Teaching Stewardship of Bodies

Part 6 of the Stewardship series...

D&C 88:123-134 says "... cease to be idle, cease to be unclean, cease to sleep longer than is needful, retire to they bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated.”

Of course the best way to teach this is through example. And the early to bed, early to rise thing is really hard for moms! That doesn't really get us out of it; however I believe the Lord knows what we can do. And when babies are making it difficult for mom to keep to a regular sleep schedule, the kids can still be responsible for getting themselves up in the morning as the case may be.

We need to teach proper hygiene. If you teach your children BEFORE they need things like deodorant, it'll be much less embarrassing for them. My 11 year old thinks it's pretty funny when I tell him he'll have to start wearing deodorant so people will still want to be around him in a year or two.

Exercise is another tough one for me. Luckily my husband is super good at that and takes the kids with him. I do too, when I'm on a good exercise streak...

Have you ever stopped to consider how important food must be in our lives given that we must spend soooo much time on it? Without food, we wouldn't have to spend time: planning for it, buying it, putting it away, preparing it, cleaning up after it, eating it, etc. A mother spends A LOT of time in this one area every day. It must be REALLY important, dontcha think? So I think it's worth my time to learn these things well, and to prepare the highest-nutrition food I can. And then teach the children to eat it and prepare it themselves.

In fact, bodies themselves are central to the father's plan. Elder Bednar's talk, "Things as They Really Are" is an incredible article about this. It gave me a lot of new insights about bodies. You should read it.