I can not believe that I have not posted on the blog since March. Actually, maybe it is believable. Being a work from home mom to two kids is incredibly different than being a work from home mom to one kid. And since Abigail has been on the go, which happened when she started crawling in January, it has been so much harder to keep up with daily tasks and my online teaching job. The blog has been put on the back burner for sure.
This weekend, we were scheduled to go to Greenville to visit Andy's family, and I asked Andy if he would take the kids and go alone so that I could have time to clean, organize closets, and catch up on laundry. It has been an amazing weekend. I have a little more to do before they come home today, but it is crazy how much I can accomplish when I'm alone in my house!
Back to school time is here, so I also started planning for the year. While we don't do traditional school yet, Daniel will go back to preschool, and I will go back to teaching online, so I spent time this weekend setting up some of my online courses and reaching out to my co-teachers. I also had a long conversation with my friend Emily about how she structures her schedule with her kids for the school year, and she gave me great ideas about planning meals. I looked at our calendar and planned our weekends away and our weekends at home and jotted down some ideas about what to do with Andy's time off.
This morning, I woke up and thought about how, in all the planning I did yesterday, I had left out one of our biggest core values. Months ago, I watched a video about the importance of blocking out fun family nights for the purpose of teaching our children the gospel. Bible verse memorization and knowledge of scripture are two of the highest priorities Andy and I have for our children. Right behind actually having a relationship with the Lord, Andy and I want them to know the Bible and one day let that knowledge of God's word direct how they live their lives. We also highly value family time and quality time having fun together, so the idea of family nights centered on doing a fun game or craft or activity while teaching about the Bible really appealed to me.
We started strong and did two or three activities. The video suggested doing a family night every two weeks to make it an attainable goal, so we made it maybe a month. And then I just stopped planning activities. I got busy and put it aside. We do read the Bible at night with Daniel, and we haphazardly try to memorize scriptures that our church puts out. We watch a Bible movie or Veggie Tales a few times a month, but we certainly were not focused on our efforts to teach the Bible in a fun, interactive way that involved the whole family.
Thinking of all the planning and organizing I had done this weekend, made me feel guilty about my lack of intentionality when it comes to teaching my children what is most important to their dad and me. So this morning, I pulled up Pintrest and started creating a plan for family night activities for the fall semester. Pintrest makes it so easy. All I really had to do was create a document where I wrote down the activities in a way that was easy for me to read and keep up with. I found a website that had a different activity for each story in The Jesus Storybook Bible by Sally Lloyd-Jones, and I adapted the activities (when necessary) to fit our family. I will say that The Jesus Storybook Bible is an awesome Bible, but the stories are a little too long and text heavy for my 3 year old, so I plan to read most of the stories out of my new favorite children's Bible, The Bible App Storybook Bible (can also be reinforced by the YouVersion for kids Bible App). If the The Bible App Storybook Bible had a story that The Jesus Storybook Bible didn't, and I wanted to include it, I just looked up an activity that went with that story (or made one up). I also decided to watch the movie from The Beginner Bible on Moses because the activities suggested for those stories overwhelmed me! And Daniel LOVES movie night with popcorn.
I hope we use the activities and that they do guide our time together as a family this fall. I wanted to write today to encourage anyone reading to think about your plan for your family this school year. Life gets busy, and we work so hard to keep up with all the little things in our homes - cleaning, laundry, meal plans, homework, and sports schedules - that I think we often neglect keeping up with the big things we value. It's super hard to plan a fun family night the week you want to do it AND get out to the store to buy the supplies you will need the day before you start. But making a plan in advance - just like we do with our dinner plan for the week or our grocery list or our sports schedule - doing that increases our chances that we will follow through. And I sure hope we follow through.
I also wanted to write to share some of the resources with you. I was going to share my document on the blog, but I think sharing it online might violate some copyright laws since I use a lot of other people's ideas. Their ideas ARE cited in my document, though, so if you want me to email you a copy, let me know! Otherwise, click here for the main resource I used. (This is also a really good place to go to get super Bible movies - and if the link doesn't work, look up "Beginner Bible Movies" on Youtube. We loved the movies so much, we asked the grandparents for the DVD versions for Christmas.)
The activity page is a good source if you have kids in the 3-7 age range, I think. I had to adapt some of the ideas to fit what I thought Daniel could handle (and also what I - a very non-crafty mom who prefers easy activities - could handle). I will also give the tip that I actually plan to put Abigail to bed for a lot of these activities, so she won't be participating in them. I honestly don't think she would be learning all that much at barely a year old, anyway, and I think having her absent will increase Daniel's ability to focus and learn. I also think it will make him feel really special to have time with just mom and dad. I wanted to emphasize that Andy will participate in all our activities. I think a lot of these blogs are from homeschool moms who do the activities as part of their school day, so that probably explains the lack of father involvement in their examples. But, for us, we will be using the activities as family nights and not part of a school day. To that end, it is really important that Daniel see his dad taking charge and leading these nights. Andy's leadership in this way, for us, is part of teaching Daniel what a spiritual leader in a family looks like. And hopefully, one day when my kids understand my "behind the scenes work" they will also see what being a "helper" looks like!
Super excited about what this school year holds! If I get REALLY organized, maybe there will be a post in a few months letting you know how our family nights are going 🙂!
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