The Mother's Cell

Whoever built our church was a man. Oh, shut it! Men just don't think like mom's do. We have had to convert a side room off the platform into the mother's room. Now, every couple of years there is an influx of baby making in the church and this room (as well as the cradle roll class) get's REALLY crowded.

This time it started with Dawn and I. We were the first breastfeeding moms that needed the room. We used to make all these comments about how we needed privacy and all that. We did get that when we put up a curtain. We were also very tired of having to be in the cell-like atmosphere and Dawn went out and put up a great lamp that you step on to turn on and Ollie (head elder) put up a privacy screen so we didn't have to worry about the congregation getting a flash of nipple during the sermon. All this after we made a bit of fuss. Now we have toddlers, there are MANY toddlers and three more infants who are all BREASTFEEDING. This means that our little 12 X 12 cell has about 14 people in it every Sabbath and let me tell you, it is all but a calming atmosphere.

So here are my proposals:

1. Children's Church. I want Abby to learn how to sit through a program but I understand that the congregational prayer and sermon can be tedious for a 2 year old. So we could do our own program that starts after the children's story and they just file out and come into our program during the "boring part." We could have a sign out and sign in system so people could actually leave their toddlers there and participate in the adult service if they wanted. We could get some of the academy students to help. There could be puppets sometimes, drama sometimes, stories and veggie tales sometimes. It could just be 45 minutes of our toddler program.

2. There is a video feed into the Primary 2 room and we could just turn that into a transition mother's room where only kids between the ages of whenever they start walking and 5 can come with their parents to scream and do whatever they do. This would require less work but yield less learning.

So, what to do? I will be calling local moms but my big thing is to leave that room for those mom's that are breastfeeding and need privacy but also provide a chaos free place for those that have toddlers. Now, I know that chaos free is a stretch but at least that room would be BIGGER and be less crazy.