Biblical Womanhood: Input requested: Memory-making ideas

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Input requested: Memory-making ideas

I'm sort of having writer's block - er blogger's block - today. It's not that I don't have things I want to write about or an inbox full of questions from readers that I've promised I'd answer soon which I should be using for blog fodder, it's just that I want to be writing about other things.

Like the laundry soap I made, only I've not made it yet. Or the Apple Challah I just pulled out of the oven, only that's still a figment of my imagination, too. Or pictures of my precious little girls, but I seem to have trouble catching them both awake and picture presentable at the same time recently (it seems they are perpetually clad in spit-up stained or chocolate covered clothes - no matter whether we just put on clean clothes or not!).

Anyway, since I'm sure you'd rather hear about much more interesting things today than all the things I want to be writing about but can't because, well, there isn't much to say about it right now, I'm posting Juliann's question and copping out by letting you all do the answering. I'm positive you have much more interesting and creative things to share than I could come up with right now:

I am teaching a seminar at a ladies' retreat next week on "Having Fun in our Families." I have put together a list of fun, memory-making things that we do along with some others have shared with me. I was wondering if any of your readers might have some special tips they would like to share. My intent is to cover traditions, spiritual milestones, physical milestones, plain everyday fun, creating a warm home environment, making your husband and children feel special.

Might be a fun post to cover, and give us lots of great ideas to try in our homes! -Juliann

So, help me out here, Ladies. Tell us about your creative family traditions. I'd especially love to hear if you have any special traditions for the Autumn season. If you've blogged about it, leave us your link to peruse! Thanks in advance!

Oh, and don't worry, my blogger's block usually lasts all of two hours, so I'm sure that being the usually verbose person I am, I'll be back in full force very soon. And maybe I'll even be able to tell you about that laundry soap and Apple Challah!

Graphic from Art.com

16 Comments:

Lady Why said...: This isn't an autumn tradition but these are two things that we've been doing a lot of recently.

One thing we love is family read alouds. We do this almost every night. Lately we've been reading Missionary Patriarch and, since the weather is turning cooler, we all pile outside onto the deck and porch swings with every quilt and comforter in the house. We all pile under blankets to read the book in the dark. The reader has a book light clipped to the book to see. We usually have a snack and lately it's been popcorn and hot chocolate. This is the most fun and is looked forward to even by the children that are too young to really grasp the book!

Another fun family game we love is called "Yella Fella". When we are in the car and someone sees a yellow car, that person has to be the first to yell out "Yella Fella!" The first one to call "Yella Fella" gets a point. The object is to be the first one to see the most yellow cars in any one drive. When we get back in the car, we start over. It's very competitive and sometimes I have to call a time out so my ear drums can recover from the chorus of "Yella Fella" shouts ringing in my ears!

Silly and not related to anything particularly meaningful... but fun nonetheless!; 11:59 AM
Kathleen said...: A couple of fun family activities and traditions are-
On my families' birthdays, I dig out all the larger pictures we had taken of them (school and studio pictures) and tuck them into the frames already hanging on our walls so everywhere we look, we see the darling face of the birthday child at different stages. It makes my daughters feel very special.

We also play a car game in which you call out when you see an out of state car- except (since our girls are school age) you can't call it out, unless you can say the capital too. A fun way to reinforce a lesson.; 12:29 PM
Anonymous said...: Our family has a unique Christmas tradition. We eat a special brunch Christmas morning, open gifts, and enjoy each others' company in the usual way. In the afternoon, we go to a family friendly matinee movie and then out for Chinese buffet. Usually a few single friends and family members join us. It is our favorite holiday tradition. The tradition began when I was a single student working for an Orthodox Jewish boss. He asked me my Christmas plans and when I told him I didn't have any beyond midnight church and calling my family, he invited me to join his family for the day. We ate Chinese food and saw a movie, and I was so happy to be part of a family circle. I have always remembered their kindness to a lonely student, and have carried this Jewish tradition into my Southern Baptist family life. Miss Kris; 1:10 PM
Andrea said...: Living in the grand ol' state of Wisconsin, we really have the best of both worlds - hot summers, cold winters, exciting fall weather, and spring warm up to look forward to. As such, our state has many a 'food season' as well. I love fall especially for two reasons - the leaves change, and apple picking!!

