Preparing for Baptism

How did she go from this tiny little ball of preemie love...

...to this all grown up, smart, helpful, loving, amazing, beautiful 7 year old?!

(Payson opted for a family birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese instead of presents from mom and dad this year.)

Payson had her 7th birthday last week, which we think is a pretty special birthday. I guess 7 doesn't seem like a big deal in some families, but for us it's HUGE! Seven means that we have just one year to be sure we've done our jobs right and prepared her for baptism!! SCARY!!

Starting tonight we will be focusing our family home evenings on Payson. We'll be using the Preach My Gospel guide to prepare Payson for next year. We've gone through and broken the 5 lessons up with the small headings/sections in each and have about 35 lessons to teach between now and this time next year. (Which is perfect for us, since that leaves some extra weeks for when we have other activities planned, or we just plain old forget. It happens sometimes.)

I'm so excited to go through these lessons as a family. I'm excited to prepare them and learn from them and to watch our family learn together. I can't believe it will be leading up to my baby girl making her sacred baptism covenants! I get all emotional just thinking about it and it's still a year away!!