Our Family History

In Our Family This Week... One would think that after an entire month of rest and relaxation that I'd be ready to hit the ground running and get back to business!!  However, I started the week out not feeling the best and still trying to get unpacked from our Christmas trip to Nebraska.  Super cold weather was with us all week and LOTS OF SNOW! 

August was ordained to the office a Priest on Wednesday before Mutual (such a wonderful occasion!) and he was able to bless the Sacrament today for the first time.  I was so proud of him and especially of his worthiness to perform such ordinances :)
On Friday, John and I were able to have a free date!  The BSU "Blue Elvises" were invited to the VIP grand opening party of Dave and Busters (a Chuck E Cheese for grown-ups as John describes it). So Jill Belau, Karla Coburn and myself visited and chatted while our husbands got lots of pictures taken of themselves with people at the party.
Saturday was spent getting all of the lesson plans done for the next two weeks and cleaning the house in preparations for the Sabbath.  Oh, this week has also been spent watching the entire 2 seasons of Once Upon a Time with John each evening.  We have really enjoyed this series!!

In Our Homeschool This Week... After having a whole month off - I realized how much I missed my time teaching the kids!  I decided we needed to incorporate some more aerobic movement into our day and so we started off with about 10-15 minutes of cardio each morning before we began Enrichment. We did lots of dancing to fun songs (which was of course too silly for the older boys so they ran up and down the stairs!) We focused on Faith each morning during Enrichment and we're memorizing the 4th Article of Faith. Lots of puzzles and books and lessons were learned this week...

Ben working on his typing lessons

August and Seth taking a break from Chemistry to play with the Dino/Monster building pieces with Lexi

 and then the biggest hit of the week was the introduction of...

 or just "ABC DUCK" as the little ones refer to it!  I brought this duck puppet home from Nebraska that Grandma used to introduce the alphabet letters to her Kindergarten class.  I didn't think it'd be that big of a deal to Aubrie, Lexi and Nathan BUT... boy was I wrong!  They have fallen in L.O.V.E. with Alpha Duck and beg for him to come out and teach more about letters (he's also teaching them their sight words).  They each have to hug her several times and tell how much they love her, etc. They've drawn pictures for her and written letters (and even saved part of their treat to give to her the next day!) and Lexi has found one of her fancy bows to put on her head.  It's just so funny that they really want to impress Alpha Duck!!

Spiritually Speaking... Today was our Ward Conference and the whole theme was about Putting on the WHOLE Armor of God. I was very inspired by all of the talks and lessons for all 3 hours!  Some of the questions and thoughts that were presented to us were:
(1) What are we doing NOW to ensure that we have the whole armor of God on?
(2) What provides protection for us?
(3) We must ACT and SEEK out to put on the armor of God - it's not enough anymore to just avoid "bad" things... we must AGGRESSIVELY seek out the good!
(4) We need to take things to the "next step" and have the strength to do so
(5) Be anxiously engaged in a good cause!