck and killed by the car in the parking lot two days ago, it would have been my fault.

It clearly would have been, because I was distracted, I was not holding her hand, I was thinking  my own thoughts. I don’t think I would ever get over the guilt of such a death. Ever. I don’t imagine that the censure of others would even have an impact because my own sense of shame would be overwhelming.

And yet, it hurts me to think of Shellie Ross or my sister’s neighbor feeling the shame that I project myself feeling. It seems grossly unfair and mysogynistic that anyone would blame them for making a mistake, for being inattentive, for having the audacity to entertain a thought outside her children for the few seconds it takes for death to snatch a child.

Is it even possible to focus and concentrate a mother’s every thought on the safety of her children? And if it were possible, is that what we require of a mother? That she have no thought or concern or desire outside her children’s every breath, waking and sleeping?

Is that what God requires?

Motherhood is hard for me because I feel tugged, most moments of the day, between what I want to do, what I need to do, and what my children need, what my children want from me. Accidental death of a child is an extreme example of this, but in every moment, I choose (unconsciously or not) whether to entertain my own thoughts or subsume them in service of a childish plea. Even many of my own thoughts are about my children (or about being about my children!).

If and when we criticize a mother who has lost her child as a result of momentary distraction, we deny her a human right more inalienable than anything the Founders ever codified: that of having her own thoughts.

Sally tells me today is the best day of her life. I express surprise, and she says, “Is it not the best day of your life too?” I tell her maybe not the best, but certainly a good day, I hope, and why is it the best day of her life? Because she doesn’t have to go back to school until January 4th, she says.

Perhaps that is just the rhythm of childhood. Vacation — Christmas break, summer vacation, a trip in the middle of the year — is exciting, special, different. School is everyday, normal, routine, boring at times by definition.

But as I’ve been thinking about homeschooling, I wonder if it is more than that. Rixa commented on my initial homeschooling post that she would love a charter school with a half-day program. The day I read her comment there were two articles in the New York Times in intriguing juxtaposition. The first was about Forest Kindergarten, where kids 3 1/2 to 6 years old spend three hours a day outside in a 325-acre nature reserve, every day, regardless of weather (in New York State, where the weather is a factor). They explore and play, with no formal academic curriculum until first grade. I assume (hope) that even in the upper grades, outdoor exploration/play is emphasized.

The other article was a story of parents with children in Chicago’s public elementary schools trying to raise money to add an hour to the school day, which is currently 5 hours and 8 minutes long. “By comparison, students in New York City go for 6 hours 30 minutes. In Boston, they spend 6 hours in class, and in Los Angeles, most students are there 5 hours 19 minutes.”

I have long had an unarticulated feeling that I wish Sally could go to school, but just not so long every day. She’s at a school with early and late tracks, so her day is 8-2:15, while half of the kids go 9:15-3:30.  (That’s a 6 hour, 15 minute day). I think this schedule might be okay if three hours of it were spent outside, but I think her play time (and not on a nature preserve, but rather a limited schoolyard, is much less than an hour).

The parents (and educators quoted in the article) in the Chicago area are convinced that a longer school day, week, and year is the answer to making their children competitive. Chicago-area charter and contract schools are in session up to two hours longer than the regular schools (that would be over 7 hours in school each day!).

Interestingly, the parents in both articles are relatively well-off (as the Waldorf Schools are private, and one presumes, pricey, and in the Chicago area parents are wanting to spend more money in addition to their property taxes, etc). Often when there is talk of extending the school day, including moving from half-day to full-day kindergarten, and to adding pre-kindergarten, etc, legislators and advocates point out that households with two parents working need the extended child-care that a longer day would provide.

The economic and other logistics of homeschooling are fascinating to me. Homeschooling requires that a family be well-enough off to have a full-time parent, and/or modest enough in their wants and needs to accept the priority of homeschooling over the desire/need for a second income and/or that parent’s willingness to sacrifice temporarily some of their own ambitions.

