I'm really bad at posting here lately. I know that so many of us don't really blog much these days, but I do like to update from time to time as it's been a decent little family journal over the years.
Life here in Texas has been really good so far. The winter weather is a lot warmer than the winters in Nebraska (though I am finding myself missing snow...weird but true). I miss our neighbors. I'm sure that our neighbors here are awesome and wonderful but we have really only waved and said brief hellos so far. I need to change that. One of our neighbors did stop by on New Years Eve and gave us a bag of goodies and introduced herself. I loved that she did that and now when I see her I can holler, "Hi Irene!" instead of just "Hi!"
The kids love school. This school is really wonderful and their teachers are amazing. Cadence actually has homework now which, while annoying, has been very good for her. She has a much better appreciation of her own time as well as other peoples time. Rory is reading. It's choppy and she gets impatient when she does read, but it's coming along. She adores her teacher. I do too. She has been teaching Kinder for 25 years I think she said. Yep the same grade for all those years. She loves her job and it totally shows. The school has also been taking Rory's dietary needs seriously. I had one meeting with the woman in charge of food preparation, went through the school lunches with her and what Rory could or could not have and by the next day every single person working the lunch line not only recognized her, but gently reminded her when something had soy in it so she wouldn't chose it for lunch. Rory has started to grow out of the milk intolerance and can have cheese and yogurt now with out trouble, but soy still causes issues. I was truly impressed with how quickly the school did it's best to meet her needs even though they aren't life threatening.
Church has been wonderful. It's probably the first time we have been in a ward where we didn't get callings within two weeks of moving in, which has been nice. I still don't know very many people, but it has been awesome to attend the adult classes the last couple of months.
I miss Nebraska. I miss all the people we left behind (thank you internet for keeping us connected). I miss the small town feel that we had there. I hate starting over. We were so blessed in Bellevue. We had ready friends; next door and at church and even school. We found wonderful people to teach our children in their extracurricular activities and they became our friends too. I miss that living here, in this huge city with all it's huge city drawbacks, but I can't over look all the good things about living a big city either. We do have friends here (thank heavens for them or things would be pretty lonely), but I'm sure even they agree starting over stinks.
I'm glad that 2014 is over. Odd to say, but true. It was a really exhausting year. I'm thankful for all the new opportunity that is open to us now, but getting here was long and not something I'm keen on doing again. Brady was gone for so much of the year and that was harder on me than I thought it would be. I am forever amazed by my kids and their ready adaptability to every situation our life seems to throw at us. They are truly awesome kids and I'm so thankful that the Lord sent them to us. I am thankful that all the training is over though so we can all be together again.
I'm looking forward to 2015. It's going to be a good year I think.
Friday, January 9, 2015
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Daily Family Scripture Study
Okay so I said I would blog about this once I got a good plan. I'm not sure it's a good plan, but it's working so here I am to tell you all about it.
To start, daily family scripture study has not been a strong point for us. Sad but true. I have made several attempts over the last couple of years to change that, but because our kids are so young it's stupid hard to keep everyone on track. We got to the point where it was somewhat like General Conference: get the kids all in one room, keep them somewhat occupied with church based/family based activity and hope that some of the information was sinking in to their little heads. Unlike Conference it had to happen daily and it was stressful and exhausting and ended up with bad feelings all around.
I have been praying for a way to do this with the kids that will at least keep their interest for more than 10 minutes. I had a half formed idea that instead of just reading straight from the scriptures and trying to explain after reading that I would pick individuals or stories from the scriptures to talk about and then just read the key scriptures involved. That seemed crazy daunting to me to organize and do every single day and I did reach out for story ideas on Facebook (which so many of you supplied and I'm so glad you did, thank you!).
Then I remembered something very important. This work had already been done for me and was available on LDS.org. I know some of you remember the Book of Mormon Stories book from childhood. Had all the pictures with explanations and then several scriptures to read about the stories. I got online and sure enough, there was the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants all simplified into stories with recommended scriptures for me. You can click each of the book links above to view the manuals online.
