As a home schooling Mom, in partnership with my husband, and with the grace of God, I am always sure to do my best in loving, forming, guiding, inspiring, teaching, disciplining, and cheering-on our children. I find myself so busy in my duty, that I had not really considered "playing" with the children as reasonable, nor efficient. When I was not doing any of the afore-mentioned items, I was working with them to tend the house or working on miscellaneous household tasks or outside projects.
As Nicholeen explains "Family activities are for the sole purpose of relationship building. Having these fun times together shows my children that even though I have to correct their negative behaviors, I don't want the corrections to influence our relationship"
As inspired by this book, we have written a family mission statement, and within that mission statement we have agreed to.
"...humbly love, support, and be united with one another within an atmosphere of trust, faith, and learning in our home."A family fun night helps us to live out our mission. As Nicoleen explains "One part of building a family who respects and loves each other enough to be friends is spending lots of time together. The person who spends the most time with your child will have the most influence on your child's decisions in the future."
As a family, we agreed to plan one "Family Fun Night" per week, on Sunday, which was already a family day in our home. Each Sunday at our family meeting, one of us gets to choose an activity from a pre-defined list for the next week’s Family Fun Night. This allows the entire family to anticipate the next week's activity.
This has been such a joy for all of us, and has allowed me to put work aside, and just enjoy my family. It has been an unbelievable and wonderful opportunity to build memories and simply laugh, play, and love my family.
Click here for a list of of activities we have agreed on and from which we are able to choose our Family Fun Night activity.
We also have a Family Night and the kids LOVE it (and so do I!) To add to your list, we also have wii contests--the kids laugh so hard when its my turn--as well as card games (rummy, war, ets), and even charades. The whole purpose behind our Family Night is to laugh, at it works almost every time!!
ReplyDeleteThanks for this beautiful post, Kristen!
Oh, I love those ideas Mary! Thank you. We recently started playing Kings in the Corner, as a family, an oldie but goodie from my Grandma Speikers. Will add that to the list too! :)
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to seeing you, and your sister next Saturday! :)