Family Night

I remembered tonight why family night is so important for us. I didn’t have time to prepare one of our regular Heritage Builders lessons. And Kayla’s old enough now to figure that out. But we explained to her that family night can be all sorts of things – games or pizza or walks or special devotions. But it’s mostly being together.

Tonight we threw around our family conversation beach balls and had some thrilling toddler/preschool conversation, had family prayer and took one of our night-time walks These could be called pajama walks if we got around to putting everyone’s pjs on before we left. We listen to night sounds and notice the different moons and watch people’s bonfires and smell the drying cornfield. It’s pretty magical.

The family conversation was also rather thrilling. One of the questions on the conversation ball is “If we could go anywhere in the whole world where would you choose? I think Karissa answered the Zoo!. So I guess we’ll have to wait a few years to get into theological and cultural and spiritual discussions. Right now we’re just having some goofy fun and being together. But we believe it’s setting the groundwork (by training ourselves, mostly) for later times of openness and discussion, as our children grow older.

This was our first official “Family Night” for months. I missed it. And I’m learning that everything on my list doesn’t have to be done, the house doesn’t have to be perfect. The lesson doesn’t have to be time-consuming. Their shoes don’t even have to be on to throw them in the stroller.

All we have to do is stop what we’re doing and be together as a family for an hour.

It’s one thing to be in the same house. It’s another thing to give my children all of my happy, unhurried attention. And it’s worth it.