Scriptures and Kids

This week has been fairly busy with just normal, everyday activities, hence the paucity of posts (I have to insert an aside here. I think many of the coolest English words start with the letter P. Some of my favorites (the first is my favorite word): pulchritudinous (beautiful), pugnacious, pusillanimous, peripatetic, perspicacious, etc. If you ever want to learn a new cool word, just open up a dictionary to P and have fun!). We have been enjoying watching the girls continue to grow up.

Anwyn loves playing computer games, mothering her dolls, and helping her mother. She likes to keep active and run and dance a lot. She continues to impress us with her singing abilities and her memory - she'll remember all sorts of random things and she learns new songs quickly. Kristi has been working with Anwyn to help her learn her Articles of Faith; Anwyn has memorized 7 of them so far. She learns them by learning the songs.


Lily is our pretty little flower. She's recently decided that she wants to stand up more. Lily will pull herself up and stand quite regularly now. She loves watching her older sister too. Lily likes to give hugs and recently has turned into a somewhat snuggly baby. She likes to "bonk" heads (press foreheads together) with her daddy. Whenever music starts playing Lily will start bouncing up and down. She's also recently started singing along with music (singing: "laaaaaaaa"). Lily is our little joy with a ready smile and hug.


I'm changing subjects now. I recently changed how I do scripture study. I've read the Book of Mormon a number of times cover to cover. I've read most of the Bible as well but have always focused much of my scripture reading and study on the Book of Mormon (again, not neglecting the Bible, just not reading it nearly as much as the Book of Mormon - after all, my favorite book is Isaiah and my favorite section of the Bible is from Isaiah to Malachi). Anyway, I decided that I needed to change how I studied the scriptures so I could get more out of it. I decided to pick topics at random and find scriptures about them and read those. However, I also write a talk/essay at the same time, incorporating the scriptures I've found. Like many people, whenever I've prepared a talk for Sacrament Meeting or prepared a lesson for church, I always learn so much. It's in preparing to teach and in the act of teaching that you learn the most; this is because in order to disseminate the gospel to others, you have to understand it clearly and be able to explain it simply.

This led to my current style of scripture study because I figured that if I put the same effort into my daily study as I do when I'm preparing a talk, then I'll get a whole lot more out of it than I do just by reading through chapter by chapter (again, this is just what I think will be most beneficial to me for the time being; everyone is different). I also am a student and spend a lot of time focused on psychology and the brain but haven't been putting as much effort into gospel topics as I do school; this just seemed like a backwards approach to what's really important so I've started putting more effort into scripture study (and much much less effort into school - just kidding!). As time goes by, I'll also have a number of talks that are ready to give with some modest tweaking. It's been a very enjoyable method of scripture study so far. Even though I may not always read many scriptures each day, I find that I spend more time with each one.