When I think of Sally going to a half-day of formal education, or the wish to shorten her school day by even an hour (as she could if she attended the middle of the day and neither early or late track), and even when I am vehemently against homework, it is all in the service of providing her with more time in the day to play, preferably outside. This is even more urgent in the winter months, when it gets dark at 5 pm, and yet my three kids are outside in their snow clothes, long past the time when the sun’s rays provided meager warmth.

This again could be simply the rhythm of life in a four-season climate. Summers are for spending outdoors, for gardening, biking, jumping on the trampoline, swimming, running through the sprinklers, and winters are for quietly reading by the fire (or . . . doing homework or sitting in class).

But given what we know about dirt being good for kids, and active play improving sleep, and finally — how excited my kids are by the prospect of a week and a half off to sled, cook with mom, build snowmen and snow forts, and swim in the indoor pool with the big bucket and water slides, I am worried it will be impossibly hard to sentence Sally back to a desk come January.

Today I told Dick: the thing I hated most about my childhood was having to be quiet when my dad needed to sleep.

It was selfish. My dad was in a Navy residency program back in the draconian doctor days, and he needed his sleep. I don’t even remember how often we had to be quiet, how often the need to be quiet impinged on what I wanted to do, or even being punished for being loud instead of being quiet. I just remember having to be quiet. I don’t know why I hated it, because my favorite thing to do as a child was to read, but my second favorite thing to do was a sedate sort of interaction with my brother and sister that led my parents to say “If you must kill each other, please, do it quietly.”

Today the snow was beautiful: thick flurries whitewashing the dead brown lawn stubbles, plastering over the evidence of a procrastinated autumn fertilization.

Dick needed us to be quiet today. All day, it seemed like. He recorded screencasts for his latest freelance work. He sat at the table in my kitchen, recording his work, letting the girls watch him through the camera viewfinder, more exponentially patient than my dad ever was, and I ever am. During one of his breaks, I made special brownies, two small pans, one for now and one to freeze for later next week when the friend who was best man at our wedding stays with us as he moves cross-country.

I am jealous of Dick’s new ventures. I hate that he schedules extra, complicated things for December, that he says he has to because we need the money, that he asked us to be quiet, on Saturday, when all of us are home and all I wanted was to bask in the coziness of home while the perfect snow falls to cover the hard ground.

I hate that he is learning new things and being rewarded for learning new things when I feel desperate to paint some fresh new snow over my just-scabbed frustration. I know I should have fertilized in the fall, but couldn’t God take my rage without my walking back and forth?

I cut into the pan of brownies that is for us today, and covered the other with clingwrap. The loud, rustling layer of tinfoil had to wait as Dick started another screencast. I went upstairs.

The snow really was beautiful. My thin crust of pure patience had seams of scratchy, too-long grass poking through, but I nursed my caffeine indulgence, cleaned the girls’ room, and filled bags with broken games, worn-out clothes, and ratty stuffed animals for disposal at the DI. There is nothing more cathartic than pruning the stuff that flourishes like morning glory in the corners of my house.

Back downstairs Dick agreed that the girls could have a brownie; Sally cut herself one from the today pan. Susan and Spot took the wrap off the next-week pan and dug into the middle.

Dick said the screaming and raw, impotent fury was a bit of an overreaction. But it’s never about the brownies. It’s about the seething bedrock of never having just one thing stay perfect, stay finished. I wash the laundry: they change clothes again. I run the dishwasher: they need a seventh glass of water. I feed them: they poop it all away.

I respond kindly to ear-grating whining and mind-shredding fighting five times, but the sixth time a clump of crab grass breaks through the frozen powder, and minutes later I wonder who is that awful woman who can’t seem to remember that she is a mother, not a monster? Why can’t this one day be perfect?

I am busy patching back together my snowy crust of calm and superficial serenity, of soft voices and sympathetic arms; if only I can paper over this seam, coax that anger back to hibernation.

