Family Home Evening in November

We try to have Family Home Evening every Monday night...sometimes it ends up happening on Tue. or Wed. or so on but we are usually pretty good at doing it weekly. I wonder sometimes if the reason we are so diligent on doing it weekly is really because of the kids though. I'm not sure they would ever let us forget! I try to remember to enjoy these FHE now while they are young and still like to do them! Our FHE are very simple. They last maybe 5-10 minutes long. Sometimes we will do an activity of some sort that will make it longer but usually it is just short enough to keep their attention and long enough for Mommy and Daddy to be able to handle it before someone starts crying. I feel so blessed to have boys that love each other so much. Especially to see Levi and Hryum together. I think Levi babies Hyrum more than his parents do sometimes! But even though they love each other, it never fails that when we are trying to have "family" moments all of us are tried with our patience eventually. I think we have figured out that short FHE work the best for us! This picture was actually taken last week. We are blessed to own the Living Scriptures series. They are DVD/videos that are 30 minutes long. They are animated and tell a scripture story. They come with coloring and activity booklets. We only let them watch "Jesus" movies on Sundays so lately for FHE we have just been going over an account, since they have already seen the movie, in the scriptures and then coloring/activity pages for our lessons and activities. We feel very blessed that we have these "tools" to teach our children with. When we lived in Colorado we started getting these DVD's in the mail monthly but when David lost his job we had to stop doing this. No one knew this but we were blessed that Christmas to get as a present, from Steve and Barbara, a few Living Scriptures DVD's. Then we moved out here and some friends from church, the Rickners, had also gotten into the Living Scriptures on video by mail but their children had grown up and left the home so guess who got blessed once again?! We eventually ended up owning all! But I have to say that my favorite is the coloring and activity books....it makes for great FHE lessons. Thank you for blessing me and my family! I'm using the word "blessed" a lot but I really feel that we are because I'm not sure that we should own even half of what we do. And I have no doubt that the kids have a better understanding of the scriptures because of them.

Since Thanksgiving is this week we decided to go over some of the things that the kids have been learning in school about this holiday. I asked Brigham why we celebrated Thanksgiving and his reply was, "To celebrate God's birthday!" Very cute! After he and Levi told us things that they knew about the holiday I asked them to tell me 3 things that they are thankful for. Levi said, "You, Dad, Brigham....but I need another one for baby." Then Brigham said that he only needed 1 thing. He was thankful for his family. Brigham and Levi tried to tell me this at the same time so I knew that they were not trying to outdo the other. They truly meant it. I LOVE MY FAMILY! Moments like these make it all so very worth it.