[LIF] Earth Hour

It is now 9:15PM and Earth Hour has moved on to another time zone. I was happy to hear my wife tell me that the businesses around her store were reducing their lighting and that every second street light seemed to be off! Nice. Her store reduced lighting too. But here at home we went to candles. The candles reminded my oldest of church so she wanted to turn it into a time of worship! So she decided to write prayers on scraps of paper and put them into a box, apparently this was to help her younger sister participate. I led a few worship choruses and the girls danced all around the livingroom in the candle light. It was really nice until it denegrated into a circular chase and several near misses of a table edge! I put a stop to that. As a parent you learn to enjoy moments within moments, it's a skill.

After our dancing came to an end the kids pulled out the prayers. I was asked to read one for Chelsea. It read:

God we love you.
God we know you.
love us.

I was impressed.

After a few of these were read out (they were all pretty similar with love and safety as the main themes) we started up the laptop (on batteries of course). I put on some instrumental music and we laughed to the visualization of a wacky snowman! It was getting close to the end of the hour anyway. So after a few songs we went up to brush our teeth in the candle light. Elyssa wanted to turn the lights on to go pee, but I asked her to wait and turned it into a teaching moment around the purpose of Earth Day. I told her that if we don't do something now her generation is going to really have a hard go of it. We talked about being conscious of the energy we use. At 9:01 she was able to turn the lights on, I had them in bed right away (the agreement for letting them stay up through Earth Hour) and came down to settle and work on papers.

Hope you had an equally pleasant experience of Earth Hour.