Family Hone Leaving

Bethelle is a staller.  And she's good at it.  She can walk all over you at bedtime.  The routine can take an hour.  It's been getting bad lately, so Nick and I have been trying to trim it down.  I think at best we can only get it to 20 minutes.

Last Tuesday when we announced that it was bedtime, Bethelle countered that it was actually time for "family hone leaving".  This is generally a Monday activity, but she just kept going:

"Welcome to family hone leaving, everybody.  Daddy will say the prayer and then we'll sing 'I am a Child of God'."  How could we stop her?  She's too good.  Nick prayed, we sang, and then Nick or I usually give some kind of a simple gospel lesson.  Bethelle went right into the lesson.  It was about Jesus.  He's nice, he wants us to be nice, have families, live on earth, be happy.  It was so adorable and just the right thing to buoy a parent right up.  She then called for a closing prayer and another song (actually, the same song again) and we were done.

Coming in the midst of a renewed effort to thwart her stalling efforts, we were put in our place by a 2 year-old, but it was well worth it.

This is Bethelle's Family Home Evening Chart.  We cut it out of the January Friend.  It gets her pretty excited.  We use its suggested topics and when we're done, she gets to flip that piece over.  It's making some kind of a picture about different activities.