Family Home Evening Fun

Tonight was one of those Family Home Evenings that were priceless. Family Home Evening is a special evening that members of the LDS church set aside to be with their families and learn about how to become closer to the Lord, be more like the Savior and strengthen family bonds. Sam picked an activity out of the Friend magazine. The title was "Cease to be Angry". First of all, teaching a 4 yr old about the meaning of the word "cease" is pretty funny. She kept saying "Cease! Cease!" It really did crack us up.

The article was a multiple choice quiz. We put our girls names in the quiz and put them in the situations outlined and then asked them what choice they could make to cease to be angry but to be kind instead. Again, our 4 yr old, Maia was funny. For example, we asked Maia what she would do if she were playing at preschool and she accidently ran into one of the boys there.

Before Sam could give her her choices she said," I would say...'Ryan, you should watch where you are going!' in a nice voice, of course." LOL. She obviously missed the memo that it was HER fault in the first point and that bumping into someone warrants a kind "Excuse me, I didn't mean to bump you" in order to smooth the situation over.

So anyway, it was lots of fun, the girls got a kick out of it and we went over our family rules and tried to pick out the family rule that went with the topic for the night. We got all kinds of answers. "Be Happy?" "Keep your Promises?" "Obey?" We finally figured out that it went with "Use Nice Words" and out came the highlight of all Family Home Evenings--the treat. Cupcakes!

The girls were quite excited once we established that, yes, they could have two cupcakes. After ceasing to be angry with Michaela for running her finger thru the frosting of her 2nd cupcake when she wasn't looking, Maia, especially, started getting loud. Maia has a tendency to speak rather loudly already, it was 1.5 hr past bedtime and I was starting to get mighty tuckered out. The girls started pretending to be something we have yet to figure out and were jumping around the kitchen, high from the sugar I am sure.

I looked at Sam and said," Do your ears ever start to ring from all their noise?" and he said," Yeah, it's like being a fish in the middle of the ocean who has been stunned by the noise that dolphins shoot out to disorient them." This made the both of us laugh really hard. Olivia then busted out laughing as if she had already heard the joke and said, "What is so funny?" This made us laugh even harder.

These kinds of moments are always difficult to convey to others who weren't present but it was one of those moments I just had to write it down so we can remember it. It will likely be useful to recollect on one of our less than sterling moments when the little girls are overtired and crying, the big girls are irritable, past feeling and/or not paying attention, Mom wants to nothing more than for the children to be in bed and Dad has been stunned by the all the dolphin noise.

And so, I write this to let the record show that there is always enough good to balance the not so good. It definitely makes it all worth it and when it comes to small children it is rather entertaining too.