Baptism Journals

A few weeks after I moved to my new house I was called to be a counselor in the Primary in my ward. For those of you who have no idea what I just said, I was asked to serve with the children in my church. In some wards (churches) this may not be a big deal, but in my ward it is huge. Usually there is only a president and two counselors and a secretary. In my ward the president was allowed to have a third counselor, which was well needed. To give you an idea, back in January the statistics for my ward were 42% of my ward was under the age of 18 years. At that time there were 44 children under the age of 18 months! By December, our nursery will have 50 children. Our Primary is quite big. We have around 100-120 children that attend Primary each Sunday, most of them in junior primary. We have the most wonderful primary I have ever seen. I feel like we are a "Provo" away from Utah. We are kind of like a little bit older BYU ward.

So to the point of my title. This year we are having 12 children baptized. This is such an exciting time and a wonderful experience. As a Presidency, we wanted to do something for each of the children (and still stay within our budget) to help this experience be memorable for them. I made this baptism journal for the CTR 8 class this year. It took a lot of time and I had help. Thanks to Becky and Jana for catching my mistakes and offering ideas and to Malcolm for doing the binding cost effectively (free). At the end of each journal is about 50 blank, lined pages that we pass around at the baptism for people to write a message. The remainder of the pages are for the child to use as a journal.

Anyway, it was a big project, with left margins and right margins, double sided pages, and way too much thinking, but I was pleased with the results. I ended up making 30 of them. Taneal won't be baptized until June, but she really likes the journal and the children that have so far received the journal have enjoyed them, too.