There are two kinds of people

I'm not quite sure how to go about expressing my feelings about this, but I felt it might help to write them down. To begin with, I have a very difficult time keeping my children reverent and quiet during sacrament. I believe every mother of young children has this same difficulty. I don't think my children are always the worst behaved during sacrament, but they probably are much of the time. This has been one of my trails since I started having children. I've tried so many different things to entertain my children, and to try and keep them quite. I've tried food, coloring, toys, bribery, punishments, time-outs, books...you name it, I've tried it. My girls for the most part are pretty well behaved, I usually just have to remind them to be quiet every once in a while. It's the boys I have so much trouble with. Joseph can't keep his hands to himself, and wants to lay everywhere. Samuel can't sit still and keep quiet. I usually end up taking Samuel out to a time-out at least once, and sometimes I take all the kids down to the Young Women's room and try to listen to the talks from there,when all the children are misbehaving. Today when we came in I picked an empty row close to the back, and we sat down. The family sitting in front of us, picked up there things and moved to the very back, where the hard chairs were. I knew that they moved because they didn't want to sit near us, and my heart sank. I didn't blame them, if they weren't my own kids, I wouldn't want to sit near them either. But it did make me feel horrible. I know my kids aren't the quietest, and I constantly try to teach them to be reverent. My job is hard, and it just made me feel like such a failure, I was tempted to just take the kids back to the car and go home. But, I'm not a quitter, so we sat down, and I was soon so busy with keeping the kids reverent that I forgot about it for the moment. I had to take Samuel and Joseph out just before the sacrament, and left Austin and Betsy by themselves. I talked to the boys and calmed them down. After the sacrament was over, we went back in. A sister a few rows back handed me a note, telling me that my girls were very reverent during sacrament. I felt grateful to that sister for letting me know, and for taking the time to write that note. towards the end of the meeting I had to take the boys out again, and the girls followed me out too. As we were heading down the stairs, two young women came out and offered their help with the kids. I told them there was only a few minutes left in the meeting so we'd be fine, but I thanked them for their offer. Even if no one sits next to us, except for visitors (and that's because they don't know better), I know I need to be at church every Sunday, and that my kids need to be there too. I wish I could snap my fingers and get them to be reverent, I can't, and I'm just doing the best that I can. I realized after church today that there are two different kinds of people, the kind that avoid problems, and the kind that try to help. There will probably always be people that don't want to sit by me, and my children, but there will also be the good people, that can see my difficulty, and try to help me. I'm so grateful for those people that try to help, and if you are the kind that helps others instead of avoiding them, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
On the way home from church, Betsy said "Mom, Austin's being a Paste!", I said "what?" Austin said "a pest" I couldn't' help it, I had to laugh, it sounded so silly for Betsy to be calling her sister a "Paste" when she meant "pest". While we were eating lunch I was talking to the kids about how important it is to marry someone who is righteous and a member of the church, and get married in the temple. Samuel looked at me and said "am I going to marry you when I'm old enough?" I said "no" I'm married to your Daddy. Then Samuel thought for a minute then said, "okay, I'll marry Cheslie, and Ariana (two little girls in our ward)" I said, "nope, sorry, you can only marry one girl", he finally said, "okay I'll marry Ariana, and take her to the temple." I thought that was so sweet, but I told him that he didn't have to pick who he was going to marry now, he only needed to decide that he was going to get married in the temple.