FHE #21

We have been lousy at keeping up with family home evening since Chloe was born. Basically, I didn’t plan it, and I didn’t call everyone together, and so therefore there was no family home evening. (I hate feeling like if I don’t do something it NEVER gets done, because everything is planned and done by ME). SO when I was sitting in relief society today, and the lesson was on a talk from General Conference last April titled, ‘Sacred Homes, Sacred Temples’ a thought came to my mind, that I need to make my home like a temple, and I needed to TEACH my kids about the differences between our home, and our temple and we needed to talk about HOW we can make our home more like the temple. Thus the idea for this family home evening was born.

We started on our porch talking temples, and our house, and then we took a tour of the house. We went from room to room pointing our what we saw (there was LOTS), and then we came to the living room to watch a little bit of “Mountain of the Lord” I showed them the clip where they are showing the inside of the Salt Lake temple before it was dedicated. As we were looking at the inside of the temple, I would ask:

  • Is there laundry on the floor, or on the chairs?
  • Do you see toys all over the place?
  • Is there trash on the floor?
  • Do you jump off the furniture in the temple?
  • It this room messy?

I’m sure I asked other questions too but you get the idea. I ended by telling the kids how nice it feels to be in the temple, everything is calm and peaceful, and I want to feel that way when I’m at home too.

General Relief Society Meeting

Thursday morning I got a call from my relief society president asking me if I would like to go to the conference center in Salt Lake city, for the general Relief Society meeting. I said that I would love to go, but that it would depend on whether I can find someone to watch my five kids. So I tried getting a couple of young women from our ward, but they were busy. And anyone else that I could think of that I would ask to watch my kids, should be going to the meeting too. So I asked Kyle if he would just ASK his manager if they could work something out that Kyle could be home Saturday afternoon so I could go. Well I got really lucky, because Kyle’s manager told him he could just take Saturday off. So Kyle was home to watch our kids, and I got to go to the meeting with some other women in our ward.

It was just wonderful to sit in the conference center, undistracted by kids or anything else. And it was just beautiful to sing with and hear all the women that filled the conference center, singing “There is Sunshine in My Soul Today” (Hymn 227).

I’ll just share a couple of things that seemed to be directed at me and caught my attention during the meeting:

  • Eliminate the non-essential things in our lives

So often we get caught up in all the things we have to do, that we either don’t have time, or forget to do the things that are most important. And personally I know that there is too much clutter in my house, and it seems to suck up a lot of my time and my energy and my happiness. It’s just got to go!

  • Visiting teaching needs to me more of a way of life than just a task.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking ‘well I already visited my sisters this month, so I’ve DONE my visiting teaching’ when really we should be looking out for our sisters, and being their friend all the time. And I just wish my visiting teachers would just VISIT me, let alone anything else. Sad huh?

After the meeting, everyone in the conference center stood to watch the first presidency leave the room. A whole bunch of sisters were waving at the prophet, and he waved back. So more ladies waved, and he waved back. So President Monsen waved at the choir, and they waved back. And so he waved to different sections of the conference center, and in turn each section waved back. It was so cute, and just a wonderful experience to be there tonight.

PLUMS

I LOVE the little purple italian plums. And I’m so excited that we were able to go pick some from Uncle Denis’ orchard tonight. The plums were growing in cluster of what looked like giant grapes:

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The kids mostly ran off to play on the slides and swings, but Ethan helped us pick a bit:

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Since we went out on a Wednesday after Kyle got done with work, we ran out of sunlight pretty fast, but I had a flashlight in the car and we kept going for a bit. 🙂 And this is the fruit of tonight’s labors:

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Yellow Watermelon and Red Corn

Just by reading the title of this post, I’ll bet some of you think that I’ve got it backwards. Corn is yellow and watermelon is red. But for dinner tonight we did indeed have yellow watermelon and red corn. 🙂

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We harvested Ethan’s second watermelon tonight, and I asked Ethan, Tyra and Jeremy what color they thought the inside would be. We actually planted seeds for red, orange and yellow fleshed watermelons. Ethan said red. Tyra and Jeremy both said orange and Kyle said that he was going to pick yellow just because none of the kids did. Well I sliced into it and it was in fact yellow- 16 pounds of yummy yellow goodness. 😛CIMG2417

And here is a picture of our beautiful corn:

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This is the first time I’ve ever gotten corn from my own plant. I have planted corn before, back when I was in high school. I started it in little pots and they got to be about 2 feet high and died (my parents didn’t want me digging anything up to plant my corn in the ground). So I am SO excited that I planted corn and actually got to EAT IT. The ears were rather small, but that was just perfect for the kids. I was able to give them each their own little cob.

Dinner around here was very exciting tonight, and I can’t wait till next spring so I can plant more really cool stuff. 😀