Was It Worth It To Stay Up Until 3 AM?

Absolutely yes.

Night One was 1 am, Night Two we played Rook instead. But last night it was 3 am.

Dallin was up reading his book. He said, "I listened for a while, but all you discussed was parenting and marriage." I guess he's right. But somehow it felt like so much more.

When we called it a night, I felt like we nearly had it all solved. A pretty impressive result for only seven hours of chatting. Here's what we concluded:

• Discouragement leads to Despair. Despair leads to Iniquity. Iniquity, of course, leads to Discouragement. We'd be better off to gaurd against discouragement than to try to stop the cycle farther down the path.
• Starting Chas in Music For Young Children, instead of sticking with the teacher we have, is probably biting off more than I can chew.
• Hope is not Naive and Cynicism is not a sign of Intelligence. Hope is the Lord's way. Is hope something we just fake until we grasp it?
• The parent who insists on a certain rule should be the one to enforce it.
• Scripture Study is more valuable than "just reading." Colleen takes two pages at a time and reads and re-reads them until she discerns the principle being taught there. She forces herself to discover a new principle every time. My cousin wakes up early every morning to pour over conference talks on parenting and look up every scripture contained in them.
• My amazing sister-in-law's parenting success may be due to the fact that she never gets emotionally drawn in to her children's fits, arguments, pouting, etc.
• It is valuable to have a pragmatic view of parenting. It will serve no purpose to despair that our children will grow up to be unhappy, undisciplined adults who cut themselves off from their parents who messed them up. It is better to pretend that they will grow up to be happy, helpful, selfless adults who are very grateful for their mothers. We have no idea which will actually be true, but we may as well assume the latter, it seems like it has a better chance of happening if we pretend it is going to.
• Labeling children with positive labels often makes them come true.
• We'll make more progress trying to strengthen our strengths than fix our weaknesses.
• If our friends who are human and love imperfectly think we are on the right path to Heavenly Father, surely the Lord whose love is perfect and merciful is pleased with our efforts.

By the way, I slept through Ward Conference today and four people commented on it to me. I'm sorry Bishop Croonen and President Christensen, I was up late last night working.