January 24, 2016

We've implemented Family Fun Night.  I've felt like we're so busy all the time and then when we're not, we all just wast our time instead of doing fun things together.  We're good at having fun together on trips, but not as good at home.  So Friday night is Family fun night.  We play games or watch movies or anything else.  The kids love it, especially the littles.  The bigs don't say they love it, but they have fun.

This week we've added a scripture component to family fun night.  I've been working with the bigs for several months to help them do regular personal scripture study.  They struggle.  Also I always mean to read scriptures with the littles but I struggle with that too.  So we made calendars for all the kids for them to mark off each day they read. Then they can bring their calendar to family fun night and if they have 6 or 7 days marked off, they can get a candy.  We just started last week.  They were all so excited! Seth and Ruby have been reminding us to read scriptures to them every night.

Last weekend we had a 4 day weekend because of MLK day and a teacher in-service.  The teacher day was only for Somersets, so we used that day to go to Adventure Dome.  It was empty. We had so much fun.  There were no lines.  The sad part of the day was when Rachel went on a roller coaster and lost her glasses.  We ordered new ones this week.  In the meantime she is wearing my extra pair that are weaker than hers.

We had a big talk with Danny and Rachel because phones were being used too much.  We mixed love and logic with How to win friends and influence people (which I just read and loved!) to have the discussion.  We talked about how phones are a privilege and they need to be doing awesome at all their other stuff to have them.  Danny hated the discussion, Rachel reacted great.  However the discussion has been doing great things for both of them.  Rachel is trying to use her time better and Danny is working harder at school.