Home Evenings With Linda Paulson Adams' Family--Part II

This week, Linda Paulson Adams continues with more help from her family's wealth of Family Home Evening ideas. In addition to her success as an author, Linda is also a talented musician, and more about this can be found by clicking on this link.

Linda's second book

More from Linda. "We always begin and end Family Night with prayer. That's not optional. Inviting the Holy Ghost to be with us, during the prayer, is pretty important for success, too. Now, songs are wonderful. I love music. I love the hymns and Primary songs with all my heart. They don't always make it into the meeting, although we try - it depends on the patience level detected by our finely-tuned extra-sensory parental perception."

She continues. "I want to share a few ideas we've used that help out in those times when we messed up and planned nothing, the kids are whiny and arguing, and/or Mom and Dad are just plain worn through, but we still want to HOLD THE MEETING."

Here are a few of Linda's ideas:

* Get everyone together in the same room. (This is kind of important.) Have your prayer, and announce a Family Project Night: for the next hour, everyone gets out one of those UFO's (Un-Finished Objects) we all have lying around, and works on it. Smaller children can color a picture or play quietly with a toy. Legos or other building toys work well. Older children are likely to groan and complain at first, but when we've done this, amazingly, everyone is able to find something to do. What we like about this one is that while everyone is in the same room, the kids tend to get along, and conversation remains decent for some strange reason. It's... nice.

* Get everyone together in front of the TV (hang on, I'm going somewhere with this), have your prayer, and pop in a Church or Seminary video or Conference talk. Pay no heed to any whining, groaning, moaning, threatening (as in: "If I have to watch this one more time, I'll poke my eye out with a stick!" My answer: "Help yourself, just don't leak any eye juice on the carpet, please"), or Classic Teenage Grunts which may occur.

FYI: If you're not already aware, you can subscribe to get a set of General Conference DVD's delivered to your home for about $14/year, when you're ordering your Church magazines. Pretty cool, huh? You can also order lots of Church videos for extremely low prices from the Church distribution center at: www.ldscatalog.org If you're really up a creek, Extreme Home Makeover or Lassie on DVD might do in a pinch, but try to keep the torture factor to a minimum for all involved when subjecting your family to what you think (or they think) is wholesome entertainment.

* Get everyone together (Are you noticing a theme here? Good!), have your prayer, and pull out a board game - preferably one the whole family likes, if such a thing exists. It's OK to have a "kiddie" game for younger kids and an older one for the teenagers - but keep everyone in the same room. Our family likes "Apples to Apples." Even though the little ones need some help reading - there's really no way they can mess that one up. I mean, really. You can try Duck Duck Goose or Mother May I or Simon Says, too. Or croquet, if the weather's nice and your children aren't the type to misuse the wickets for ulterior purposes of sibling vengeance.

* Get everyone together in the car, have your prayer, and head off to Dairy Queen (budget allowing). Pizza Palace is OK too. Or go for a drive-thru taste test: Who REALLY has the best French Fries? Order one large fry and hand out a few to everyone, then go to the next place and do it again. Until you're either tired, out of time or money, or you're all sick.

* Get everyone together in front of the piano, have your prayer, and have a family sing-along. Hymns and Primary songs are ideal for FHE, but hey, if you're having fun jamming to "Yesterday" or "Come Sail Away," why not? You're together. *Reality Check: We haven't actually tried this one out yet - at least 1/3 of my kids would revolt. (Man... that statistic sounds so familiar... wonder why?) Go with what's right for your family.

"And a quick lesson idea for when you haven't planned so great," Linda says, "but you're up for a little more duty than the above exercises: Pull out the Friend, New Era, or Ensign, Church News, Preach My Gospel, or the scriptures, and open to a random page. Discuss whatever topic, story, article, or verse you find there. Those work too.

"We've found if we keep serious discussions to ten to fifteen minutes and bookend it with a little fun or nonsense, the kids hold their attention a little better - okay, a LOT better - than when one or the other parent (or both of us) try to wax eloquent and complicate up the simplicity of the Gospel by inserting lots and lots and lots of words - IE, lectures. Keep it fun.

"The point is to stick together, and stick to it. You're the parents. You're in charge. On some level, kids get this concept. (Even if they don't like it all that much.) Once they know you mean business, and they are not getting out of this obligatory "family time," they might even start to enjoy it."

Home Evenings With Linda Paulson Adams' Family--Part I

Linda Paulson Adams is the author of two LDS novels set in the Last Days, which lead up to the building of the New Jerusalem. Read the first five chapters of Prodigal Journey and Refining Fire on her website at www.alyssastory.com, where you may also order autographed copies of her books. She is hard at work on the third and final book in the trilogy, and plans to complete it this year. Linda also works as a freelance editor, public speaker, singer, and songwriter.

According to Linda, Family Home Evenings in her home range from the well-planned (rare), coordinated and organized to the more frequent "What are we doing tonight? Eeek, it's 7:30 already!" variety. She says, “The thing we feel is most critical is to HOLD THE MEETING: ready or not, here it comes!”

She continues, “Don't just not have it because you forgot to plan anything. Don't skip it because you're tired, the kids are whiny, nobody seems to be listening, someone's missing, or the game's on. HOLD THE MEETING. Period.”

The Adams family has six children. The oldest is preparing for college soon and the youngest is in kindergarten. As Linda says, “We have a variety of ages to keep interested, which is a challenge. And as lifetime LDS parents, we're well-schooled in the ideal FHE routine, which means opening and closing songs which are perfectly matched up to well-thought out lessons, with excellently prepared and interesting visual aids, during which all the children are perfectly reverent and participating in a lovely Gospel discussion . . .

Meaning (ahem), no one is running amok with underwear on their head, calling out inappropriate answers relating to some anatomical body part or function, poking their sibling with some pointy object, or asking those unanswerable ‘But where did Heavenly Father come from?’ sorts of questions, none of which has anything whatsoever to do with the lesson at hand.”

“Yeah,” she continues, “Let's get back to reality. Life is messy. And - news flash - mortal life wasn't meant to be perfect. Perfect comes later. A lot later. As in, in heaven. (In fact, if you do a careful study of the scriptures, even Christ didn't label himself perfect until after He was resurrected.) So let's just give that up right now and focus on trying. All you Star Wars fans out there, I'm going to offend you right now, so close your eyes and skip this paragraph: Yoda was wrong. Let me repeat: That cute, fuzzy Muppet with an uncanny resemblance to President Kimball was not actually any sort of prophet, and he was wrong.

“Yoda told Luke Skywalker, "Do or do not - there is no try." Wrong! False doctrine. There is too try. And in my universe anyway, trying counts!

“Sure. Once in a while we hit pay dirt and actually have one of those cool, ideal, and structured evenings. We do strive for it. That's the ideal. But I have real children - a lot of them - and try as I might, they don't all behave. And they don't all, always, get along with each other or want to be there. (Example phrase: "I'd like it better if [insert name of random sibling] didn't have to be here.")

“And any of you with a teenager most likely knows the sound I call The Grunt. It's an answer, a shrug, a pledge of annoyance all at once. Hearing The Grunt during Family Home Evening most likely elicits from one or both parents' mouths the rapidly-fired innuendo that someone in the family is behaving, ahem, ahem, like unto Laman and Lemuel. Which accusation most likely elicits yet another Grunt. Pretty soon, the living room sounds like we're raising livestock instead of children.

“Most of the time we try really hard to get some doctrinal discussion in there, spend five to ten minutes going over the family calendar, and call it good. Our most successful discussions lately have centered around Preach My Gospel and current Conference talks.”

To be Continued! Tune in next week for Part II.