Negotiating Snack time

For anyone with small children that has ever had to take them to church you may relate well to this. Each Sunday we have a morning bag-packing routine. Mine has scriptures, manuals, books, etc for my lesson. Tina's has an array of item designed to to fend off pending primary disasters as well as combating all sorts of child food and bodily fluid emergencies during church.

It was another seemingly ordinary Sacrament meeting on Sunday. Each child had a bag full of stuff and were drawing, reading or otherwise entertained until it happened. Riley had begun to eat her snacks because she has the fortune of being four and not being completely responsible for packing her own stuff - she gets a lot of help from Mommy. Jacob on the other hand is in the throws of learning how to fend for himself and fighting the transition from mommy doing it all to having to get his own stuff.

We allowed him some freedom to choose what to put in his bag. Unfotunately he choose to put only what was on his mind at that time in itn which were paper, pencils, and markers. NO SNACKS!

Then the negotiation began. Riley was elbow deep into her bag and furiously munching away. This sound, I believe, attracts the attention of other hungry children in much the same way a shark is attracted to the faint smell of struggle. Maybe it is the crinkle of the bag or the crumbs falling to the ground that gets them.

After a frantic search in his bag, Jacob surmised that he had forgotten all of hi usual snack fare and the whining began. "I forgot my snacks!" Jacob began to murmur with the sound of the pre-cry cadence breath. Only in church, even an "inside voice" sounds like a freight train. Tina immediately intervened and began to try to calm down the boy while asking if the girl would share. Riley shook her head furiously in the side to side manner and folder her arms. Her stance was clear: "I have my snacks, get your own!".

I picker her up and put her on my lap. I cajoled, I begged, I pleaded for her to show some mercy to this starving child. I fell short of brbery because that was just not on the table. My pleas fell on deaf ears as I had seeminly lost out to this little, unshakeable iron-willed princess.

Then something remarkeable happened.

I enjoy seeing my kids do the right things and showing empathy towards one another and when it happens I relish it. After Jacob had lost hope and was sinking in despair, Riley suddenly reached into her bag, and pulled out a granola bar. She looked at me through her unpatched eye and said, "Maybe I can share this with him?". After all the posturing and whining and the bitter dissapointment Jacob must have felt at this moment, suddenly mercy was extended, and Riley showed compassion. She split the bar in half, gave it to him, and also offered some of her goldfish on top of it. He accepted the gift with a "Thank you Riley" and returned beneath the bench to finish his artwork.

I sat there in great content having witnessed a family negotitaion on the smallest of scales and was reminded again what Christmas is all about. Maybe I was just glad that the potential melt down was averted and I could return to listening to the speaker (or whatever I was really thinking about). Sometimes we make mistakes and are extended mercy from others. Sometimes we are the ones extending mercy. Either way, I feel grateful for the Mercy of a kind Father in Heaven and His Son, at this time of year that we have been given so much and it took the compassion of a four year old girl at snack time to make it sink in.