Lights at Temple Square

By absolutely NO FAULT of their own, our two oldest children, Caitlyn and Zach, have found themselves teenagers. And in so doing, they live their lives attached to cellphones, Ipods, and social networking sites. More than once I have found myself having a COMPLETE conversation with Caitlyn, not knowing that she can't hear a single word I've said, but has watched for cues and has succeeded in nodding and grunting at the appropriate times. It's a little strange and stressful as a parent, but Brook and I look at each other helplessly and can't blame them for trying their best to tune us out. It's just what teenagers do. Spending quality family time together has become increasingly difficult and challenging. While we (Brook and I) see the years ticking away, we want to spend as much time with them as possible. At the same time, however, THEY (Caitlyn and Zach) see that there's more life than what's waiting for them at home (imagine that) and want to hang out with their own kind.
Ok, we get it. But that doesn't mean we (Brook and I) don't still try.
We decided that we wanted to take them to see the Christmas lights at Temple Square a couple days before Christmas. We braced ourselves for their resistance and managed to trick get them into the car. We had planned it out well so that they really didn't have any excuses. There wasn't school the next day, so I have SOOOOOOOOOOOOO much homework didn't work. There weren't any practices, meetings or commitments. HA! They were pretty much stuck. I did hear Let's just turn around and go home so I can hang out with my friends, spoken halfheartedly about 20 times, Why do we have to go? asked about 15 times, and Ugh, this is stupid, uttered maybe eight.

But Brook and I managed to keep our cool. Brook concentrated on the road as he maneuvered through the snow storm, I sang Christmas carols with Brynn, and we turned the movie volume up really loud. Really loud. Pretty soon I had forgotten about the two disgruntled people in the back and actually believed that we were having a fun family outing. We happened to choose the best night for Temple Square. There was a light snow falling so not only did the snowflakes look beautiful, but they also frightened off scaredy-cat families. BYU was also playing in their fancy-shmancy-shut-down-the-state-of-Utah bowl game that night and JACKPOT...... No Mormons!!!!! While a normal night at Temple Square is spent shuffling shoulder to shoulder with about 20,000 other people, this night saw us walking wherever we darned well pleased and being the first in line for everything. We loved it. We saw cousins. We smiled. We laughed. We held hands and threw snow at each other. And Caitlyn may have summarized it best when we had almost made it home. "That was fun," she said with a smile. "It didn't suck that bad." No Caitlyn, it didn't suck that bad at all. :)