I helped the girls get snow pants, coats, boots, hats, and gloves on, earlier, before the brownie violation occurred. They ruined the snowscape. They churned it up till the backyard was half dead, brown grass and half clean, white snow. I loved that they did that, so freely, so exuberantly. I thought: this is a great metaphor. I’ll say: you think you want pristine panoramas of perfection. You think you want order, and quiet, and sheets tucked tidily under mattresses.

You think you want a life where precocious children would never put a finger in the middle of a covered pan of brownies. But then you realize that you can’t make snow angels without disturbing the drifts. You can’t have joy without the mess.

I should have captured it right there. Preserved it, polished it, added it to the loop of stuff I tell myself when I wander in my thoughts at stoplights and while being quiet during screencasts.

Instead I constructed the other metaphor, of snow as bandaid, as wood filler for a rotten stump. It’s not as sweetly affirming as the other image. There’ll never be enough snow to cure the grass beneath. And even if it was never about the brownies, even if it was about something true and validly infuriating, it was never worth evoking fear and shame.

So it’s easy to think of giving up. Walking away. I am never going to be the mother these children deserve. I am never going to be deep down the mirror core of the patchwork covering of snow I mostly enough maintain on the outside.

But in the spring the snow will melt, both the brown snow sick with dirt and salt and the last baptizing whiteout of the winter. And it will be time to fertilize again, another chance to soak into the roots.

I was folding towels when Dick responded to Spot’s overtired hysteria past her bedtime. Sally was reading in her room and Susan had been allowed to fall asleep in our bed because Spot was so disruptive. I climbed the stairs and changed her back into her pajamas. Patience came from somewhere, and a promise to snuggle with her for awhile. My hand on her chest, I felt her heartbeat in my fingertips. She had forgotten, or forgiven, enough that my being there was calming. She rubbed her eyes vigorously, then turned her face away, as she always does to sleep, and sighed, long and low.

There’s a “rest of the story” on Motherlode today, and the picture it paints, in the words of the father and wife involved in the “dirty little secret” post from earlier this week, is heartbreaking, and very sympathy-inducing. Basically, the father was served with papers a few months into his marriage, telling him he was the father of a two-year old. The financial strain of paying back child support, the financial and emotional hardship of going to court 40 times hoping to gain visitation, etc, and the regular stresses of starting a family and career have put them in the current situation.

This post tells such a radically different story than the first essay did. I feel horrified for everyone involved. I understand why they have given up for now on making the boy a part of their family, because it sounds impossibly complicated (maybe, simply, “impossible”). I applaud them for continuing to honor the father’s financial obligation.

But this brings up a slew of interesting writer-audience issues. I can’t apologize for reacting the way I did to the first essay, because my feelings were based not on conjecture or gossip or the writing of a critical reporter, but on the facts and feelings that one of the principal characters shared. In telling a story, the onus is on the writer to present relevant facts, to tell the story, and if things are misunderstood (especially by such large numbers of people), the fault is the writer’s, not the audience’s. If the claims made in the second post are true, then the mother/writer is either a very unreliable narrator, a poor writer, or an irresponsible attention-seeker.

The mother/writer in the first piece sounded shallow, image-conscious, and materialistic. Perhaps (hopefully) she’s not. But that’s how she herself presented herself.

It’s like if Shakespeare came along and said, “Wait! You think Romeo was foolish and short-sighted and impulsive to kill himself when he found Juliet lying on the tomb? He wasn’t! He gathered the top five doctors in Verona and each one pronounced her dead! He waited three days as her body decomposed and THEN he drove the dagger into his heart! DUH! You don’t know anything! You’re so quick to come to conclusions about somebody. … Oh? What? You say I FORGOT to put that in Act 5? Well, shucks, that story is so familiar to me, I thought EVERYBODY knew about the multiple autopsies and the mirror-breath test. You readers are so dumb and quick to judge.”

