2012 Theme: Families Are Forever

One of the things that I cherish most about my faith is families being together forever. What a thoughtful, loving, and smart Father in Heaven we have, to place us in family units. We support each other, we love each other, and we help each other be better.

To help our family continue building strength, we prayerfully decided that our 2012 family theme would be "Families Are Forever."

As we go throughout the year, a special focus will be placed on this. FHE's will be about family, discipline will refer back to the family. Everything will be family!

Our first real FHE was to introduce the theme. Essentially, we came up with ways that we can strengthen our family and wrote them on cups. Then, we stacked the cups to make a "castle" (as the kids called it), like so:
The ways we can build our family (which we all came up with together) are:
* Go to the temple.
* Ask daddy for a blessing.
* Follow the prophet.
* Help mommy make dinner.
* Clean the house together.
* Help mommy with the dishes.
* We each fold our own clothes.
* Do service together.
* Give lots of hugs & kisses.
* Help mommy do the laundry.
* Always have Family Home Evening.
* Go to church every week.
* Tell the truth.
* Read our scriptures.
* Do family history.

As we stacked them, we talked about each one. Then we talked about what would happen to our family if some of the cups were missing. So, to demonstrate, we pulled a cup out of the bottom. Guess what happened?
The kids SQUEALED in delight! So we quickly wrapped up, saying that our family would be its strongest if we remembered to do those things together.

And then the kids continued to build and destroy castles for the next 30 minutes. The cups were demolished, but we had a great time!

Here's to 2012 - all about our family.