Day 6 - Family Time

We're hanging out tonight, watching The Empire Strikes Back with the younger two boys.  It's our second night of Star Wars fun, and this was probably my favorite of the series.  Middle remembers the movies, mostly because of video games he's played based on them.  Little may have seen them once, but he doesn't remember them.  So it's been fun experiencing them through his eyes, as we were probably about Little's age when this one came out.

Yesterday, we were working on a special Cub Scout badge with him and he had to gather his family and have us each write nice things about each other.  Afterwards, he had questions to answer about the exercise and one of them was to say what he learned from doing this.  "I learned that I like to do things like this together.  We don't do it too often."

Savageman and I exchanged looks.  Out of all of us, family rituals and together time means the most to Little.  He is the one who gets excited about having a sit-down meal together, the one who looks at the Family Activity on the coloring page in church and actually wants to go home and do it together.  He is the one who asks when we can have a family game night. And he's right - we don't do these things nearly often enough.

I'm glad we have him reminding us of the importance of family time.  Life gets busy, we put things off, and in the blink of an eye, the kids are too old for many of the activities we were sure we'd get to someday.

Well, it's someday, right?

So we started last night, with a fire in the fireplace and a movie together, something we haven't done in a while.  Today we all cleaned the main floor together after Mass, and I threw a pork roast in the crock pot to make Carolina-style BBQ.  We went our separate ways for a while; Savageman and I ran Middle to a friend's house, did some errands, visited some of our own friends for a while and went to the gym.  Little went to a neighborhood friend's house, and the Teen studied for midterms.  When we regrouped tonight, Little set the table so we could all eat together, and now we're snuggled on the couch watching the movie.

It's really nice.

The theme today in church was "Speak, Lord, your servant is listening."  We were encouraged to set aside our own agendas and be open to what God really wants from us. 

If more family time is what the signs are pointing to right now, we're listening.