Family Home Evening at the Park

We went down to another park for Family Home Evening on September 13th. Nathan prepared the lesson. It was a really good one on time management. Ben was his "assistant" and handed Nick and Tatiana each 10 wooden blocks. Then Nathan had a stop watch and told each kid when they could start stacking their blocks. He first let Tatiana go first and she started at 10 seconds and then told Nick he could start when there were only three seconds left. Obviously Nick was unable to finish the task. Then they switched and Nick was able to start first. He told them that when we wait until last minute to do something, like homework or chores, or practicing piano, etc. that we often find we do not have enough time. And if we get the things we have to do done first, then we often find that we have free time at the end for things we want to do. We had an excellent example from early that day. Nick had come home from school, had his after school snack, and then instead of getting straight to his homework he spent some time looking through Ben's book orders that were sitting on the counter. (To be fair, he gets that from me, I love book orders and children's books. But there is a time and place for everything.) I told him he could look at those later and he said things like "I know, in a minute" (Sound familiar anyone?) Over 20 minutes were spent browsing through these book orders. Then he was working on his homework up until dinner. I asked him if he had a choice would he rather look through book orders or play legos. He said play legos. There were actually several things he listed that he would rather do if given the choice. We pointed out to both of them that when you stall, or goof off, or "procrastinate" (they learned a new word), that they are trading the free time at the end that they would have for something fun for time at the beginning doing something that really isn't at the top of their list. We also pointed out that if you get your responsibilities done right away then you are not stressed because you end up with not enough time to complete them. I hope I am making sense. It was an awesome lesson and the kids had some great "ah-ha" moments.

I told Andrew, "Show me your cuteness." And this is what he did, yeah, that's cute!

After the lesson we had fun on the playground for a while...

We had our refreshment on the way home in the van. Tatiana had made fresh Snickerdoodle cookies after school. Yum!