Pumpkins & Family Home Morning

James was so excited to get pumpkins this year - just like last year! He has learned a little about pumpkins recently (what with all the pumpkins on people's porches), he knows that they are orange (which is the color we are working on - he's got red down!) and he is pretty good at saying the word "pumpkin" (although it is very similar to the words "pine cone" and "penguin").

Yesterday for our *Family Home Morning activity we bought our pumpkins, and man he was so excited! Here he is, waiting in great anticipation...



This boy loves to go out on our front steps and look at the "beeg" (big) pumpkins. He can tell you which one is his (the smallest one), which one is Mama's (the medium one), and which one is Daddy's (the big one).

What fun it is to have kids around the holidays!



*Because of our family's schedule, we can't have Family Night on Monday nights. So, we decided to have "Family Home Morning" on Monday mornings. It has been so much fun and a real blessing in our lives.

Back before James was born, Jonathan and I were both in school and would get home late on Monday night, eat dinner, do homework and struggle to fit Family Night in because we were so tired and trying to do so many other things. We were in a Sunday School class one Sunday where we were discussing Family Home Evening, and somebody made a comment that totally changed our Family Nights. They said that one thing that had worked for them was to just designate the entire evening as family night, instead of just trying to fit it in and get it done and check it off the list.

We thought this sounded interesting, so we tried it. It turned Family Night from something we had to get done to something we really looked forward to! We decided that from the time we got home from school in the evenings (or from dinner time until we went to bed) it was family night. We didn't do any homework during that time, we just spent time together, until we went to bed. This helped to make it more of a priority, and, frankly, more of a party. It was almost like a second date night to look forward to.

Although it is hard sometimes, we try to do the same thing now. All morning long is family time, and we really look forward to it!

Lessons Learned

This afternoon we had family home evening before Jonathan left for work. We have been doing FHE lessons from the cute new nursery manual that came out a little while ago. James LOVES looking at the pictures of Jesus and is so cute when we talk about Jesus.

Today our lesson was called "Jesus Christ Showed Us How to Love Others." James was so dang cute as I was teaching him the little lesson - he kept on nodding his head and enthusiastically saying "yeah!" about everything I said. We were talking about how we can show love to others by being nice to everyone. We then gave him some examples of being nice to people - one of which was being nice to Jukie (his Grandma, who he calls "Giki" lately) even when he is playing with Grandpa (this kid is a little obsessed with his Grandpa and sometimes he is the ONLY person he wants to play with - this one day he wasn't very nice to her when she tried to sit down next to him and play). So we finished up our lesson and that was that.

*****

This evening as James and I were visiting with my family, I mentioned our family home evening lesson, and said that we had learned to be nice to everyone. Without missing a beat, James got all excited and said "Giki!"

So glad that he learned something! :)

Pumpkins

Tonight for family home evening we went and bought some pumpkins for Halloween! We're going to carve them another day, it was getting a little late. James had so much fun riding in the shopping cart while we picked out our pumpkins. He held onto one of the pumpkins the whole time we were at the store! It was so darn cute. When we got home, he sat on the floor and played with the pumpkins for quite awhile. He liked to pound on the two big ones with his hands and kind of roll the little one around. You've gotta see these pictures!

a little game of t-ball

For family night up in Oregon we played t-ball with little Benjamin's t-ball set he got at our white elephant gift exchange. Here are a few pictures...