Sunday morning, after brunch, we headed off to B&N pick up Katherine some books. More on that below, perhaps.
So we got into the store, and wandered back toward the Kid Section. Katherine found about a dozen things that she wanted between Point A and Point B, of course, none of which were suitable. (I fear that by the time she is ready to appreciate Uno, she will no longer appreciate Hello Kitty, so getting a Hello Kitty Uno Set is probably right out.)
But once we were in the Kid Section, books and similar paraphernalia were utterly passe. Instead, her whole attention, vision, very existential being was focused on one thing, and one thing only: the train.
(B&Ns have a wooden train set in their Kid Sections, to give kids things to play with while Mom & Dad look around for books for them. It works, and while kids being distracted from looking at books themselves is probably a bad thing, being distracted from pulling several dozen books at random off all the shelves is probably a good thing, so it’s a wash.)
So while I browsed books, Katherine played with the trains. And there were maybe four or five other kids there, doing the same thing, younger and older, with other parents hovering nearby.
And she was the best-behaved of the lot.
Not perfect, by any means. Not a paragon. But rather than screaming and yelling and pitching a fit (or a caboose) when her train ran into the barrier of someone else’s train (or someone else standing in the way), Katherine just insistently hooted, “Toot-toot!” and waited fro them to clear the track.
And if she sometimes didn’t notice when she was in someone else’s way, when it was pointed out, she moved, rather than ignoring the situation or pitching a fit (etc.).
It was really pretty keen, and made a nice follow-up to the earlier morning activities.
See, Sunday was Kitten’s first day of Sunday School. No more sitting in the Nursery during the service and playing with toys, pulled into the church for Communion at the end, but now it was time for actual Scholastic Education into Theological Verities and Religious Inquiry. Or, failing that, learning songs about Joy and Jesus and drawing with crayons.
Problem is (aside from her seriously missing playing in the Nursery), the Sunday School is about half an hour or forty-five minutes, encompassing only the first half of the service. In the middle, whilst announcements about various goings-on are made, the kids are sent back into the sanctuary to sit with their parents, tra-la.
Well, I wasn’t ready for that. And Katherine, whose gyrations and antics and desire to be entertained are okay for the five-to-ten minutes during and after Communion, found herself (or her parents) tested by a half-hour of prayers and responses and kneeling and similar church-going activities. Not a happy mixture.
Not that she was a crazy girl or anything (once she was informed that climbing over the back of the pew was Not Allowed), but she was active, she wanted Mommy & Daddy’s attention, she wanted to go back and forth along the kneelers from one end of the pew to the other, she wanted to play with her stuffed kitty, and have Mommy & Daddy play, too, etc.
The good news was, there was nobody else in our pew.
The bad news was, we were sitting (as is our wont) in the front right pew, literally in front of God and Everybody.
Hrm.
So afterwards, I cast my mind back on when John and I were young’uns at church, back up in the Bay Area. And what I remembered (aside from the threat of Dire Paternal Discipline afterwards) was that we had little religious prayer books and the like to look at and keep us entertained whilst the adults were doing That Boring Stuff.
So that’s why were picking up books, to keep her entertained in the pews. And that’s why it was nice to see that Katherine actually could behave herself.
Hey … I wonder if we could bring one of those train sets to the church …
“Toot-toot!” “Amen.”
Many are the times in my youth that I never made it all the way through the service before Dad and I went outside to ‘wait for everyone else’.
I don’t recall that ever happening, as the preemptive threats (never empty) of what would happen when we got home became dire enough to quiet me down.
Of course, I don’t remember being three all that well, so I may be mistaken.
The related story was I can distinctly remember (and this would have been no later than age 6 or so) being told, as I gyrated around one Sunday Mass and looked out the back door, that I should sit down and turn around and behave because “Jesus is there.”
Now, in perspective of being an adult, I’m sure that the message being conveyed was about God being present during the service, if not about the actual presence of the Body and Blood (this being a Catholic church, of course) being up there at the altar, too, and it being disrespectful to be turning my back on it.
To my mind at the time, though, I was told this as I was looking out the back doors at where there was a storage closet or something in the church structure. And even though I knew it made no sense that Jesus could actually be buried there (I mean, I knew Jesus had been buried, but I knew there were lots of other churches, too), I felt like the message was “Don’t you be looking back at Jesus’ burial place while the church service is going on! He’ll getcha!”
I’m sure this had some profound, if unintended, effect on my personal theology, but darned if I can figure out what it was. Needless to say, though, I didn’t look out the back door during the service again. But I always wondered about that storage space …
When I went to Sunday School at Chula Vista Presbyterian, we started the service with our parents, joining in the opening hymm, prayer, and call & response litany (which ususally took about 10 minutes and were easy to keep kids interested in). Then all the children went forward to the alter steps for the ” Junior Sermon” which was usually given by the associate pastor (who was oversaw the Sunday School as well).
After the 5 minute lesson, students were sent off to Sunday School with their teachers, who met them in naive of the church. Our parents retrieved us after the service ended usually in the courtyard of the church where they served coffee and “pink stuff” between services.
In retrospect, it was a genius idea for having kids in the service, but only for a short time. And it meant parents could concentrate on the service and not on watching their kids (which would be my complaint with the way your church seems to be doing it).
Well, I’m not 100% certain that’s how they regularly do it.
They also have a distinction between “Sunday School” (at the 9:15 service) and “Children’s Chapel” (at the 11), which seems more along the line of what you were describing.
Unfortunately, I prefer (both timing-wise and musically) the 9:15.
I think we can get Katherine trained to behave relatively decently during the service; how much she’ll enjoy it is another matter (though I don’t think anyone much enjoys church until their 20s or 30s, at the earliest — but that’s another post). The question is how to occupy her time.
What I don’t want to do is have her doing completely non-churchy stuff. No Game Boys. No playing with Barbies. If we can find stuff with the appropriate themes or imagery, that would be ideal to me. I mean, hey, it’s church — a religious coloring book seems a legit way of spending one’s time, whereas a Scooby Doo coloring book does not, jokes about the Holy Ghost aside.
I dunno. I’m trying to balance what I feel is right, what I feel is practical, and what I remember from When I Was A Kid And We Had To Sit Ramrod Straight And Smile.
Btw, I think you mean the “nave of the church.” The “naive of the church” are all the silly, superstitious goofballs like me who are there to begin with. 🙂
Yeah…
But what about the knave of the church?
AT CV Pres, both services delt with children the same way, although far fewer children were in Sunday School (thought about shortening that to SS, but that might cause confusion) at the 10:30 service.
And sorry about the “nave” thing, my understanding of religious practice, etc does not include spelling.
What’s really funny was that, while reviewing the construction bid for our church expansion at the Vestry meeting last night, I ran across exactly the same spelling error. Though I suspect it was, in that case, a spell-check dyscorrection.