Ready for 8

Remember how I mentioned I wasn't so thrilled about my child reaching the age of accountability?
I got an answer to my questions today in Sunday school.

First, I found Sunday school quite boring.
I fidgeted and my chair was uncomfortable, I was worried it was going to flare up my back pain.
When I changed positions so my back wouldn't hurt, I became acutely aware that I was fasting and that my stomach was empty.
Now that we have church at 11 am, I realized its been more than 4 years since I've fasted past noon. It was past noon.

Then I thought about how I tried to teach my almost 10 year old, fasting is about telling your body my spirit is control not my physical body.

Then I remember the lesson, talk, or urban legend that says, my father taught me he never sat in a boring sacrament meeting. When asked how he never heard a boring talk, he said I'd write my own in my head if I ever found one lacking.

So I thought ok get it together, what are you doing do help your learning?

But then I got really sleepy and I wanted to lay down.
Sometimes it takes a few times of our spirit telling our physical body to pull itself together.

Our lesson was on 2 Nephi 2.
We talked about the Fall of Adam. People shared some good comments, some people shared some fallacies according to me. I truly believe Eve knew what she was doing before she partook of the fruit. (She didn't know the end result, or what it would really mean to give it up, but I don't think she was clueless.) The serpent did beguile her, but she also knew there was no other way. Joseph Fielding Smith, I also think agrees with me.

Joseph Fielding Smith
" Adam and Eve therefore did the very thing that the Lord intended them to do...The Lord said to Adam that if he wished to remain in the garden, then he was not to eat the fruit, but if he desired to eat it and partake of death he was at liberty to do so. So really it was not in the true sense a transgression of a divine commandment....It was the divine plan from the very beginning that man should be placed on the earth and be subject to mortal conditions and pass through a probationary state as explained in the Book of Mormon." (Answers to Gospel Questions, vol. 4, pp. 79-82 as taken from Latter-day Commentary on the Book of Mormon compiled by K. Douglas Bassett, p.92)

Someone mentioned how they did have choices before they partook of the fruit. They choose to eat other fruit. They choose how to spend their time, they just hadn't choose to transgress, they hadn't chosen to be cast out of the Lord's presence.

Some mentioned they were perfect and innocent before they partook. All of a sudden it dawned on me. My three younger children are perfect and innocent, and I understand why the Lord during his earthly ministry often said, "suffer the children to come to me" but if they don't grow past seven years old they would be missing their opportunity to grow, learn and reason.
I look into my younger children's eyes and they are beyond perfect, I don't even know how to explain it, even when they are sad or ornery, their eyes show complete innocent, because they live a sheltered life they don't understand anything but innocence. But as the months past after my daughter gets baptized her brain will grow and develop in away that was not possible as a little child, and she will begin to reason. She will begin to understand the choices she makes.

Once I thought about it in terms of Adam and Eve in the garden, I started to realize I'm excited for my daughter to grow to 8, I'm excited to give her the choice to be baptized, and I'm excited her reasoning in her brain will start to function in away that was never available when she was younger.