Choices, consequences, & prayers

I just had a great teaching moment! Bekah gets to take 3 books to bed, but only gets to keep them if she is quiet. Well, she soon started banging on the wall, and very sadly, lost a book. She threw a fit. No result... she still didn't have the book. So she announced that she was going to pray that I would give the book back, and got down on her knees. I could see the wheels in her head saying, "We pray to Heavenly Father when we can't find something, and we find it, so if I pray to get the book back, I'll get it." Unfortunately for her, that's not the way it works.

I knelt beside her, wrapped my arms around her, and we talked about what "consequences" mean. As a good parent, Heavenly Father won't change the consequences of what we choose; it was our choice. Bekah loves to choose. She loves the music to "My Turn on Earth", so I sang part of one song and explained what it meant about choices. Then we talked about what things we could pray about: being brave, feeling better when we do something bad, to be safe... That got her very excited to pray, and we were again on our knees for a long time. She prayed that she would be brave on the blue slide at Cherry Hill, that other 3 year olds would be safe on the climbing wall at the rec center, that she would feel brave watching the scary part of Sleeping Beauty... Anyway, it was heart-warming. She is actually upstairs praying again as I write.