There were juice boxes, too!

This is my weekend off, so I got up and went to church this morning. I'd only had three hours sleep, at the most, but I figured I would just catch up later, so I dragged out of bed, and went to church.

After sacrament meeting, the crazy old dear who is the nursery leader came up to me and told me that her knee is in bad shape and the doctor upped her medications, and she wondered if Rachel and I would teach the nursery class for her.

I have actually been thinking about the nursery, because I've gone in to help out a few times at Rich's request, and I think the nursery leader just needs some training in how to make nursery a little bit more like a classroom experience. Not a lot of changes, and not to make it a more regimented thing, but just to give a little bit of a regular schedule and to teach a tee-tiny short lesson and have a regular singing time. So that when the kids leave the nursery when they are 3 years old, they will be prepared for Primary, where they will be expected to participate in singing time, and to sit down and have a little lesson time.

The current nursery leader is a fairly new member of the church, and she's not familiar with the whole Primary class idea, and doesn't know anything about the nursery at all. There is a lesson book, but I asked her if she had one, and she said she lost it. Rich said he has one, and I can use that, so I was already planning to start bringing in a lesson on the weeks when I'm there.

So today Rachel and I went to the nursery. There are only two nursery-age kids right now, both of them are around 18-19 months old, and they know each other. For the first hour, we sat and talked and planned a little lesson ("Heavenly Father gave us animals!"), while the kids played with the toys.

There are some nice toys in the nursery room, and the two little boys were mostly interested in playing with two large fire trucks, which left me free to enjoy the box of dinosaurs all by myself.

There are about ten really nice plastic dinosaurs, no, there must be either nine or eleven of them, because there was an uneven number, as I discovered when Rachel left for a minute to use the ladies room and I started pairing the dinosaurs up, posing them like they were slow-dancing at the prom, and there was one left without a partner, so I put him off to the side, looking away from the dancing, and imagined him thinking about how his life sucks and no one understands him, and wearing black nail polish.

I explained the scenario when Rachel came back, and she thought it was funny until I moved the dinosaurs around so some of them were making out and three of them got together while I hummed the song, "Three-way". Rachel said that was just wrong, and anyway, one of the little kids started humming it after I had sung it a couple of times, and Rachel said his mother might not like it. (His mother reads this, so Hi Jesse!)

When there was a threesome, that left another dinosaur out in the cold so he went and sat by the emo-saurus, and they whined about how no one cared about them, and the first one told the other one about shopping at Hot Topic, and then he sang the Death, Death, Devil, Devil song. It was pretty funny until Rachel texted me four hours later at home to say that she had that song stuck in her head and was tired of it.

We cleaned up all the toys and had snack time, which was great because Rachel and I were both hungry and there were Cheese-Its. Then we let them play a little more until lesson time and one of them was smelling pretty stinky, which is what always happens in the nursery. We were hoping one of his parents would drop in to change his diaper, since we aren't supoosed to do it, but it didn't happen so Rachel called him Stinky, and also Big-foot after he kept stepping on the other kid every time he walked by.

I think it all went well, and we had fun, which is important. Rachel is a bit worried that we have lowered their self-esteem and also, exposed them to deviant behavior among dinosaurs, but I think they'll be fine.