Celebrate good times, come on!

15 years ago this month The Family Proclamation was issued by President Hinckley and the Quorum of the 12 Apostles in the General Relief Society Meeting. So, there is a celebration! How fun huh?

Click here for some posts about it. Here's one of my favorites.

Last week Charles and I were discussing the goals that we have for our family. I've mentioned before that our goal is to have an intentional family. That concept comes from this book.

We don't have TV in our home. It's more of a circumstance than a choice. When we moved here we hooked up the cable to our TV and...nothing. Not even local channels, everything was fuzzy. Didn't matter, we don't like TV anyways, except for BYU games. And I like the Food Network. Not sure we'll even have TV in the future.

But, something that Charles and I both love is the internet. We don't waste hours watching TV, but we sure do waste a lot of time on the internet. It's so bittersweet. We live far from friends and family so we like "staying in touch" through Facebook and reading blogs to know about things like the Family Proclamation Celebration. However, being on it at the expense of spending time together, was affecting our family goals. We had made attempts in the past to "limit" our time somehow but, had failed. With Charles being in school it was too hard. He needed to be on the computer to study and what not. With him gone at school and studying, I was also on the internet a lot.

Two weeks ago Charles finished his coursework for Pharmacy school! Hooray! No more classes! He wouldn't need to be on the computer as much to study. He had the fabulous idea that when he got home from work or his rotations that we would not get on the computer. We would wait until the kids were asleep. Both of their bedtimes is around 8-9pm so we'd have about 2-3 hrs at night to surf the web. Plenty of time.

We are 2 days into our goal and it has been wonderful. Tuesday was one of my favorite days in a long time! Charles came home so excited about working in the ER. It was so fun to see him so excited to learn and enjoying the beginnings of his career. We made dinner together. We cleaned up together. All 4 of us went running together with our new jogging stroller. It was a day of family work and togetherness and not until after we had put the kids to bed did we get on the computer. Some of you might already do this, we are a little slow :)

I haven't yet decided how I'm going to limit my time during the day when I'm here w/ the kids. Sometimes writing an email or reading a blog serves as a small break for me and refreshes my "adult mind" and gives me ideas of how we can play together. The main goal of this is to be together as a family when Charles gets home and focus on each other, all 4 of us.

Though we made this goal before finding out about the Family Proclamation Celebration, we are now following through with it, with the proclamation in mind. I wanted to write about this to inspire others to do something too. If you decide to do something, please let me know. I'd love to hear about it!

"Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities."