Blessed Baby Boy

Sunday was Everett's baby blessing at church. Like any important day, things started out crazy but once I calmed down it turned out to be a wonderful day.

To start off, Everett got a giant bug bite on his face Halloween night, just in time for it to be a big red welt by Sunday. I was having an extreme bad hair day because of the humidity which caused me to fuss with it longer which caused me not to have enough time to feed Everett for one last time which caused him to scream and spit up on his new outfit as we headed out the door. Aaron said it reminded him of the days when his mom used to take him to church...not exactly the effect I was hoping to have since the last time Aaron went to church with me was over 7 years ago.

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I was nervous beyond belief because not only was Aaron there, but his entire family and one of his friends came also. That comes to 16 non-members and my 5 inactive brothers and sisters. I was hoping everything would go just right so they would come away from this as a positive experience. I need to learn to calm down and not worry so much. We made it to church early and my mom informed us she saved us a seat...on the front row. She had 7 kids, did she not remember that sitting in the front row with an infant is like committing Sacrament Meeting suicide? Oh well, it was nice of her to save us a seat. I started feeding Everett his bottle and he and I started calming down. There were to be 2 baby blessings that day. Just as they started to call the participants up for the first baby blessing Everett loaded his pants. It was so loud family members sitting 3 people over looked my way to see what happened. Aaron and I ran out the door to try to change him since his blessing was next. We realized we would not have enough time to change him before his blessing, so we came back in just in time to hand Everett over to my brother with a loaded diaper.

I had visions of leaking diapers bouncing through my head on his pristine white blessing outfit (which by the way was freaking expensive! Who sets the prices on those???). Everett started crying. My dad, step-dad and brother who were doing the blessing are not skilled in the art of calming a baby down and I thought, "here comes the cherry to top off this disaster of a day". Luckily, that's when Heaven opened up and sent some love and miracles my way.

Our Bishop who was helping with the blessing has a little one of his own and knew just what to do. He stuck Everett's pacifier back in and got the guys to start bouncing him and he calmed down right away. He didn't make another peep. My brother, Ben did Everett's blessing. It was his first time so he was so nervous, but I couldn't tell, he did a perfect job and gave Everett a wonderful blessing. Everett slept for the rest of Sacrament Meeting. (After we took him out and changed his pants of course...no leaking! Woo hoo!)

I was finally calm and focused on what was really important. Everett's blessing and all of the family and friends that were there to support us. I know our non-member friends and family all have their own opinions and feelings about the LDS church, good or bad. Whether the experience was positive or negative for them, I'll probably never know. What I do know is that they left that meeting knowing that we believe in a loving Heavenly Father, we believe Jesus Christ is our Savior and that he loves us so much, we believe the love within a family is so important and that we believe in the power of prayer. That made me a happy girl.

After Sacrament Meeting we headed back to our house for yummy food and to enjoy the afternoon with our wonderful family and friends. We truly have the most amazing families.

Everett, you will never have to question if your family loves you. (this blanket was made for Everett by his great, great Grandma Bland)