Thankful Thursday: August 24-30

I'm thankful for the temple trip last week.  I'm pretty sure some bad things would've been a lot worse had I not just been.

I'm thankful for health and improvements!

I'm thankful for my sweet, smart, wonderful daughters!!  We have lots of little traditions in our little family.  One of them that the children really love is "child of the week."  Jmy has even recently been moved into the schedule.  (This is technically his week.)  Each child, during their special week, gets to do certain things more frequently... they are sort of the "on call" person for certain tasks or privileges.    The privileges are, really, the previously most argued-about subject... like: who gets to sit next to Mama or Daddy (depending on whether Daddy is home or not) for each meal and who gets to say the blessing on the food, or morning devotional prayers, or night time devotional prayers... you get the idea, I hope.  ;)

Well, pretty recently (within the last few months), my girls have decided that they love FHE so very much that they want to plan and execute it so that they know it will, for sure, happen.  (I was doing all right with holding them, but then something specific happened and I wasn't able to maintain it well.)  Anyway... we've had FHE every week I can remember since they took over the planning and holding of it!

A couple weeks ago it was Kat's week.  Oh, my GOODNESS Tea was SO upset when she expressed a desire to teach FHE and I told her no in favor of Kat, reminding Tea that Kat was child of the week.  Tea was irate, which hits our ears as very loud crying.  When I told her that she could plan and teach FHE next week, during HER week, she was somewhat placated and eventually calmed down.  I proceeded to forget the incident.  So, Monday (8-20) rolled around and I was working to "round up the wagons," as it were, to get the kiddos to bed.  Our nite-nite routine involves picking up the house, evening devotionals, and (hopefully) reading time.  Currently we're half-way through 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  They LOVE it!!  I knew Tea had been planning something throughout the day and realized it was FHE when she was terribly heartbroken when Ria erased part of a chalkboard picture she'd worked on.  (The chalkboard is often of central focus in the girls' lessons because they want to have a pictoral reminder of the story part of their lesson or they want a picture of the topic of the lesson.  It's always really sweet and almost incomprehensible, but still wonderful!)

So, as we're sitting for devotionals, Tea sets up the chalkboard and lets me know who should say opening prayer.  I ask her for the opening song, we sing it, and her assigned pray-er prays.  Then we proceed with the devotional (currently Old Testament reading, reading a General Conference talk from October 1975, each child chooses a song, then closing EXCEPT on FHE Mondays we have FHE before closing prayer).  Tea's lesson topic was Faith.  I honestly cannot remember much of anything about it except that she started out telling a completely made-up story with Jesus Christ as a central character.  I eventually did stop her and remind her that our FHE lesson was to learn about different Gospel Principles.  As it turned out, I helped her discuss Charity.  It turned out to be a very sweet little lesson.

I was thinking I would have to come up with something for today (since it's Jmy's week), but Kat took the heat off me when she begged to be able to teach FHE tonight.  She planned it all out and executed it quite well.  The lesson was on Faith.  She had us since Oh Come All Ye Faithful, then she talked about Faith for a minute, and she ended with reading a Bible story from a children's Bible storybook the kids were given in a parking lot while out with Jess a while back.  Kat, especially, LOVES this book.  She's read it through completely at least 5 times.  She read the story of Daniel and the Lion's Den.  She proclaimed it her very most favorite Bible story (but she says this about whichever one she's been reading recently... like we're reading is Esther currently, and she told me yesterday that THAT book was her very favorite in the Bible!).  ^_^  I love it!

Anyway, Kat's lesson was wonderful.  Ria does an equally awesome job, too.  I look forward to the day Jmy pleads to be allowed to teach during his special week!  I'm just so thankful for these kiddos who love the Lord and His Word SO much!!!