NURSERY CLASS OR THE DOCTRINE OF PAWNING OFF THE KID

One of the greatest blessings is that of being a Nursery Leader. It’s the rare calling in the church that gives you a break from going to a boring class and sleeping through two hours of lesson material, that is very seldom prepared, and not really doctrinally sound. I think that if statistics were known, most of the teachers will hit the church’s website within 15 minutes of the time that they’ll leave to go to church and print off a lesson for the day. That’s probably why, whenever I tried doing it, the servers are crammed and slowed down so badly that I found that it was better to go online 20 minutes prior to going to church. Just kidding.

My wife and I were once Nursery leaders and were tasked with the opportunity of tending those young’uns who were between 18 months old and 3 years old. This is the age where they’re still a little bit clingy and don’t want to leave mom, but then again they want to play with toys for two hours. It was the anxiety of separation from mom for some, and for others it was like them saying, “Good bye Mom, I’m going to my class to work with all the toys and you can come and get me later. Have fun doing parent things.”

We actually had two stints in the Nursery. Both of which lasted for 5 years, each time.

Now I want to let you know that I have a very sensitive nose and can smell a messy diaper long before it happens. And so when it happens I’ll grab someone in the hallway and toss the kid out to them and tell them to take them to their mother for a changing. Back then we knew where all of the mothers were to be found and so it wasn’t hard to give them up.

I guess you might also say that we were the equivalent of liberal nursery leaders. Hey, if you came to our class as a kid you could do whatever you wanted to do as long as it didn’t involve kissing other kids or making noise. Now for the sake of not wanting to be sued for naming names, all kids will be referred to by gender, as to what they were assumed back then and not what they identify as now.

I said that we were liberal, and we were. Our Sundays would start in class with cheese crackers, pretzels and mini marshmallows. We figured that that type of comfort food would speak volumes to the kids, and it did. At times we had parents that wanted to stay with their kid and we’d have to draw a hard line on them sticking around. There would be more than one parent who would protest, but their cries would fall on deaf ears and they’d be cast out to the outer darkness of the poorly taught Gospel Doctrine lessons.

As leaders we’d pull out Play Doh, coloring books, toys and anything else that we could find to get their attention. I know that the Bishop wanted us to give them a lesson but he probably didn’t expect the parable of feeding the five thousand with bread and fishes to be enacted with pretzels and marshmallows, so he didn’t push it. And, once or twice a year we’d have an ice cream social where we’d bring ice cream to class and give them all that they wanted. You might say that all of that sugar wasn’t good for the kids to get them all hyped up, but after our two hours were done, they were back in the care of their parents for Sacrament meeting and we were done…….that was before the current change happened where Sacrament meeting is first on the agenda.

And now I’ll give you a few stories.

The parable of the little girl starts with her mother bringing her to class and her screaming “bloody murder” because she didn’t want to be there. I think that she felt close to me because I’m normally warm and so she’d leave her mother’s arms and come to me and I’d sit with her and she’d almost immediately nod off and go to sleep. I found that if I pre-positioned a chair in the corner of the room that I could sit with her and nod off too with my head stuffed into the corner. And there we’d both be, studying Lehi’s Dream while the world around us would continue to spin out of control. Many times she’d sleep for two hours which also gave me a restful respite too.

Now I said that it was a parable, and so the message is: “If you can’t beat them, join them.” And thus the Lamanite slept through the night as the Nephites escaped. You can call it a moral to the story, but I prefer to call it a parable.

The parable of the bullfrog was one that involved a large rubbery bullfrog.

We had a toy in the nursery that was a large rubbery bullfrog that was really loved by one of the boys. Actually it was a multi-generational thing in that it was in the Nursery for many years and a lot of little kids played with it.

One of the little boys would come to class and immediately find the bullfrog and fill its mouth with crackers, pretzels and marshmallows and he’d play for two hours with it. He’d walk around with it, eating the stuff that he’d stuffed down its throat and every now and then he’d fill it up again. Other times he’d feed it, empty it and then feed it again. It was so well used over the years that the paint started wearing off of it and it also became the victim of a few power struggles between some of the kids. I said that it was a parable and so I can only liken it to the picture of King Noah that we have in the Book of Mormon. It’s like saying, “If you eat too much you’ll get fat like bullfrog King Noah.” Ok, that’s another moral. Just don’t go all D&C 89 on me and tell me what it really means.

It was sometime during our second tour of duty that we heard that one of the other ward’s Nursery leaders declared that there were germs on the toys that were being spread from kid to kid and so they were going to cull all the toys out of the Nursery and bring in new toys. Understand that these toys had seen generations of kids come and go and that they were loved by many and of course, there were probably enough germs to start another plague. Well, as things would have it, they took it upon themselves to throw them all away and bring in new used toys. When my wife and I found out about it we went to the church and got in the dumpster and rescued all of the toys that we thought could either be preserved or kept in service. We then took them home and washed two loads of them in the washing machine and snuck them back into the Nursery. The bullfrog was one of them, and since my wife really loved him, we kept him. It wasn’t long after that that our own grand kids would get him and stuff candy and other stuff in his mouth and carry him around eating out of him too. I guess that once you’ve found your purpose in life, you’ve found everything.

Personally, I like the excuse of using “germs” to keep some of the most rowdy kids out of the Nursery. I’ve always thought that we should have put a sign on the door that said, “If your kid is rowdy he probably has germs and shouldn’t come into the Nursery today! Please take him home!”

I would encourage the other ward Nursery leaders to read D&C 46:10-26 and rely on faith.

And now I make an end of my writing.