When I had Abraham I realized one more person in our family means one more assignment for Family Home Evening. Our assignments have been:
- Conduct (this person chooses who says prayers)
- Music
- Scripture
- Missionary Moment (we try to do a little mission prep activity or talk about missionary experience from the week)
- Lesson
- Activity
- Treat
So the bases were pretty much covered and I had to come up with something new. And, then it hit me, in the wee hours of the morning while nursing my little angel, service. And since I'm the mom and pretty much can do whatever I want I decided that was it. Our family was going to add service to our weekly schedule.
Our first week, just happened to be warm enough to be an outside activity and so we headed to our kayaking creek to do a little clean up. It was such a fun experience! Everyone got a grocery bag and went to work. I'm pretty sure that all the big people filled their bag multiple times and not one of the kids complained about having to "work." It was awesome.
We found some treasures that weren't trash too...
When we were done with our pick up the kids played tag, then we all played Red Rover.
I tried to get some good pics of a couple of the kids... this was Bryant's favorite.
He's growing up so much!
It was delightful to have Jonas so happy to work! Love his little holey smile.
The other two were too busy having fun to stop for pictures.
But I was there! Making a rare appearance on the blog. :)
When we were done, we had some ice cream gift cards burning a hole in our pocket from Halloween so we went and got treats.
I'm really excited for our new FHE assignment! Each week whoever is in charge of service gets to choose what we do as a family sometime that week. I made a list of around 60 things to choose from, many can be repeated throughout the year or they can come up with their own idea. We have a journal to keep track of it all. I hope it helps all of us to recognize how blessed we are, to focus on helping others rather than wanting stuff all the time.
Disclaimer: I hesitated putting this up on the blog, afraid some might think I'm tooting our own horn, but on the contrary, we are struggling with selfishness in our clan and are trying to combat it. The reason for sharing on the blog is that the blog is our history (and this is part of it) and perhaps someone might want to do something like this with their family at some point.
Request: If you have any ideas for our "Missionary Moment" for FHE please either leave a comment or send me an email. I'm trying to compile a list we can refer to each week to make the decision easier.