Growing up, we went apple picking every fall - bushels and bushels of apples awaited us each year. We'd wander through the local orchard finding the best apples for pies, apple butter, apple sauce, and even for eating. It is one of my fondest memories growing up. Pumpkin picking was also fun as well. After a long day of apple picking or pumpkin picking, we'd drive around and look at the fall colors, then head home with apple cider to drink, and have a fire in the fireplace at home. My parents weren't rich when I was little, but they sure made up for it in love and fun! :); 1:17 PM
Simply Stork said...: family is very important to us...we have alot of autumn traditions...we always rake up the leaves and jump in them...we always collect leaves that fall and make a "book" out of them...we love to get out our holiday candles and decorate the house with them and best of all...along with fall comes colder weather...and colder weather means many evenings sitting by a fireplace for game night.
~simply stork~; 1:25 PM
Erin said...: Just an 'everyday fun' kind of thing . . . we did this just yesterday. Made s'mores over the stove. Didn't get enough of it in the summer, but still had the supplies left over. So we fired up the burner and pulled out the skewers and 'roasted' marshmallows. No bugs, smoke in your eyes, or burnt eyebrows. I was tempted to say 'no' when the idea came up, but I am working on enjoying and sometimes indulging in the spontaneity of a child's life in the midst of our day-to-day structure. And, of course, who can say 'no' to chocolate!; 1:32 PM
Sally said...: Here is a blog where a women uses pretty stones to "build" a memorial for her family. I think this is an awesome idea!
Sally

See: http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/bubbebobbie/339768/; 2:57 PM
Mrs. Jo said...: A couple of fun family traditions that stand out to me:

Fall-making caramel apples by peeling the wrappers off of all of the little square caramels and melting them down and dipping the apples in. It's just not fall without making these once in September!

Christmas--every year for years and years my mom has hosted a Cousin Cookie Party at her house a few weeks before Christmas for all those extended relatives we don't see much otherwise. We use Grandma's caramel sugar cookie recipe which is just delicious with homemade cream cheese frosting. All the little cousins help cut out and bake cookies as well as decorating them with a ton of various sprinkles/candies. Then one of my aunts helps all the kids make a photo ornament craft (she does a unique style each year) of themselves so they have one for every year and can see how they've grown over the years. Finally, we all go around the Christmas tree and do our Cousin ornament exchange. In advance, my aunt draws names and lets everyone know which cousin they are supposed to buy/make an ornament for. So, each child has a special ornament from a cousin. It's fun to look back over my ornaments and remember which cousins got them for me. Because of this tradition, I didn't have to go out and buy cheap, gawdy ornaments when I first got married for our first Christmas. It's great fun to see my own kids participating in this family tradition now and I hope to continue it with my own nieces/nephews someday. The neatest part of it is that my Grandma died 20 years ago, but we all still honor her memory by using her yummy recipe to get together and carry on a family tradition.; 2:59 PM
Elisabeth said...: We also have a number of traditions, here are a couple.

When we were younger, we'd play a game called "Bear". When my dad came home from work, he would chase us all over the house (as the bear) in his work clothes. We loved it. If we got caught the penalty was a hug or a tickle or something, then we could run again. Of course, we didn't do this all the time, but it was a lot of wild fun when we did do it!

Another is to tell funny stories around the supper table. If someone finds a funny book or story or even an interesting piece of news, we share it and laugh or have a discussion about it.; 3:37 PM
Emily C said...: One tradition that I love in my home is family night once a week. We choose Monday nights, because that's the night when our church has decided there are no meetings so we can stay home with our families.

The idea is to reinforce and teach values and morals to our kids, but it manifests itself in lots of ways. Every week we sing songs, pray together, learn together, and often have a fun activity to go with it. My favorite family nights growing up were when my father would pull out journals of our grandparents and great-grandparents and tell us stories.

I found, growing up, that having this scheduled every week meant that we had an opportunity for lots of memory-making. Sure, I don't remember every single family night, but I remember a lot of them!; 3:43 PM
Martha A. said...: We had alot of fun family traditions at home growing up, but we do not have many of them now. I would like to implement some, but it is hard to do it!
-Watching trains- our family all likes trains, so we would buy a box of ice cream bars and go sit by the railroad tracks and wait for a train!
-Reading aloud together, pretty much every night my dad would read aloud to us from a book, like journals of George Whitfield, Charles Finney, John Wesley and others. We sat and listened while we did needlework, crocheting etc. It has been found that you hear better when your hands are busy and in our family I am amazed at what we learned. We complained about it, but I am very happy we had this now!
I have good memories also of my mom reading to us while we quilted.
- Making Raviolis together every Christmas. We make homemade raviolis for Christmas. We never eally got into the holidays like most people, but this was our special dinner. We also had a special punch we made, which I actually entered into Taste of Home and got in the magazine.
-Singing together- last year at Thanksgiving I think it was my sisters and I sat and sang together. We have not done it in a long time, but we used to always sing. We sang while we did dishes, cleaned the kitchen, drove in the car etc. When we stopped singing it was during a difficult time in our lives, but the tradition of singing together is alot of fun! Someone would play piano or something else and we would sing...nothing professional, but it was fun!; 5:10 PM
Anonymous said...: Spiritual Milestones:

When our children have made a decision to ask Christ into their hearts, we've taken a picture of them with their bible. Then we glue the picture in the front of their bible, along with a little "write up" of what was happening in their lives when they accepted Christ. This was recommended to me when my husband and I were new Christians. It serves as a visual and written reminder of their conversion experience, should they ever come to doubt their salvation. It is a lovely memory for the children.

Birthday Milestones:

When each of our eight children come upon their 10th birthday, we've chosen this year as the year you will have a Surprise Party. Everything is a surprise: the guests, the meal, the activities, even the date! Its so much fun for the birthday child. Depending on the child, we've done things such as going away for a weekend to a free retreat center available to employees of my husband's company, going to a gymnastics center and meeting 12 friends there, going bowling...hmmm...that's all that have turned 10 years old so far, but we have one coming up in February, so the fun of planning this very special birthday begins again. Its such a delight for the whole family. We really love this tradition! The 10 year birthdays seem to fall about every 2 years around here, so I get a little break in between. About the surprise date -- we tell the child it will be up to 2 weeks before or up to 2 weeks after the actual date, so they never know. We celebrate with a small cake and a gift on the "real" day, if the special party will be after the real day. Some years, we invite friends too, other years its just family...it kind of depends on the child and the planned activity. In other years, we don't go "out" for parties, but have fun-filled home parties with games, homemade cakes, etc.

I'm looking forward to reading others traditions!

Susan in Manitoba; 5:55 PM
Anonymous said...: One of our favorite things to do is our Friday evening. Our kids will sometimes ask, "What are we going to do for our Friday?" Quite often, it will be a movie & popcorn. But we also like doing jigsaw puzzles together, or playing Charades (oh dear, that can really get wild around here!...), or Apples to Apples. Once in a while, a Friday evening will mean just everyone in the same room, reading his or her book, or working on a knitting project. We love our Fridays together, & seldom does anything interrupt this much looked-forward-to time with one another.

Brenda; 8:20 PM
Anonymous said...: We read books together pretty much every evening except when we're away late or something. On Friday evening the children are allowed to sleep in their sleeping bag, anywhere they choose. Behind the couch, under a crib, on my bedroom fllor are common spots! We have a fire pit in the back yard and enjoy cooking outside every once in a while. In the fall we always look forward to attending a fest that a local orchard has. Corn maze, wagon ride to the orchard to pick your own apple, hay pile to jump into, are just a few of the activities we get to do on that special day.
I have a beautiful journal book, big and thick, not one of those small ones, that I keep beside my bed. I jot down things about the children, things they did or said, or detailed accounts of something special we did, or even just a detailed humorous description of a typical suppertime at our house. This is for the children, to preserve some of those little bits of their childhood that can so easily be forgotten.; 9:07 PM
Lacey said...: Crystal, when making laundry soap, BEWARE! It could turn out like my mom's did:
prairiechickenlady.blogspot.com
:o); 10:06 PM
meg said...: In our household, traditions are brand new and shiny; our oldest child will only be 3 on Friday. However, we do have a few traditions that my husband and I started before kids came along, knowing we'd carry them over:
- Every Sept., we dip apples into caramel, drizzle them with semisweet and white chocolate, and roll them in nuts. Mmmm. Too bad I will have to cut mine into wedges this year (I had braces put back on, and caramel apples are on the "no" list!).
- We make a gingerbread house at Christmas. We do not make the dough from scratch (not worth the headache!), but we buy a box kit and then elaborate with our own candy choices.
- We make a birthday cake for Jesus on Christmas Eve to show the children tangibly that it is His birthday first and foremost.....and then take it to my family's gathering that night.
- Just this fall, we're enacting Family Game Night on Thursday nights. Our oldest is getting into board games, so we will pull out all the snacks and munchies and go to town. Great way to teach how to take turns!
- We always, always go to an apple orchard and pumpkin patch to let the kids pick out some of the fall's best harvest.; 12:55 PM

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Input requested: Memory-making ideas

16 Comments:

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