A Year of Service

Our children truly do love each other. I know this from how I have seen them lovingly act towards each other. I know that kids will fight, but it seems like my children are constantly fighting. (Am I the only one??) I have pondered about what we can do about this in our family. With Tom being a Bishop, he can be gone several nights a week. However, we have one special night set aside for Family Night. Which I might add that I have been more grateful for in the past 8 months then ever before. We have decided that 2009 is going to be our year of service. I am going to try to have one service oriented thing to do each week and that our family home evening lessons will be focused around. Last Monday we started. This week is our Thank You Week. We talked about people in our lives that help us. We sat at the table and made thank you cards and colored pictures for those people who help us. We had some really cute cards given to us by our children. We also made some for different people who help us outside of our home. This coming Monday we are going to make Thank You Rice Crispies and deliver them, along with the cards.
To try to help bind us as a family and teach our children that we need to take care of each other, we started Service Pixies. I found these ideas in a book entitled "52 Weeks of Family Service". Our children love this idea. They do a 'Secret' service for someone and when they are done, they leave a Pixie Stick for them. They have had so much fun with this. However, they haven't figured out the secret part yet. They have to run to the person that they did the service for and tell them that they have a Service Pixie waiting for them. Since we have started, the fighting had been better. My hope is that they can develop a greater love for each other and help them know that it feels good to make other people happy.

"You are good. But it is not enough just to be good. You must be good for something. You must contribute to the world. The world must be a better place for your presence. And the good that is in you must spread to others." -President Gordon B. Hinckley.