FHE and Pumpkins

Tonight Kai was the opening prayer for family home evening. Kai, who can be a little on the wild and crazy side, usually has the sweetest most sincere prayers. I always look forward to the tenderness and love he expresses as he prays.

I folded my arms with a smile on my face, anxious to hear what was on his little heart. (and possibly looking forward to the high praise he usually offers me.)

"Please let this family home evening go fast so we can get to carving pumpkins!"

Ummmmm, HURTFUL!

Well, despite his plea for speed we had a great lesson based on Ether 12:27. Which promises us that if we are faithful and take our weaknesses to the Lord he will turn those weaknesses into strengths. We had two sided charts, on one side was a self portrait of us, and on the other side was the Savior. On our side we wrote 5-6 weaknesses we have that we need to work on. (When math facts was one of the things listed I know I hadn't explained myself well enough!) On the other side of the paper we listed Christlike attributes.

The goal is for us as a family to choose one Christlike attribute a month and work on it together. We are going to replace dinner time Best & Worst with Gems & Rocks. Our Gems being the times during the day we succeeded in displaying that attribute, and Rocks being when we didn't. My hope is that we will all better recognize the spirit in our lives as we pray daily for the help and guidance.

(After General Conference I looked through my notes and feel so strongly that I need to be helping the children feel the spirit daily so they can learn to recognize it for themselves.)

Brotherly Kindness is the attribute we all agreed would be an excellent place to start.

Onto the part everyone has been waiting for........ the pumpkins! This year we have 27 for our own family the children have all been chomping at the bit to carve those bad babies!

Spoiler alert! Since some children of mine took FOREVER deciding what they wanted to carve, 3 of the 4 pumpkins only got cleaned out. Boy Howdy were they disappointed when I told them that 8:30pm was too late to start to carve and the fun would have to wait yet another night. Good thing I was able to remind them of "brotherly kindness" before we started out on a bad foot!

The pumpkin that did get finished was none other than LUKIE'S! He was quick to pick the superman logo and the two of us got straight to work! We are quite the duo!