Love at Home

I wasn't feeling a lot of Love at Home today as my children all returned from long days at school.  Some of them were grumpy.  Some were impatient with me and with each other.  Some of them were not very anxious to clean up messes they had made.   The Scout Master is out of town this week, so I didn't have him to "bounce" my irritation off of.  Instead I decided to remove myself from them for a little while and regroup.  I constantly feel the weight of my responsibility to set the tone in my home, and if left to my own devices today, I would not have set a very good one.  

Last week I had asked one of the girls to prepare a Family Home Evening lesson on "having a house of order," but after the events of the day, I made an executive decision to change our schedule.  It's February, which is LOVE MONTH, so I thought tonight would be appropriate to talk about LOVE at HOME.   It was a short lesson.  Spell Girl read a scripture about "loving one another" and we all marveled at how many love references there are in the scriptures.  I talked for a little while about how our house should be a LOVE ONLY zone.  We should be able to come home from long days, challenging classes, and not so great school environments, and feel safe and loved and uplifted.  We should have a family filled with people rooting for each other.  

"None of us need one more person bashing or pointing out where we have failed or fallen short. Most of us are already well aware of the areas in which we are weak. What each of us does need is family, friends, employers, and brothers and sisters who support us, who have the patience to teach us, who believe in us, and who believe we're trying to do the best we can, in spite of our weaknesses. What ever happened to giving each other the benefit of the doubt? What ever happened to hoping that another person would succeed or achieve? What ever happened to rooting for each other?” ― Marvin J. Ashton

After the lesson, I handed everyone 5 little paper hearts that I had cut out last week, and asked them all to write one thing they loved about each of the other 5 people in our family.  I encouraged them to put some thought into their love notes and not just write something funny or silly.  And then we taped all of our hearts to the kitchen cabinets.  (This is not an original idea, by the way.  We did this last year after I read about it on another blog. The kids loved it and we decided to make it an annual tradition.)

In 20 minutes, we changed the tone of our home from annoyed and impatient, to kind and happy.   

It's so nice to dig around in our heads for the lovey dovey things that are in there...sometimes buried under a lot of other stuff.  I love to read what the kids write about each other...and about us.  It's always such a happy surprise.

It will be so nice to wake up to those happy notes every morning as we walk into the kitchen. There are a few extra hearts leftover in case any of us feel a little inspired to add some more love to the kitchen.  We're officially dedicating February as LOVE MONTH in our house, and we're designating our home a LOVE ONLY ZONE.  Maybe if we do it for a whole month, it will stick for the rest of the year!  <3