Tomorrow is our Great Easter Vigil - that at least 2 hours, and maybe even longer. Our parish encourages children to attend this service and even realizes this may be a long time for them... but our daughter is only five, and 'spirited', and I can not fathom how we'll last!

Both my daughters officially measure as "spirited" (according to Anne's psychologist, who pointed out that their parents probably do, too.) I never considered Anne spirited, because compared to Rachel she's calm rationality. Rachel's wiggles get right under my skin at times.

That being said, we routinely have a two-hour service, and the girls do just fine. Of course, we attend a charismatic congregation that is very wiggle-tolerant. In fact, the adult portion are as likely to be raising holy hands and moving holy feet as the children, though *they* tend to limit their wiggles to the musical interludes. Even so most of the Anglican members of the combined congregation do send their children out to childcare after the children's lesson. My experience is that the more you include, engage, and teach the children about what is going on in the liturgy, the more able they will be to participate in it instead of disrupting it. That means, of course, that you have to spend several years being willing to whisper explainations when you would rather be in prayer, and putting up with snubs and sneers from those of your fellow congregants who consider your whispering to your children to be inappropriate. The upside is that there *is* a pay-off: the children who are routinely sent out of the service don't have the same ability to participate and find even a one-hour Lutheran service too much for them to sit through; the children who routineky stay have coping skills.

I swear by "sermon summaries" for mid-sermon wiggles. I keep a pack of pencil-crayons and a small enclosed pencil-sharpener in our pew (hidden from the altar guild behind a strategic Hymnal LOL!) and bring small half-lined/half-plain school notebooks for each child (for my four, and also for other of the stay-in-church children!). I prep the children carefully before the service with the lectionary readings, so that they recognize them when they're read and catch the tie-ins in the sermon. They can write in the notebook or draw pictures, illustrating the points in the sermon. This too, works on a learning curve: my part-time son and daughter, used to structured colouring books, started by colouring the entire page one colour; moved to colouring each line in the lined portion, and gradually began drawing and colouring pictures largely unrelated to the sermon. Anne does detailed folk-art Christian symbols often intertwined with the text, and Rachel copies whatever Anne draws. But they've had the advantage of seeing a lot of my doodles of traditional knot-work and folk-art patterns. For PTS and PTD, I'll sometimes take my own sermon-summary book so I can model doodling Christian symbols ("art meditation"). I'll also sometimes draw pictures in their books for them to color. I don't get them very often any more, but they are slowly learning appropriating both Lutheran and Anglican iconography for themselves. Lately, of course, I've been preparing pew-work sheets with cross-words, quizzes and wordfinds. These which appeal more to my left-brained children than the sermon-summaries do. The right-brained children just draw pictures in the margins. I try to be careful not to hand out the books or work-sheets until the sermon, and to gather them up at the end of the sermon, so that the children don't play with them during hymns or prayers when they should be participating.

The Vigil is a different kittle of fish, though. I didn't take Anne until she was 4, and didn't take Rachel until last year (6). Even though our church isn't crowded for this service, it runs very late. You need to know that your child will be able to fall asleep when enough is enough, and the crowding would tend to prevent that (when Rachel crashed last year, I just tucked her up in my coat and laid her on the pew beside me.) The candles are another issue -- you know each child is going to want her own, and you know you're going to be in horror of her setting someone on fire. But, that's just part of being a mother, isn't it<g>? All in all, the service is too beautiful, too moving, to deprive your child of incorporating it into her earliest memories if you can possibly manage it. But it's going to be a judgement call regarding what you can manage, and when.

In our house it's fairly easy: Dean's evangelical, I'm the catholic. So if someone has to stay home, it ain't gonna be me!

I wish I could forward this statement -- "they find it frustrating not to be able to participate as much as we do because they can't read" -- to every worship committee and liturgy planner. We adults can get so arrogantly smug about our literacy that we don't even notice others who are handicapped without it: not just preschool children, but also elderly grandparents whose eyesight is going, refugees or immigrants whose full literacy is in a different language, and adults with secret dyslexia (a bigger problem than most pastors know). The solution is so easy: introduce new hymns slowly, repeat some hymns from week to week, and give non-literate worshippers a chance to learn the hymns by memory.

I regularly ask the worship teams to let me know what the hymns ahead of time so that I can review them with the children. Sing it a few times in the car between activities, or around the house, or as a lullaby at bedtime, and by Sunday the children will recognize it happily and know at least the chorus or first verse. It would be trivial for the church secretary to email the hymn list to mothers who wanted to prepare their children; or for the deacon to read out next week's hymn-list with the rest of the announcements. But no matter how many times I ask, it's not important enough to anyone else. So far the only reliable way I've found to get the music ahead of time, is to be married to one of the worship-team. Does your husband happen to play an instrument?