Family Power!

One of my goals for 2012 is to have more meaningful, deliberate Family Home Evenings on Monday nights.  Jason and I trade weeks for being in charge of teaching a very quick and simple lesson to the kids then having lots of fun with activities and food.  We assigned a gospel topic or theme to every month to help guide our lessons.  I am going to try to blog about some of our FHE successes and I'll probably write about the failures, too.

This month the theme has been "Eternal Families".  We believe that our family lived together in heaven before we came to Earth, that we can love each other and work together as a team while we are on the Earth, and that we can live together when we go back to heaven some day. 

Our first lesson was all about being a family team.  We talked about all of the things that our family has to look forward to in 2012.  We are going to learn more about Jesus Christ, the temple, the scriptures, and prayer.  Jason is graduating, Leah is starting kindergarten and taking ballet lessons, Adam will start Joy School and start using the potty, Emma will learn to walk and maybe even talk, and I will keep us all fed, clean, and sane... hopefully!  We're going on a Disney vacation and moving to a new house.  It's a big year!  We made a family power poster with our handprints on it and pictures of all our goals, then we made homemade ice cream to show how hard work can really pay off!

Our next lesson was all about sticking together as a family.  We showed clips of the LDS musical Saturday's Warrior where the family is in heaven, waiting to come down to Earth.  (And boy, does that movie seem way cheesier than it ever did when I was a kid!) After they sang, "Pullin' together we can work it out" we got into the kitchen and made homemade pretzels.  We had to pull the dough to get the pretzels ready, and the kids had a great time making different shapes with the dough.  I think we ended up with a pretzel 5, 2, snake, and heart in addition to the traditional shape.

Our third lesson was supposed to be this week- all about speaking kindly to each other, giving compliments and using manners.  I wanted to make homemade Valentines, play Sweet Potato (instead of Hot Potato, you toss the ball and give a compliment) and share a story about a boy who used garbage words.  But the night never happened- Monday night Jason took the kids out to buy Valentines gifts for me, Tuesday, we had our romantic family dinner, and by Wednesday, we realized that we needed to use our family night to help Leah write her talk for Primary this Sunday.  Even though we didn't follow the monthly theme, we still had fun playing Choose the Right Memory and acting out Nephi breaking his bow in the wilderness.

Overall, the more deliberate Family Home Evenings have been fun so far.  The kids are much more engaged when we are doing a variety of activities and, of course, when tasty food is involved.  And the themes give Jason and I a chance to really focus on the things that we want to be teaching in our home.

We'll see how we do throughout the year!