Except it’s even worse, because to really be a parallel case, it would have to be Romeo who wrote the play and then got hurt, defensive, and morally superior when people came to the inevitable conclusion that he was a big boob.

Another issue is Lisa Belkin’s responsibility in all this. As the writer of the Motherlode blog, she frequently has guest posters, and they often explicitly or implicitly ask for advice. Several times guest posters have been criticized for decisions they have made. Perhaps this is an ugly part of blogging, but it is also, in fact, an intrinsic part of blogging: reader response is the WHOLE POINT OF BLOGGING.

If you write a post on a blog with comments, you ask for and expect responses. If those responses do not include the fawning congratulation or commiseratory sympathy you thought your story deserved, you can’t then say, “How rude! I didn’t ask you to intrude on my private life! How dare you presume to comment!” Because when you posted to a public blog which asks people to “join the discussion,” you ASKED FOR COMMENTS.

I think Lisa Belkin’s editorial policy bears some of the burden here. Since it was not her story (so she presumably at least wasn’t “forgetting” important details), what was the motive for publishing such a damaging, one-sided initial account? Controversy? Link-baiting? In not urging her guest poster to dig deeper for and include these mitigating circumstances, I think she has betrayed the trust of a writer she should have mentored, in favor of the publicity-loving instincts of sensationalistic journalism.

And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

(Except to say that I hope things work out for the family and the boy. What a difficult situation with no easy answers.)

I first heard of a Jesse Tree on Rocks in My Dryer last year, and I immediately wanted to create a Mormon version. I like that traditional Jesse Trees emphasize Old Testament prophecies of Jesus Christ; I want my kids to be as familiar with Bible stories as they are with the Book of Mormon and church history stories that we often focus on.

We’re not as consistent about reading scriptures as my family was when I was a kid. I tend to blame this on Dick because he is not a morning person, but since I’m not a morning person either, we’re kind of even. Last year I hoped that creating a Jesse Tree with special Christ-themed devotional readings would jump-start our daily scripture habit. It didn’t work. We enjoyed the stories and I used it for a sharing time in Primary, but by the second week in January we were back to our slothful ways.

But I’m optimistic, and I’m sure again this year that our Jesse Tree will be only the beginning of glorious yearlong testimony-building, although my memory is so fabulous that I spent several days getting the kids excited about starting our Joshua Tree.

The Jesse Tree is named for King David’s father Jesse, and the scripture in Isaiah that talks about the stem of Jesse, Jesus Christ.

For each devotional, we have an ornament for the tree, a picture from the Gospel Art Kit (GAK), and a few specific scriptures. With the kids so young, we tell each story in simple terms (referring to the GAK summaries if necessary). As the kids get older, we’ll read more and more directly from the scriptures. We could also read the stories from the children’s scripture books, but I like the storytelling give-and-take for keeping the kids’ attention. I have been pleasantly surprised by how excited the kids are about “doing our Jesse tree” each night. Sally drags a bar stool into the living room and sets the tree on top of it in the middle of the rug. Susan asks if we can “do Family Home Evening,” but I tell her it’s not Monday anymore so we’ll just be doing one story.

As time goes by, I might search for better pictures and ornaments for some of the devotionals, but the GAK is convenient, and the ornaments I’ve gathered (mostly wood cutouts from Hobby Lobby and odd craft materials) do the job. The stories might seem impossibly broad, but the focus is always on the witnesses and types of Christ in the story. I’ve listed them in rough chronological order, but, again to involve the kids, we’re letting them take turns picking an ornament, so we’re not worried about the order.

A Mormon Jesse Tree: Witnesses and Types of Christ

1) The Jesse Tree/Witnesses of Christ (book) GAK 326 (Isaiah 11:1-2, Jacob 4:4, 2 Nephi 25:26) All the prophets have known of Christ and had “a hope of him.”

