Power of Moms Retreat

The Power of Moms retreat I went to the last couple of days was a like Motherhood Ideas Overload! I came home with so many good ideas that I want to try in my home and a few new systems to set up as well. It was such a great weekend.

Friday we had April Perry present the Mind Organization for Mom way of organizing your mind and all the things on our ever lengthening "to do" lists. She has a whole system to keep things in order and I am anxious to incorporate many of her elements into my own system.

Then Saturday I spoke about Enjoying Motherhood NOW whenever Now is for you. I felt it went fine. I hope those in attendance got something out of it. I wish I could really give people some of the lessons I have learned these last 4 years without them having to go through the pain I have to learn them.

The rest of the day was spent going over how to take care of ourselves and our families and create the kind of families we want to have when we are grandparents. There were so many good ideas shared by the group on how to do this. I am going to take it slow in implementing things to see which ideas I still love as time goes by.

Today we sat down as a family and prayed and read the scriptures and then sang a song about keeping the commandments. Then I asked the girls if we could write our own "family commandment" because God always writes his rules down (ie the 10 on the tablets) so why don't we do the same. I asked them what our rules were.

They said things like "Don't wear shoes upstairs. No food upstairs. No putting kids in washing machines. No jumping off the dressers." I wrote down some of what they said and then pointed out the reason we don't wear shoes on the carpet or take food upstairs is to keep our home clean. So maybe our rule should be to be Clean and that one rule could cover all those and also only having clean language and taking care of our bodies and not watching bad things on TV. They agreed.

To address the washing machine idea and the dressers, I said the reasons for those rules were to keep us safe. We want our home to be a safe place. So our rule became Be Safe! This also includes keeping others safe in our home too.

By the end of our lesson we had come up with 6 rules. We had an art competition to see who could make the best poster for our rules and Sabrina won. So now we have some clear family rules. We call them our "COLARS" because they guide us to the home we want to have.  They are Clean Obey Love Ask Respect and Safe. (Ask refers to things like going to others houses or borrowing things or if you can watch TV or whatever.)

We are going to see this week how we do at keeping our family rules then next week I will introduce consequences for not keeping them.

If you have a chance to go to one of these retreats DO IT. It is worth the time and effort!

Cami's Kindness Week

I have been extraordinarily busy the last week and will be the coming week but I have to take some time to post that I am declaring this week Cami's Kindness week. Usually I only do a day (her birthday) and I ask everyone to do random acts of kindness (above and beyond what they would normally do) as a birthday gift to her.

But this year she would have turned 5. That is a big birthday. So I am asking for a work week of kindness--5 days of random acts of kindness. If you want to take on the challenge and give this gift to my little Camille I would love to hear what you did. They don't have to be big things. It could be just getting on the ground and playing with your kids when you normally wouldn't or reading them an extra book.

Camille's birthday was Thursday the 19th and our family went to Disneyland and met up with cousins Hank and Lili who turned 2 the same day. We also enjoyed the day with our other Harris cousins from Southern California and our aunts and uncles and some of their friends and their kids and our aunt Nikki's sister and her kids. Basically we were a massive herd roaming around Disneyland having a wonderful day in the Happiest Place on Earth and it was great.

We drove in the night before and met Jonathan who was down there for the grand opening of our Southern California LaptopXchange in Ontario. We all went to dinner at BJ's because I have been craving a pizookie for about 2 months. Here we are eating our pizookies (giant cookies with ice cream on top).

Noble and I shared the triple chocolate.

 The girls shared 1/2 Oreo 1/2 chocolate chip.

Daddy and Annie and Baby share 1/2 white chocolate Macadamia nut and 1/2 red velvet with cream cheese and white chocolate chips. Yummm! Mine was still the best. :)

The next morning we woke up early and met up with the cousins to walk to Disneyland. I miss our So. Cal. family. Everyone has a buddy!

Here are the cousins waiting for Hank and Lili and Darren and Nikki to start the day.

When we left Disneyland for California Adventure we tried to get another photo with all the cousins.

But the train was rather distracting.

It was a great day and Nikki and Elizabeth made these adorable blue buttons for us all to wear that said Celebrating Camille with a big white tulip and a number 5 on them. 

Thanks for the fun day everyone! I have so much more to post about the Power of Moms Retreat I went to and other stuff but right now I need to go get Harrison ready for church.

Let me know what you do for Cami's Kindness week please!