Family Home Evening

I love Monday nights, particularily because it is Family Home Evening and I know that we will all be home together for the night.  I started a new Monday night routine with the kids last week.  Each Monday night Emma and Walker take a turn choosing what we will have for dinner, helping prepare the meal, and then helping with the dishes afterwards.  Emma went first last week and she decided on spaghetti with meat sauce, raw carrots with dip, and soda crackers with cheese melted on them.  She loved peeling the carrots all by herself and carefully preparing each of the crackers.  Because it went so beautifully last week we tried it again with Walker tonight.  He chose pizza...with no melted cheese on it.  So we reserved a special slice just for him with all of the toppings except for cheese.

By the time the pizza was ready to be put in the oven Walker had eaten half of the toppings and nearly a pound of pizza crust dough.

 

He was willing to let Emma in on the prep.

As much as I love cooking with my kids sometimes I feel like this by the end of it.

After dinner we had a Family Home Evening lesson in the backyard about gardening and plant care.  I love working in the dirt and helping plants grow and thrive.  I've been doing a lot of research to find different projects that I can do with the kids in the yard and in the house that will help them learn and enjoy it too.  This morning I had the kids paint a terra cotta pot and then tonight we planted lemon seeds in it and talked about how we can care for the seeds to help them grow.  Apparently the seeds will grow into a beautiful little plant that will smell like lemons.  I'm excited to see if it works.

This kid LOVES being outside.  That rubber boot is probably the least disgusting thing she had in her mouth all day after eating a leaf, a pine cone, grass clippings, and a handful of dirt.