Family Home Evening

For people who may not be aware of the Mormon teaching of Family Home Evening, I thought I’d give a little recap of the concept and the reality of what those words mean. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, we are encouraged to hold Family Home Evening in our own homes with all members of our family every Monday evening. The purpose of this is to strengthen home and family, to bring us closer together, and to help families learn how to interact socially with each other.  There’s a little more to it than that, but you can look it up yourself here.

I genuinely believe in Family Home Evening. I think it’s absolutely inspired for families to set aside one night every week to escape all the busyness and time takers that corrode family unity.

Unfortunately, I am not perfect. I am not organized. And sometimes Family Home Evening is composed of breaking up quarrels, raising my voice (to be heard of course, not because I’m actually grumpy or anything), and threatening to kill the offspring I am working  so hard to develop unity with.

Families rock.

No really.

In spite of all the mayhem, I still think Family Home Evening is brilliant. This is why I haven’t given up on the idea yet. With the daughter living in St. George, Family Home Evening has become much more complex. Thank heavens for technology. We call her and put her on speaker phone and resume business as usual. How kids can giggle, tease, and irritate each other when they are in different cities over the telephone is really staggering, but my children have always been a bit staggering.

Why I’m writing all this is because we decided to do the whole “Give a day of service and get a day of Disneyland” thing. It sounded like another one of those brilliant family unity concepts. I am all for brilliant family unity concepts. So we chose a service project and tonight went over the game plan for the execution of the service project.

Teasing, giggling, and irritating.

But at the same time, it was fun. We’re going to collect books for the deployed soldiers who left children at home so that the USO can record the parent reading from the book, and then send the book to the child(children) along with the DVD of mommy or daddy reading a bedtime story. Seriously . . . this is my kind of service project. Books!

And sending books to kids lonely for parent interaction? I am all over that. Tonight we gave my kids each tasks they had to fulfill. They are all completely and irrevocably on board with this project because they know they are getting Disneyland at the end of it all. Disneyland is the ultimate reward for any good deed.

Yet, even with the carrot of Disneyland dangling before them, it still took ten minutes to calm them down long enough for opening prayer and another ten minutes to get them to stop fantasizing of a world in which their parents could be gone for six months or longer. I’m trying to paint this thing as the sad tragedy it really is, and my kids are finding nothing but benefit in the proposition (ie: we wouldn’t have chores all the time, no one would tell us it was time to go to bed, we could play x-box until our eyes rolled out of our heads . . . ).

I sometimes wonder if the success in Family Home Evening is getting through the night without having actually strangled any of the children. If so, I can count tonight as a raging, riotous success.