Aych Ee Double Toothpicks

Things have been tricky lately, what with the new baby and all.

I have been listening to conference over again, and the running theme is family and what it takes to make it succeed.

Across the board it's been "Family Prayer, Family Scripture Study, and Family Home Evening."

We're really good at the first one, patchy on the second, and the third is a distant relative we know of, but haven't seen in a long time.

So, yesterday, after dinner, I figured it was high time to jump back on the bandwagon.

I sat down with my trusty family home evening manual, and called everyone's attention.

The kids were acting like hooligans, trying to get the best spot on the floor, which meant being as close to the baby as possible without actually sitting on her, and there was a lot of shouting, pushing, and general discontent.

I glared at the lot of them and tried to maintain order best as I could.

Now, I was going off of little to no sleep, what with Leah jumping up and down in her bed for an hour at 5 AM and Emma waking up every hour to make sure I was still alive. My patience was quickly trickling out my very tiny hour glass.

I started reading the lesson I had tried to prepare for, and was all over the map. It was pretty bad...But I was trying, right?

I kept trying to grip my children's attention by talking in an exciting way, and was failing miserably but Jeremy solved the attention issue by drawing it all to himself...

And I was done. FHE was officially over. My already wayward train abruptly derailed and went
steadily down the slope of chaos into unknown depths.

I had a lady tell me a few weeks back to accept my current life as the new normal.

I'm not sure I want to do that.