2) Creation/The Council in Heaven (world) GAK 600, 100, 201 (Alma 30: 44, Moses 4:1-2) God created the world for us and promised that He would send a Savior for us.

3) Noah (rainbow) GAK 103 (Genesis 9:13, 15) God promised he would never again flood the world, and because He kept that promise, people knew to believe His promise about a Savior.

4) Abraham & Isaac (bundle of cinnamon sticks) GAK 105 (Genesis 22:2, Genesis 22:8, 11-12) Isaac as a type of Christ, Abraham as a loving father willing to sacrifice his much-loved son.

5) Moses (snake) GAK 123 (John 3:14-15, Helaman 8:14-15) This is one of my favorite symbols — If we would but look to Christ, we will live.

6) Ruth (wheat) GAK 124 (Ruth 1:16, Ruth 4:13-17) Ruth followed her mother-in-law because she was converted to the gospel. She was virtuous and became an ancestress of Jesus.

7) Esther (scepter) GAK 125 (Esther 4:14, Esther 7:3) Esther acted as an intercessor for her people, just as Christ is our intercessor.

Isaiah (lamb) GAK 113 (Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah 9:6-7, Isaiah 53) Listen to Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.

9) Jonah (whale) still looking (Jonah 1:12-15, Luke 11:29-32) Jonah is in the great fish for three days, much like Christ is in the tomb for three days.

10) The Brother of Jared (stone) GAK 318 (Ether 3:8-15) Because of his faith, Ether saw that Christ would have a body like his, and learned that Jesus was “prepared before the foundation of the world.”

11) Lehi & Nephi (liahona) GAK 302 (1 Ne 16:28, Alma 37:45) Another great image — liahona as words of Christ.

12) Enos (bow & arrow) GAK 305 (Enos 1:8, 26) Enos bore a powerful witness even without seeing or hearing Jesus.

13) King Benjamin (tower) GAK 307 (Mosiah 3:2, 7-8, Mosiah 5:1-2) The people covenant to obey, take upon themselves the name of Christ, and experience a “mighty change.”

14) Alma the Younger (chains) GAK321 (Alma 7:10-13) Christ will loose the bands of death.

15) Samuel the Lamanite (wall) GAK314 (Helaman 14:1-8) Sing Samuel Tells of the Baby Jesus.

16) Nephi (star) GAK 200 (3 Nephi 1:8-14) My favorite advent story, and where we always begin our reading on Christmas Eve.

17) John the Baptist (sandal) GAK (Matthew 3:2-3, 11-17) John prepared the way, baptized Jesus, and restored the Aaronic priesthood.

18) Mary (heart) GAK 241 (Luke 1:28-33, 38) Mary was pure and loving. (Also, probably patient, kind, and willing to play Sorry all day long).

19) Joseph (hammer) GAK 206 (Matthew 1:18-25) Sing When Joseph Went to Bethlehem.

20) The Shepherds and the Wise Men (gift) GAK 202, 203 (Luke 2:15-16, Matthew 2:9-11) The Shepherds and the Wise Men went to find Jesus as quickly as they could, and worshiped Him. I point out to the kids that we might have been among the heavenly chorus singing of His birth.

21) The Atonement and Resurrection (cross) GAK 227 (Luke 22:41-44, John 11:25) Without the Atonement and Resurrection, Christmas would be meaningless.

22) Moroni (gold plates) GAK 320 (Moroni 10:4-7) The Holy Ghost testifies of Christ and the Book of Mormon.

23) Joseph Smith (temple) GAK 403 (D&C 76:22-24) Joseph Smith sealed his testimony of Jesus with his blood.

24) Rescuers of the Martin Handcart Company (quilt) GAK 415 (from the Ensign & President Hinckley video.) The young men acted as physical saviors of their people.

25) Modern Prophets (tie) GAK 520 (The Living Christ, from the Ensign,  President Monson video) I might see if I can find videos of each prophet’s final testimonies on youtube — they are all about Christ.