The Little Things

It is 11:40 on Sunday Morning. I feel really good about my day so far, I feel like I have accomplished a lot! I don’t usually accomplish much on Sunday, after all it is Sunday and it must be kept Holy. As such, I don’t clean or do any really chores on Sunday, I do watch TV, but I keep it to spiritual or uplifting material (at least until after church, hehehe). But today I have discovered the joy of the little things.

I am the Primary Chorister. Because I don’t like to feel like I only think about my calling on Sundays, I try to plan the music for each Sunday before going to bed on Saturday. This was absolutely necessary when church started at 8:30, but this year church starts at 12:30 and so I have loads of extra time in the morning (especially when the baby actually naps from 10-12 on Sunday mornings, I feel so blessed!). So what do I do with all my extra time?

Well, I could have made myself an amazing breakfast, but I am currently drinking Kirkland Weight Loss Shakes for Breakfast and Lunch, and that only takes 5 minutes to make and drink. Ken has meetings starting each Sunday at 7 am, so I can not make him breakfast, I could but it would be very cold at 4 pm when he got home from all his meetings. Poor Ken. But we are not talking about Ken, we are talking about all I accomplished today.

So here it is.

Last week was the first Sunday of the Year, and as a new Primary Chorister I was excited to start learning all the new songs that the kids need to learn for this years Primary Program in September. Last week after Church I almost, I truly almost believed that the children would never ever ever learn all the songs we need to learn. We have 3 classes of Sunbeams (3-4 year olds), the older kids know 2 of the 8 songs we will be singing, but the Sunbeams, and I dare say two or three of the older classes, know none of them. It feels like we are starting from scratch.

This morning I made a schedule of the next 8 months, week by week, listing what we need to learn. If we are able to learn the sections of each song assigned to each week, the children will know every verse of all 8 songs. But Wait! There is More! I was easily able to arrange the order of verses to be taught for each song. It was amazing- I am pretty sure I was getting heavenly help. So for our first song “The Family is of God” we are learning the 1st and 4th verses first and then the 2nd and 3rd, I figured that if it takes too long to learn the 1st and 4th we could get the teachers to learn the second and third which focus on the roles of fathers and mothers respectively. Another song “Beautiful Savior” we are learning backwards. I have asked a small group of the older girls (the activity day girls) to learn the descant that is sung on the third verse of this song. This is going to take a lot of my good singers away from the Melody of the song during this verse and I had the impression that if we learned this verse first we would know it the best and the kids would sing really loud and make up for the fact that there are less of them singing. We will then learn the 2nd and then the 1st verses, just in case we don’t learn the 1st verse very well I am also going to teach it to the Activity Day Girls, so if needed they can sing that verse by themselves, then have the rest of the Primary join them on the 2nd and 3rd verses. There were several other little things that I remembered or came up with while I was typing up the schedule. When I was done- It felt so good, I was able to give a copy my assistant, who was also feeling slightly overwhelmed wondering how we were going to make it all work. I was also able to give a copy to Counselor in the Primary Presidency who writes our Primary Program and our Pianist will get a copy too so that she will know what our major music needs will be each week.

I also created a Scripture Reading Schedule for myself. I love to read the Book of Mormon. I love to time my reading so that at the end of the year I am also finishing reading the Book of Mormon. Two years ago I made a resolution to read the Book of Mormon completely through 4 times during the year. 531x4=2124 pages, 2124/365=5.8 pages per day. I think I read 5 pages a weekday and 6 each day on the weekend, in December I had to do my Math again to figure out how to finish on the 31st. It was fun, I Kept my resolution, I read each day. I felt the spirit so much in my life that year, I loved it. This last year I had a new baby and couldn’t find the time to read 5 pages per day, I read the entire book once and felt great that I was able to do that. This year my plan was to do the same, read the Book of Mormon once through. But I don’t have a lot of time on weekdays so I needed to figure out how many pages to read on the days that Ken is home to make up for reading less on the days that he is at work.

This is how I did it.

In Excel I placed a “1” in the first 365 cells of column “A”, in cell #366 I made a total. Using Cut and Paste made this very easy to do. Next I Bolded the start of each month and highlighted weekends. I then decided that I would read one page on days that Ken was gone and 2 on days that Ken was around, for the first few weeks I tweaked the amount of pages to read when Ken was around until the total at the bottom was 531. But Wait, There's More! I got to thinking, Why just read the book through once, when I could do it twice. So I copied Column A and Pasted it into Column C, (Column B was already taken up by my Months/Days) I then doubled everything and tweaked it a little more until the total at the bottom was 1062. I know that this type of thing doesn’t appeal to everyone, but as I said, I love to read, I love to finish reading on the 31st of December and to top it all off- I really love using Excel! I know, I am a big big nerd, but you love me anyway.

And Finally- I made myself a to do list for the week. Ken’s younger brother is getting married on Saturday and I have a lot to do to get ready for all the family and friends who will be visiting. (The Bachelor Party is at our house). It has been a while since I sat down and made a to do list, I loved it- I feel so calm about the coming week, I may do it every week.

All in All, I didn’t do anything amazing today, I did Little Things. But they were little things that made me happy. And the world could always use more happiness, don’t you think?