gratitude snippets: day 1

day 1:

tonight i am grateful for family home evening.

{photo taken by Harlow Photography}

now before i go into any more detail i must confess: we have a history of being HORRIBLE at holding regular family nights. M and i would go on little kicks of "trying to be better"- but i honestly think that up until a couple of months ago, the longest we ever went was 2 consecutive weeks of FHE. (tail between the legs). we have no good excuse, seeing that both of us were brought up by awesomely goodly parents who taught us better than that and did hold regular family nights. but for some reason it just didn't click with us and we consistently fell short. i admit that it might have had something to do with me not wanting yet another thing to have to plan and be in charge of and nag about (Debbie downer, i know). and that's the truth of it all in a shelled nut. we used to be crappy FHE-ers.

well, a couple of months ago, i had an epiphany that i was not excluded from our prophet's counsel to have family nights. I decided that i was being a lazy-butthead, and our family could really benefit from gospel-centered lessons. we needed some good family time. and we needed to teach more about Jesus and the stories from the scriptures, rather than just assuming the girls would be fine and learn it eventually.

so we started having family night. we started with coming up with Family Rules. and one of them was to have family night every week. we haven't missed since. it makes me feel so happy to type that.

Alice loves it. she squeals and dances and marches around the whole time. Ellie loves it! she loves the scriptures. she loves singing the songs. she loves our special treats that we only get on Monday nights.


she even mimics FHE on other nights and pretends to give us lessons and do activities.

i feel a little ashamed by my lack of faith and obedience in following the little things -- specifically in having family night -- because for us it has turned into such a big thing- such an incredible blessing. sure, the lessons are usually simple, and we get easily side-tracked...but i promise, our family has already grown closer and created new memories...and its only been a couple of months! and i guess i realize that in not having FHE, we were just withholding blessings from ourselves. which is silly, no?


so tonight, i'm grateful for FHE. and hope we keep it a family tradition forever and ever.

xoxo