Day 25: Family Home Evening

I've mentioned before that we do a family night every Monday after dinner and we call it Family Home Evening. We set that time aside as a special, "family only" time. We don't watch tv, worry about dishes or anything else during that time. We spend it together as a family. We talk about a variety of topics like kindness, faith, sharing, prayer, gratitude, etc. Tonight, we talked about gratitude. I made a tree cutout and lots of little leaves.

As part of our evening, we took turns writing things we are thankful for on the leaves and put them on our tree.

This is hanging up in our kitchen to remind us of the things we're grateful for.

Next we put the ornaments up on the Christmas tree. When we put the tree up a few nights ago, we only got around to putting up lights.

The boys careful unwrapped all my snowmen ornaments.

Mckay helped them place the ornaments.

I remember during Christmases when I was a kid, my mom always put up this homemade Santa ornament that my brother made. It was far from perfect looking and we always wondered why Mom wanted this ornament on the tree among the other beautiful ones. Now I know why she did it. 

Dallin made this Santa ornament last year in preschool. I love it. I think I'll be putting it on our tree for many years.

I'm thankful for Family Home Evening. We get so busy and wrapped up in all the things we have to do. I'm glad that we can take some time each week to be together as a family, to spend some time teaching our children and enjoy being with them.

Day 4: Temples

For Family Home Evening tonight, we talked about temples. We're going to the temple in Chicago this Saturday, so it seemed like a timely lesson. (For more information about temples, click here.) We made temples out of playdoh for our activity.

Each person chose a picture of a different temple and then constructed a copy out of playdoh.

(I love the boys' faces in this picture!!!)

 Can you guess the locations of these temples we made?

For my lesson, I laid out an individual picture of each member of our family. Then I had the boys close their eyes and I removed one picture to see if they could figure out who was missing. We did that several times. Then I told them that because our family is sealed in the temple, we get to be together forever and no one will ever have to be missing or gone. That knowledge is a great comfort to me; to know that no matter what happens on this earth, I will get to see my family again. Today, I am grateful for temples.