Intentionally Enjoying My Family - Birthdays

We try to make everyone feel special on their birthday.  This week Felicity had her second birthday.  She began her day with her special place setting and milk and some dry cereal with Daddy before he had to leave for work, while I fixed a special breakfast of bread pudding (a.k.a. baked french toast).  After breakfast she colored for a little while and then she took a nap.  We were planning on going to the library, but she was sleeping and I didn't want to disturb her.

She woke up in time for a late lunch.  We had fresh homemade rolls, lunch meat, cheese, salad and red peppers.  After lunch she played contentedly roaming around the downstairs doing her own things, reading books and coloring more.  I left her to continue playing by herself and sat down to play the piano.  When I finished I went to see what she was up to and I found her sitting in Katy's chair at the table having a snack.  She found a few things in the pantry and helped herself to some crackers.  She opened the package by herself, too.  I guess she got hungry.

Daddy came home a little early from work and she wanted to play play-doh.  Kent, Katy, and Kaomi joined her playing play-doh while I started fixing supper.  After supper we cleaned up the table and got ready to party.  Grammy came over for the fun, too.  We sang "Happy Birthday" and had chocolate cake and ice cream.  Then she was excited to get presents from everyone.

With all her new, fun stuff.

This concludes my Intentionally Enjoying My Family Series.  I also shared about Intentionally Enjoying My Family at Church, with a family zoo pass, listening, projects, movie night/game day, and catching my family members.  You can read about them here.

If you've written about how you are intentionally enjoying your family I'd love to read it.  Please leave a link to your post in the comments.  If you have intentionally enjoyed your family recently but don't have a blog leave a comment telling us what you've enjoyed.

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Intentionally Enjoying My Family - Catching My Family Members

Have you ever caught someone in your family doing something unexpected.  I've been "catching" my family members this week, this is what they've been up to.


I caught Katy rocking Clark.

One day I walked upstairs to see how the kids' school was going.  They should've been close to done and I caught Katy asking Kent the answers to her math problems.  Kent was readily answering them, too.  While I'm glad to know that Kent has learned his easy addition problems I want Katy to learn them too.

I caught Felicity getting the clean laundry baskets out of the laundry room.  I helped her get them apart and set them up.  Later when I looked over I caught her "folding" the clean laundry.  She would take a piece of the laundry from the clean clothes to fold basket, shake it out and put it in a basket.  She told me she was "helping laundry, get a coin".  Of course I gave her a coin for helping without being asked to help.

Another day I caught Clark traveling around the living room.  I looked in to see what he was doing and he had moved several feet, the next time I looked he had moved several feet more.  Later that evening I caught him rolling over across the room.

One afternoon during quiet time I caught Katy and Kaomi "making valentine's", by coloring their hands with markers and making handprints on construction paper.

I caught Jeff, coming through the front door, home early from work on Friday with donuts.

I caught all the girls having a beauty parlor during Daddy's Bible Time.  Katy was "braiding" Kaomi's hair and Felicity was combing Katy's hair.

I caught Felicity throwing her breakfast of Cheerios on the floor and singing the "clean up" song from Sunday School.  Guess what?  I got her down and told her to clean them up and put them in the trash.  She did that while happily singing the "clean up" song.

I caught Kent being upset with Katy, when he was really upset with me and his math lesson.


What have you "caught" your family members doing recently?

Intentionally Enjoying My Family - Movie Night/Game Day

This past weekend when Jeff was at his Christian Service Brigade Dad's Retreat Kaomi helped plan a movie night for Friday night and I played some games with the kids on Saturday.

One of the things that Kaomi bought from Mommy's Store recently was a Plan a Movie Night coupon.  She decided to redeem it this past Friday night.  She decided that we would watch the movie "Molly on the Homefront".  Part of the coupon deal was that she also got to pick a snack.  She decided that she wanted us to have cookies for snack.  Since we were going to be watching this movie at dinner time she also got to help pick out dinner.  We settled on pizza and carrot sticks.  On Friday after lunch Kaomi helped make cookies for us to have for dessert.  She really likes to help in the kitchen and we had fun, and the cookies looked a little strange since she put them on the tray mostly by herself, but nobody seemed to mind.  After our movie everyone got ready for bed and we even had time for a few rounds of dominoes.

