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I try to avoid having too many \u201cpet peeve\u201d posts that focus on the negative, but it\u2019s been a while so I think I can turn in a chip. Also, this post is not meant as an indictment of any current or past wards in particular, but is a more generalizable gripe. Matter of fact, for the most part our wards have bent over backwards to accommodate our clan of ruffians. For example, yesterday I did the thing where one parent brings all of the other kids to church while the mom can stay home with a newborn. The mission president sitting right behind us engaged my little children in conversation when they started getting rowdy and he could tell I was overwhelmed, and I had multiple “you’re doing great”s and offers of help, and nothing in the below should be misinterpreted as ungratefulness for all the kindness people in my current and past wards have shown us.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Now, with that being said, with the exception of people arriving late and not wanting to interrupt the sacrament, the foyer is primarily for people with rambunctious kids who would otherwise be disrupting sacrament meeting. Others are welcome to stay there, but they are not entitled to the same level of equanimity and peaceful quiet as if they, you know, just went into the cultural hall (I promise the adults don\u2019t bite).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This hasn\u2019t happened recently, but occasionally you go into the foyer with a screaming child and get dirty looks from the people out there. With things like this I have a bit of an attitude (not a good thing, I recognize), so I typically either ignore them or if it\u2019s a bad day I give them a dirty look back. (Sometimes it\u2019s more subtle, like that awkward look when they try to be polite when my kid is smashing my other kid into the sofa right next to them.) <\/span>Kids are sometimes going to be kids, and the foyer is for vectoring that energy when you\u2019ve lost the battle to keep them from disrupting the sacrament meeting. As an adult you can always just go into the cultural hall; me and my kids can\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Plus, this is one of those gendered things. If I get Father-of-the-Year looks from people just for being at the park with my kids, I\u2019m sure the foyer bad-parent looks are worse for women, or at the very least the foyer looks get wrapped up in all the other bad parenting anxieties that come with the being a mother in a society that is built around childless people that don\u2019t recognize that sometimes kids are just kids. (\u201cDid you ever, you know, think about teaching them how to sit still,\u201d \u201cNO, THE THOUGHT HAD NEVER OCCURED TO ME\u201d).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And yes, we all know about the family with the four girls in matching bows that sit quietly coloring during sacrament meeting (or, heaven forbid, actually listening to the talks). And I\u2019m sure later in life they\u2019ll have other, teenage girl issues to deal with; the fact that they don\u2019t, say, rip off that hymn book holder thingie from the back of the pew like our boys have done multiple times this past year doesn\u2019t mean that their parents\u2019 parenting philosophy is superior or, when the dust is settled they will be any more functional adults, just that they weren\u2019t born with the destructive energy of Atilla the Hun (and yes, there are some girls with the destructive energy of Atilla the Hun, overlapping bell curves, yadda yadda).<\/span><\/p>\n But in the meantime, boys will be boys, girls will be girls, and when you see an apathetic-looking parent with a wild child or several running around, it\u2019s not that we don\u2019t care, we\u2019re just tired, but it\u2019s nice that there is a space in church for people like us. Please don\u2019t try to take that away from us by colonizing it with your expectations for cultural hall-level quietude. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I try to avoid having too many \u201cpet peeve\u201d posts that focus on the negative, but it\u2019s been a while so I think I can turn in a chip. Also, this post is not meant as an indictment of any current or past wards in particular, but is a more generalizable gripe. Matter of fact, for the most part our wards have bent over backwards to accommodate our clan of ruffians. For example, yesterday I did the thing where one parent brings all of the other kids to church while the mom can stay home with a newborn. The mission president sitting right behind us engaged my little children in conversation when they started getting rowdy and he could tell I was overwhelmed, and I had multiple “you’re doing great”s and offers of help, and nothing in the below should be misinterpreted as ungratefulness for all the kindness people in my current and past wards have shown us.\u00a0 Now, with that being said, with the exception of people arriving late and not wanting to interrupt the sacrament, the foyer is primarily for people with rambunctious kids who would otherwise be disrupting sacrament meeting. Others are welcome to stay there, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":48205,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mormon-life"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/loadUp.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48195"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50293,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48195\/revisions\/50293"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}