The Ash Wednesday service was this evening.  We were really excited because it was at 6:30pm which meant we could all go and still get our kids into bed within 30 minutes of their usual bedtime!  Not bad… let’s do it!

We got dinner together in time, got loaded in the car, got a parking spot and walked in at the beginning.  This is already going well!  Then we realized that there wasn’t childcare and there was nowhere to take our kids… hmm.  We tried sitting in the back row.  This was fine for the singing but not so fine when Rissa screeched, “Saaaaat!” (Zach) in her happiest voice and reached out to her brother to snuggle him.  Cute… adorable even, but not exactly in line with reflecting on the sins we need to confess before God.  Zach started pointing out everything in the room with his little sausage pointer finger and announcing, “uh daT?  uh daT?  Da Da, DAT???” (what’s that?)  We went out to the foyer to sit and try to hear bits of the service.  But our kids were being RIDICULOUSLY cute… dancing on the couch and singing little songs and playing with the fake tree (if even babies think that fake trees are weird… what does that say about fake trees?).  We left the door open to try and hear but realized that everyone could probably hear us too.

Amidst our giggles and attempts at shhhhing them, we shuffled out the door and hoped we could try again next year.  Matt is convinced that instead of giggling when our kids are adorable with incredibly bad timing, we will somehow have mastered our “stern face” by next year and be able to silence them with eye contact alone, you know, the eye contact that says, “Zip it or you are going down.”  We’ll see… if that doesn’t pan out, perhaps we will request childcare. 🙂