The month of church talks!

January was our family's month for church talks for some reason! Luke gave a talk in Primary the second Sunday of the month, Kitty took a turn the third Sunday of the month, and M&M was asked to speak for the first time in Sacrament Meeting on the last Sunday of January. (And if you remember, Kitty just gave a talk in Primary back in November...)

Luke's and Kitty's talks were pretty straight forward talking about service. The only difficulty was that we were also fighting a few sicknesses throughout the month so DH and I weren't able to hear both of the talks. (I think we were both there for Kitty's, but not for Luke's.)

M&M was asked to speak on the topic of Music and Dance. We had her set a goal to have a rough draft of the goal done by the middle of the week so she wasn't waiting until the last minute to prepare something. She shared a couple of personal experiences with music and then we helped her find a few talks from General Authorities that she could pull some quotes from.

Unfortunately on the day of her talk Kay was sick and Blondie claimed that she wasn't feeling well also. So DH stayed home from church with those two and then ended up leaving them at home just for a few minutes while he came to Sacrament Meeting to hear M&M talk and then I was playing the flute with the ward choir for a musical number immediately following M&M's talk. (DH was going to bring the kids with him but Kay still hadn't woken up for the day and she was still asleep when he returned home. DH had given Blondie instructions to turn on a movie for Kay if she woke up and if she needed DH right away to call his cell phone. It is nice to live just a block from the ward meetinghouse.)

When I first walked into the chapel and saw M&M up on the stand she looked really pale to me, so DH and I were crossing our fingers that she didn't pass out during the talk... She did a really good job on her first speaking experience. She didn't appear to be nervous at all and she spoke loud and clear for everyone to hear. She also received many compliments from people afterwards on how well she did! I'm not sure if this is a churchwide policy or not, but the youth in our ward are supposed to be given the opportunity to speak once a year in Sacrament Meeting. In our ward with a huge youth group that means that we usually have 2 youth speakers each week. If we stay in the ward much longer, M&M will have spoken more times in our ward than either me or DH.