Zatera Ul

We survived toddler duty at church yesterday. It’s been a while since we were drafted for that role, and in the meantime the toddler room has acquired, of all things, a Little Tykes car. I already had some issues with the toys in there, it is quite well-equipped to be a day care, but not so well-equipped for religious training. All of the teaching for the children happens during Sunday school (which we don’t attend, because of time and energy constraints); during the boring grown-up parts of the service the under-7 children play under supervision. So basically all OLC is learning at church is how to run around and tickle her friends. She (and TLG) are too active to be trained to sit through a service without more support from the congregation than we’ve gotten. But I’ve been teaching her a lot at home.

We did find out where my personal line in the sand was on toys in the church: No secular licensed characters. I found a few of these in the toddler room, decided that responsibility should come with some degree of power, and dealt with them accordingly. OLC doesn’t know about most of these characters, and she certainly doesn’t need to learn about them in church.

My other mental line in the sand is: No depictions of Noah’s Ark as a Happy Fun Animal Cruise. There is not much that I can do about that one, though; my church took the greatest catastrophe in Bible history as the decorating theme for the entire nursery.