9 AM Church

Getting up at 7am on Sundays to go to church is not my favorite time...but coming home from church at noon is pretty great! Sunday has become a very relaxing family day for us. This year we've decided to spend some time each Sunday doing a family activity. We rotate through who gets to pick the activity. This week I was in charge and so we played a few rousing hands of UNO. Now James and the big kids are playing our latest addiction: Cities and Knights of Catan.

Today at church the speaker spoke from Elder Oaks Nov. 2007 conference talk: Good, Better, and Best. I love this talk. I have read it over and over. I've taught it a FHE. Together as a family we are trying to make the best choices in how to spend our leisure time. Elder Oaks talks about the importance of eating dinner together. In my ideal world, we would eat dinner together every night as a family. Of course the dinner would be nutricious, organic, and well-balancd, and everyone would eat it all without complaints. Really...if we are talking fantasy life, the kitchen would also be self-cleaning. However, this is far from our reality. We do manage to eat together 4-5 nights a week, and about 80% of those dinners go smoothly (ie. no one stomps away from the table in a mad fit). The other nights are spent eating in shifts between running to activities. Because of James' late morning starts, we are able to spend mornings together before school. Again, the ideal is all of us up together eating breakfast and preparing for the day. Mostly though, the kids eat breakfast while James' prepares lunches, and I stagger down after Will goes back to sleep post-feeding. It's not the best, but it works and we do have time for family scripture study and prayers. I'm not looking forward to our early morning seminary adjustment next year.