On Saturday we decided to finish getting the house straightened up for Sunday mixed up with various games throughout the day.  We started off with a game of Zingo, then I put Felicity down for her nap and assigned each of the kids a chore.  Kaomi was to get the dirty hand-towels from the kids bathroom and make her bed, Katy was to clean the counter and the scrub the toilet in the kids room and Kent was to vacuum the dining room.  I picked up a few things and stripped the sheets off my bed and put the blanket in the washing machine.  When everyone was done Kent picked out cards to play war.  After a few rounds of war I sent Kent to clean the kids bathroom floor, Katy was to vacuum the living room and Kaomi was to clean-up her pre-school box contents which were strewn across the school room floor.  When we were done with those things we did a few exercises then marched around the house while I sent kids to quickly put misplaced items away and return to me to march and get sent to do something again.  That was a good workout; we should do it more often.  Then the kids played upstairs while I fixed lunch.  Felicity woke up late, so the kids played quietly while she was still sleeping and I did a few other chores.  After lunch we did our next set of chores and played "Don't Break the Ice".  After that Felicity had quiet time, Kent took his bath, and the girls sewed for a little while.  When Kent was done with his bath I let him play x-box and Katy took her bath while Kaomi had book time.  We went to Chick-Fil-A for supper and I let the kids play on the playground for quite a while.  They had a lot of fun.  When we came home everyone got ready for bed and Kaomi and Felicity took their baths.  Then everyone went to bed.  We all had fun!

How do you have a movie night or game day at your house?

Read about other ways I've been Intentionally Enjoying My Family here.

Intentionally Enjoying My Family - Projects

Over the last week I've been focusing on working on projects or spending special time with each of my family members.

Working on a family project is a great way to enjoy my family.  With having so many little ones a large project isn't always very practical, but I can work on individual projects with different children.

I'm working on a sewing project with Katy and Kaomi.  Katy said she wanted to make a sampler so before she can do that I thought that a needle book would be a good project so she has a designated place for her needle.  Both the girls are working on making a felt needle book with me on Monday evenings, while Jeff and Kent are at Christian Service Brigade.  They picked out the colors they wanted and we cut all the pieces.  We sewed the tabs on for keeping the needle book closed and have started sewing around the edge with a contrasting color.  I'm glad I chose felt as we've had lots of untangling which would be very hard with regular fabric.

I helped Kent work on a handmade birthday gift for Felicity.  He is making her a bank, using a  cylindrical can that had cookies in it.  He picked out a fabric that he wanted to use to cover the can.  He decided what part of the fabric he wanted then I put a small cut in the fabric where we needed the top to be and Kent ripped the fabric apart to make a straight line.  He was a little nervous about ripping the fabric, but afterward he though it was pretty cool.  When we had the right size piece of fabric we glued it to a piece of paper to make it easier to glue on to the can, which we did a couple days later.  We asked Daddy to cut the slit in the lid.  He still has to finish decorating it.

I made a special dessert for Jeff and served it to him with sparkling grape juice in the evening after the kids were in bed.

Pretending to be surprised.

I've been taking time to color with Felicity.  We were outside using sidewalk chalk and she wanted me to draw a camel.  She liked it, which was good, because it wasn't a very flattering camel.  I also helped her with some stickers that she put on a paper she was coloring.  She thought the heart shapes were cool and kept pointing them out to me.  I didn't even know that she knew what a heart was!

I've also been enjoying giving extra attention to Clark through tickles and toys that make him grin from ear to ear.  I even got to have lunch out with just Clark one afternoon.  He enjoyed the one on one time with Mommy.

I've also been making some extra time to read and snuggle more with Kaomi.

Another project which we've done in the past is to work on puzzles together.

You can read more about Intentionally Enjoying My Family here.

If you've been working on a project with your family let us know what you've been doing by leaving a comment.


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