Forget-Me-Nots

I'm really greatful for family night and that my church encourages me to have it.  Growing up in the mormon church you are no stranger to acronyms like CTR, YW/YM, and FHE.  The latter is what I'm talking about: Family Home Evening.  This is one night a week (usually monday night but you can pick a different night if that doesn't work for you) when the family gets together and spends time together-typically it's opened and closed with a prayer maybe even a song of some type and there's usually a spiritual lesson involved, an activity of some sort, and maybe even a treat at the end of it.

It can last from 30 minutes to over an hour, just depends.  Clearly the content depends largely on the family dynamics/ages of the kids.  I attended FHE from the womb and ever since growing up.  Often to help involve the kids in the evening there are different jobs/roles handed out each time: someone to conduct the evening and welcome everyone to family night, someone to pray, someone to teach the lesson, someone to come up with an activity, etc.etc.I don't know if everyone did this or if it was just my family, but we always used it to coordinate all of our different schedules.  Each kid would get a turn to announce anything they had happening that week from practices/lessons/mutual etc and mom would write it down in her planner so she wouldn't forget etc.

Even though Code and I don't have kids yet we still have family night every monday.  Sometimes it's short and sweet and sometimes it's a little longer.  We tend to switch off on coming up with spiritual thoughts/lessons for each other.  Tonight we watched the talk given in the Relief Society Broadcast (our church's organization for women 18 and older) by President Uchtdorf titled "Forget Me Nots"

I loved this talk so much and remember it meaning so much to me when I first heard it.  All of it is soo so true and we often forget these basic things.  the five things that we are cautioned to never forget are:

To be patient with ourselves

That there are good sacrifices and there are foolish sacrifices

To be happy NOW

the WHY of the gospel fo Jesus Christ

God remembers and loves you

If you have 15 minutes I highly recommend watching it again-it's amazing at bringing the right perspectives back into your life and I always feel the spirit so powerfully: [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMJTrAL-XLY]

 

Afterwards we planted some forget-me-not seeds in a little planter that I got in Relief Society on Sunday.  i'm excited to see how they do and hope they grow-never have really tried my hand at growing anything.  I'm thinking of making a cute holder for them to sit on my windowsill or something with either a framed quote from this talk near them or maybe the individual things above painted on the pots?  I dunno...but I'll blog about it once they grow and I figure it out :)

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anywho, I'm just greatful for the opportunity we have to get together every week bare our testimonies and uplift and strengthen one another and hope it'll be a source of strength for our kids too.