Celebrating the family this month

I am going to be participating in a month long celebration of The Family Proclamation. This will celebrate the 15 year aniversary of the prolamation.

We really love being a family and love to celebrate this fact. I also don't think that I use this document enough and know that my children don't appreciate it enough. I am going to use the proclamation everyday for our devotional lessons and spending as much time together as a family as we can.

Here is a link where you can get all of the detail about what this is.

My Home Library

I recently catalogued our home library. This took me weeks of taking books off of shelves, piling them on the couch and typing them into the computer. Only one person could sit on the couch for three weeks and if you did you had to worry about one or two mountains of books falling on you (which would have messed up the (dis)organization I had set up). This is something I have wanted to do for a really long time. A few years ago I read an article called "Our Refined Heavenly Home" by Elder Douglas L. Callister of the Seventy, it was reprinted in the June 2009 Ensign. There were many things in this article that caused me to pause, but because we are such a book loving family, one part especially stuck out



"There was a fine library in the home of President Gordon B. Hinckley's youth (1910-2008). It was not an ostentatious home, but the library contained almost 1000 volumes of the rich literature of the world, and President Hinckley spent his early years immersed in these books"



We have lots of books, at least I thought we had lots of books. When all of the books were listed we have over 500 books, some of which are picture books. I am not sure if there were many picture books in the Hinckley home, but even if there were, my children have only half as many books available to them. I seriously need to work on that.



This year we also got rid of books (this at first seemed a sin to me), but we set a standard in our family of what is an acceptable book and what is not. We defined those that are acceptable as Classics or Living Books. These are books that are worth reading more than once. The ones we got rid of were what we (and Charlotte Mason) call Twaddle. These are books that don't have moral value, didn't inspire us, or were just plain dumb (or dumbed down). I am so glad that we did this, now I know that whenever one of my children picks a book from a shelf she has an opportunity to be inspired and to learn. More importantly they can never be accused of wasting their time just reading.



Along with increasing the number of books we have also made it our goal to replace as many of our favorite paperbacks with hardcover books. I am also having a hard time with this because even though my copy of Jane Eyre is held together with a rubber band and I am so worried about losing pages every time I pull it out, it has all of my notes in it. I guess getting a new copy will just give me the opportunity to re-learn from the book. I will be able to start fresh with, hopefully, a new set of epiphanies. Just writing that makes me want to leave this post and order a new copy from Amazon. As Matthew would say, just put down the keyboard, walk away, and no one will get hurt.

10 things I am thankful for today

I just wanted to write about some things that I am thankful for. We were counting our blessings today and this is my top ten list (not in any particular order):

1. My awesome husband. He just keeps going and going no matter what and he tries really hard to make my life easier and me happy.
2. Six braids for three girls. My three girls let me brush and braid their hair today, they look so cute when they don't have orphan hair.
3. Eight teeth for my almost eight month old. She is finally back to her smiling happy self, no more constant, nerve grating crying.
4. My homeschooling/parenting mentors. I have learned almost all of what I know about raising my girls from some very smart people. Now I just need to more consistently apply it.
5. The Good News of the Gospel. This really should be number one. My testimony and my membership in the Lord's true church are my most prized possessions. This is what I most want my children to learn from me.
6. Air conditioning. It is really hot outside and I don't like to be sweaty. Yesterday Matthew came home from work with heat stroke, (headache, weakness, vomiting, etc) this proves to me that I am supposed to stay inside where it is cool.
7. Books, Books, Books. I love to read, and am so thankful to my parents, my Aunt Peggy, and Mrs Loop for teaching me this and cultivating a love of learning in me.
8. My daughter loves to read. One of my biggest fears is that my children will not love books like I do, but Miss M does. I have to force her to stop our reading lessons so the others won't feel neglected.
9. Grocery stores. Because I don't have to work so hard to get my food I have more time to read.
10. My bed. I have an awesome bed and it feels so good to climb into it every night. I have been so tired lately and love the soft warm place to recover. 10a is that I am not tired because I am pregnant, I am tired because I have been eating too much junk food (cookies are too good to pass by, luckily they are all gone), too much sugar really is bad for your brain.

Does Anyone Else Think This is a Bad Idea?

We needed to trim some branches off of our power lines today. They were too tall for our ladder and Matthew had the brilliant idea to stand on top of our Suburban, in the wind, and use a saw on the end of a ten foot pole to cut them down. It is a good thing that we are not unionized in this house or OSHA would be shutting us down right now (on second thought maybe that wouldn't be so bad).