Family Night...

Monday Nights we have family night. We make sure we don't make any other plans, we come together and pray, sing songs, take turns teaching something spiritual, or something based on a gospel principle, play games, do family activities, and they almost always include some kind of treat! It has been such a blessing in our family.

When my "Strong Silent Mysterious Man" and I were apart and living in different cities, we both had been taught about holding these Family Nights in our church, and decided we would try and have some simulation of them for our son.

So we would do them long distance, over the internet, over the speaker phone... whatever it took we did something! I remember one night, we had 2J's come up with a short activity, and he pulled out a simple board game that was based on eternal life... he would roll the dice and say "okay Dad, you got a 6... you just moved ahead of Mom"... and we played the entire game over the phone, they were not really ideal, but began to instill into him, the power of being together, and sharing love one to another. While we thought these great effort was to help him, it really helped us the most and I believe was the biggest stepping stone to reuniting our family.

So we still hold Family Night and our testimonies have increased of their value, so nobody at our house wants to ever miss one. We work pretty hard at making them a priority, because they mean so much to us.

For our activity last night, we decided to go for a nature walk out by the Lake. We piled in the car... with the dogs!

Rudy loves to go for a ride, but he has to be looking out the window and his little legs are so short, he always needs a little help.

Morgan always has to have her head out the window... she loves to have the wind in her face!

We had a little mishap yesterday, while we were driving and she is hanging out the window, her big ol' paw was pushing on the automatic window button, and she rolled her head up in the window. I tried to stop it and get it back down to free her, but she was so heavy I couldn't get her foot off the button... I'm yelling... she is stuck... when I pull her foot down it tugs on her head which is caught in the top of the window... it was frightening...

Finally, my Man realized what was happening, and rolled the window down from his side and freed her up. That is why they install those window locks... they are not only for when the kids are playing with the buttons in the back seat, they are to protect your animals from self distruction as well. Who knew... we will be using that button all the time now!!

We do arrive safely at the park, all the fall colors are still so pretty.

Rudy loves walks too, as long as we don't go too far.

Two J's played a few games of "search and rescue" with Morgan, where he goes out in the woods and we hold her and keep her distracted, then send her out to find him.
We think she has a bad nose, she couldn't sniff anything out to save her own life. But she makes up for it with all her other senses... her ears are super fine tuned.
He ended up jumping out and scaring her more then she ended up finding him.

So then we walked down to the lake.

It was really cold, but we couldn't keep her out of the water... Morgan loves to swim!!

The water was pretty green, so everyone who was in the lake, had to bathe when they got home. (Rudy gets the last laugh here... he wasn't getting in that cold water)

And my favorite! "I just got a bath RUN"... I love the happy dance they do, shaking off the water, running around in absolute happiness!

Really fun Family Night Activity!