Wasn’t general conference great this weekend? Best in a long while for me. I really enjoyed all the talks. I tried to help get #ldsconf to trend again this year, but some of our main DC Mormon tweeters were out of commission for various reasons. Basically, it was just me MormonShare and Lady Ozma. Couldn’t do it this year. I feel pretty confident it was all the football related tweets going on that threw off the trending stats.
Next time.
Anyway, had the kids write their conference questions. 1 lost her card and asked questions from the Saturday session. 3-4 didn’t bring questions at all. So, nearly a 50% fail rate. I suppose that was to be expected, and I had written up several other questions reviewing our material to cover during the quiz as well.
The quiz went fine. Difficult questions were answered within the zone. Easy questions, everyone answered. Definitely not a spiritual lesson, but it worked out fine.
One interesting phenomenon did occur — at least it was interesting to me. You should know that I am not an “anniversary” celebrator. I forget my birthday, my wedding anniversary, other’s birthdays and anniversaries, etc. That kind of celebration is meaningless to me. I couldn’t care less if we celebrate my birthday — most of the time I forget it (to my husband’s delight) and it doesn’t matter to me if I get a gift or a party or whatever. When I write birthdays in my calendar I remember, but it’s just not a thing that I really think about much. It’s not to be spiteful or because I think it’s dumb to remember anniversaries. I do appreciate that it’s a big deal to some others, and I do try to remember other’s important days on my calendar. I’m just dumb, I guess.
Anyway — with that background, I wasn’t sure what to do for birthdays in Seminary. The previous teacher was a man, and when I asked the kids about what they did for birthdays, they said they sang. That was pretty much it. I figured that was probably good enough. After all, the time I spend on Seminary is better spent in lesson planning, right? Well, it kept nagging at me. And nagging. So with our first birthday approaching over General Conference weekend I figured I better do something. The kids and I went to the store and bought a silly little ball to give each kid and some party hats. I sent my president and vice president a note to ask them to come to class a little early to decorate the birthday boy’s seat. I figured I’d see what the reaction was and move on from there. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money if they hated it, and I didn’t want to have a huge production that I had to repeat each time.
It couldn’t have gone better. The boy was so pleased to have a fuss made over him! The girls took some old leis that I had lying around and put them over the back of his seat, made him a Happy Birthday sign, and he wore that goofy hat all through class and right out the door. I expect he probably wore it to school, too. We sang the “clappy” Happy Birthday song from the Primary songbook to him. He just ate it all up:
So, lesson learned. Birthdays are, in fact, important for Seminary kids. By assigning out the birthdates it makes my life easier. My summer kids I think we’ll celebrate on their half-birthdays.