I pulled a generic 2015 calendar from the internet and gave each day a lesson from the manuals starting with the Old Testament. I left Monday's out because we do Family Home Evening that night and I know that for us doubling up would be impossible (especially while Brady is currently working evenings so I am on my own for quite a bit of this). Once I used up all the lessons from all four books I was near mid-October. I'm thinking I'll have to come up with something else a that point, or start over from the beginning with the lessons and maybe have Cadence and Rory do some of the scripture finding work. I had the thought that you don't have to go through each book in order like we are doing either. You could mix it up a bit and jump around.
To plan the actual lessons/reading I usually pull up the lesson on my computer and go through it all and decide which scriptures to use. Sometimes the scriptures chosen are repeated more than once in the lesson and I know that would bug my kids to be reading the same scripture over and over. So I pick and choose so we aren't being repetitive and sometimes add some other ones that I liked better. I usually put everything in order in a document on my computer and print it out, including the scriptures in larger print so I can have Rory try and read some of the shorter ones.
I use my print out to keep us on track, and the last couple of nights I used my iPad while we did the reading so that my two little ones could see the pictures involved from the lesson. Cadence and Rory are always completely engrossed in our reading. Owen and Beckah seem to zone in and out, but they are 2 and 3 and they are doing so much better then they every have before. It's also going pretty fast (20 minutes max) so no one is getting bored or frustrated.
All in all I'm happy with what I've come up with and super thankful that most of the work has been done for me!
To start, daily family scripture study has not been a strong point for us. Sad but true. I have made several attempts over the last couple of years to change that, but because our kids are so young it's stupid hard to keep everyone on track. We got to the point where it was somewhat like General Conference: get the kids all in one room, keep them somewhat occupied with church based/family based activity and hope that some of the information was sinking in to their little heads. Unlike Conference it had to happen daily and it was stressful and exhausting and ended up with bad feelings all around.
I have been praying for a way to do this with the kids that will at least keep their interest for more than 10 minutes. I had a half formed idea that instead of just reading straight from the scriptures and trying to explain after reading that I would pick individuals or stories from the scriptures to talk about and then just read the key scriptures involved. That seemed crazy daunting to me to organize and do every single day and I did reach out for story ideas on Facebook (which so many of you supplied and I'm so glad you did, thank you!).
Then I remembered something very important. This work had already been done for me and was available on LDS.org. I know some of you remember the Book of Mormon Stories book from childhood. Had all the pictures with explanations and then several scriptures to read about the stories. I got online and sure enough, there was the Old Testament, New Testament, Book of Mormon, and Doctrine and Covenants all simplified into stories with recommended scriptures for me. You can click each of the book links above to view the manuals online.
I pulled a generic 2015 calendar from the internet and gave each day a lesson from the manuals starting with the Old Testament. I left Monday's out because we do Family Home Evening that night and I know that for us doubling up would be impossible (especially while Brady is currently working evenings so I am on my own for quite a bit of this). Once I used up all the lessons from all four books I was near mid-October. I'm thinking I'll have to come up with something else a that point, or start over from the beginning with the lessons and maybe have Cadence and Rory do some of the scripture finding work. I had the thought that you don't have to go through each book in order like we are doing either. You could mix it up a bit and jump around.
To plan the actual lessons/reading I usually pull up the lesson on my computer and go through it all and decide which scriptures to use. Sometimes the scriptures chosen are repeated more than once in the lesson and I know that would bug my kids to be reading the same scripture over and over. So I pick and choose so we aren't being repetitive and sometimes add some other ones that I liked better. I usually put everything in order in a document on my computer and print it out, including the scriptures in larger print so I can have Rory try and read some of the shorter ones.
I use my print out to keep us on track, and the last couple of nights I used my iPad while we did the reading so that my two little ones could see the pictures involved from the lesson. Cadence and Rory are always completely engrossed in our reading. Owen and Beckah seem to zone in and out, but they are 2 and 3 and they are doing so much better then they every have before. It's also going pretty fast (20 minutes max) so no one is getting bored or frustrated.
All in all I'm happy with what I've come up with and super thankful that most of the work has been done for me!