Family Home Evening

"In 1915 President Joseph F. Smith and his counselors in the First Presidency began a Churchwide effort to strengthen the family. They called on parents in the Church to gather their children once each week for a "Home Evening." Families were to take time to pray and sing together, read the scriptures, teach the gospel to one another, and participate in other activities that would build family unity."

Family home evening is one of the many things Garry and I would want to raise our children with. Even though it was really awkward at first to do it with just the two of us, we strive to hold FHE regularly. Now that our son is here, we decided we have to make sure FHE is something our kids would look forward to every week. And so from our last FHE we decided we would now prepare for every FHE. We've always been just praying, picking some random topics, plan for the week, and that's it. Some changes for preparation includes:

1. Plan the monthly FHE schedule every first Monday
2. Include activities (even though it'll be awkward once again because there's just the two of us and an 8 month old baby)
3. First FHE of the month would be "Daddy's Choice Lesson". Garry will choose the topic that he think would be appropriate for the family's current situation. The rest of the month's topic will be distributed between Mommy and Daddy, and kids someday :)
4. We will have an opening hymn in French and closing hymn in English (haha, not too important, but hopefully this would help me improve my French, and Keahi's too :)

I am really hoping all these preparations would have great results for my family. But like what Garry always tells me, "the essence of holding an FHE is spending precious time with your family." As long as the things we do in our FHE helps us strengthen our love for each other and to our Heavenly Father, that's what matters.

Here's a sneak peak of our November's FHE plan :)

The church's website got a lot of resources for FHE too that I really want to take advantage of:

http://www.lds.org/hf/display/0,16783,4215-1,00.html

and

http://www.lds.org/cm/topicsearchalpha/1,18284,4789-1-1,00.html (list of the hymns that allows me to have them in both french and english, just what I needed) :)