The Family Missions Trip

Breaks can be a wonderful time to accomplish things as a family, but that doesn’t always have to mean work.  Consider spending a day doing a mini missions trip as a family.  Many churches use breaks to offer international missions trips but a family missions trip doesn’t have to leave the city around you.   There are many opportunities to teach your kids to be selfless right in your back yard.  What a good tradition to start teaching that every break from school, at least one day will be given to help those around us in need.

You could take your family to volunteer at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen.  Nursing facilities are also a wonderful place to give of your time.  Older people love to see children and many of them don’t have family close to visit.  You can also check with your church to see if there are any people who need a meal taken to them or their house cleaned.  You can spend the day cooking with your kids making and delivering a meal.  Creating this experience for your children may take some time to plan but it is a lesson worth teaching.  You can even get your children involved in ideas and planning to get them even more excited about it.  Spend some time around the table tonight bouncing ideas off your children, You may be surprised at how creative they can be. Remember that excitement is contagious so if you want your kids to be excited about helping others you have to communicate your excitement!!

Let us know what ideas you come up with, your creativity may help spark ideas for another family!

Divide and Conquer

During the school year it is easy to let jobs slide and not be consistent with family chores. Spring break is an ideal time to get back on track with a household chore for each child.  It will take time, and there will be many moans from the bleachers when you announce that there each child has a chore to accomplish each morning of Spring Break.  Mom doesn’t have off.  Dad doesn’t have off.  The kids each do a chore or re-polish a standing chore during the break.   This is an excellent time to focus on realistic expectations for daily chores and training your children in what you do expect everyday.

For example you expect your child to have their bed made and room picked up before they leave for school.  Because of the busy morning schedule this has been sliding.  Now is an excellent time to refocus that chore.  You can tell your child that they need to have their bed made and room picked up before anything else can happen that day.  You now have the time to go in to check it and correct anything that does not meet your expectation.  The days’ activities can be put on hold until family chores have met your expectations.

Remember, it’s not really about getting a task done.  It’s all about getting the training done.  Don’t quit!

The Plan

Creating a plan is necessary for many aspects of life but essential for parenting.  Having a plan makes many areas of parenting easier, such as discipline, time management, ect.   When the children have big chunks of unscheduled time a plan is even more important.   A plan helps us meet goals for the break, rather than waste time and get as frustrated.

Create a basic plan.  What is the goal for the break is it to get things accomplished? Is it to do several family activities or traditions? Is it to teach a life skill to your children?  There are several ideas for break that we will be fleshing out over the next few days so that by the time the break hits you will be able to keep your sanity.

For the family that both parents are employed outside the home, as well as the single family home, the concept of the plan is absolutely necessary.   You’ve heard it before: To fail to plan is to plan to fail.

Expectations

What do we expect for Spring Break.?  It seems as parents our expectations fall into several categories.   We build a break or holiday up in our heads to be so big and exciting that it could never fulfill our expectations.  Then we are disappointed.  Another group of us dread the break, thinking only of the constant fighting and complaining.  This self-fulfilling prophecy can also set us up for disappointed.   The last group just wants to rest.  When this doesn’t happen or the break is suddenly over and we haven’t really accomplished anything … again disappointment.

Sit down and think through realistic goals and expectations for your children’s time off. That way you won’t doom yourself to failure.

Tomorrow we will discuss creating a plan for the break.

What do we do with Easter?

We’re focusing on two areas for March, the first is making the most of your spring break with your children.  Breaks can be a very valuable time with our children but we have to plan ahead to make the most of them.   To invest in your children you don’t want to waste these moments simply as dead time.

The second focal point for March will be Easter.  As a society, we seem to spend an enormous amount of time preparing for Christmas.  Why not even more preparation for Easter? This is the holiday that lays the very foundation for the Christian faith.  So for the two weeks leading up to Easter, we will go through a daily devotional for Easter, using a prop called the “Resurrection Eggs”.  They can be found online or in your local Christian Bookstore if you would like to get them and go through these with us.

Love never fails

Love to me means my family and God.  ~Hannah, age 7

As we close out our “love month” we get to look at the best quality of love.  True love never fails.  Our children need to be able to say with confidence that, “no matter what, my parents will love me.”  One of the ways we communicate this is how we discipline.  Through discipline we need to constantly communicate that we are disappointed in the choices made or behaviors displayed but not the child.  The phrase should not be “I’m so disappointed in you!”  It should be “I’m disappointed that you made that choice because now you have chosen to go to bed early and I was looking forward to spending time with you.”  Again we have to be very aware of what is coming out of our mouths.  We need to not discipline out of anger or frustration because when we do we can sometimes communicate disappointment with the person rather than the behavior.  Make the choice to resolve the relationship after discipline.  Sit and talk to the child; hug the child to make sure they know that we still love them.  Our relationship is not damaged because of the choices they made.  That is how we communicate that no matter what happens “I will always love you.”  We must extend to our children the same love our Heavenly Father extends to us!