Our Strong Family, a Few Marbles at a Time

Building a strong family is not always an easy feat. It takes a lot of diligence and effort, amongst our busy life. There are some things we do as a family that are easier for us than others. There are some that we struggle to be consistent with, which was really bothering me! I really wanted to bring our consistency and diligence up a notch, and "raise that bar" a little higher in my home.

So a couple of months ago I decided that we needed to have a Family Home Evening lesson on what it means to build a strong family. We sat the children down and had them help us list the things that help us to be valiant, as a family. We came up with 5 things, then added one more ("work") a couple of weeks later...

We wrote these things down and gave them each a rating (between 1-10) of how we felt we were doing at the time. Our goal is to get a consistent 10pt rating on every one of these. Every month we evaluate our list to see if we are reaching our goal. (I'd like to create a graph to show our progress, so I left the old ratings up there too. Kind of a mess right now, but once I get that done we'll be able to clean up the board a bit. **Anyone have an idea of how I could make this into some sort of graph?)



I decided that we needed an incentive to help motivate and remind us of our goal, so I washed out an old Kraft Mayonnaise container and turned it into a MARBLE JAR. Every time we do something on our list, we put a marble into our jar. (Some of these are worth 2 or 3 marbles, depending on difficulty levels, etc.) We decided, as a family, on a REWARD for when we fill our jar to the top (which will be going out to dinner at Panda Express- the kids' fave, as a family).

This plan has been working beautifully in our home. We certainly haven't been perfect, but we are striving daily. I've truly noticed a difference in our home when we are diligently doing what is most important!