January 25, 2012

Inspired

A couple of posts ago I talked about the dating/family activity binders that I made up. Well, since I made them up, I have been working on adding to mine. I've contacted more national parks to have info sent to me, I've been to Sedona to gather information on things Josh and I or our family can do together, and I recently purchased hiking trail maps for Flagstaff and Sedona.


I'm feeling inspired. Every Saturday my family basically stays at home and we do our Saturday Cleanup. And that's almost all we do. I love having the house cleaned up every week, but there is nothing for our family to look forward to. And I had to ask myself, is this quality time or just quantity.

While I do believe that we need to teach our children how to clean, I also believe that we need to teach them to be outgoing and adventurous. It's our job as parents to make their childhood special and filled with memories. Right now, my children don't have a lot of special or a lot of memories. I've been to hesitant to do 'family activities' without Josh. But now we don't do anything. Ever.

This is why I think I was inspired to make those binders. There are TONS of things to do in and around our area. And last night I decided that we are going to go do something out of that binder Every Possible Weekend. I'm going to write activities down and put them into a jar. On each Sunday, one member of the family will pull a paper out of the jar and tell us what we're going to do that Saturday. Our family will have something to look forward to each week.

What about Saturday Cleanup? We're going to try to bust it out on Friday's if our activity will take a large part of the day (I'll be changing my daily cleaning to accommodate.) And if it's just a few hours in town, that will be motivation on Saturday's to quickly do cleanup so we can go have fun.

I'm pretty excited. I'm excited to start making more memories for our children. I know in the future they won't remember most of what we'll do, but they'll remember that we did things. And Josh ...? We are doing to write his name on the activities he would be really saddened to miss. If that activity is drawn for a Saturday that Josh is working, we will put it back in the jar and draw again. That, and we'll take lots of pictures!

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