Mission Prep This Week

When you get on the missionary portal (which you have to do a lot), it has a automatic count down of how many days until you enter the MTC.  Today we have 176 days until our assignment begins.  It seems like a lot of days (and a long time to wait) but then will I think about all of the things that we need to do before then--I am grateful for every one of them.  It has been nice in some ways that we are in the "Stay safe-Stay home" pandemic situation because many of the activities and community events that we are involved in are not open currently.  Our life is more centered at home than at any other time in our lives.  It MAY give us enough time to get most of the things on our list done.  We will see.

One problem with working on our list is that we are older than we used to be (profound, I know. :) )
Doing tasks in our yard like filling our holes left by some tree removals leaves us feeling more tired than five years ago.  However, we are grateful that we can still do those things.  Gary continues to be amazing as he works in our basement in our repair and update project in our basement.

While Gary has been engaged in family history research for the last five years, I have been drawn to the importance of sharing family stories.  I think I mentioned that I started a private Facebook group for my grandchildren called "Sweet Dreams, Little Ones" where I share once a week a story from our family history.  I share little things like about flying kites or bigger things like my memories of my grandfather who died when I was four.  I write the stories and then also tell them by using Facebook live.  My hope is that as they get bigger and learn to write, that they could post questions that I could answer as well. Yearly, I will print them out in a book. This all stemmed from an idea that my sister had (she has started a blog called "Grandma Tells a Story."

As we have started this process, we realized that these stories are part of the life history of our nieces and nephews as well.  As a result, we have decided to 'reactivate' a blog for our extended family and include the relevant stories there for our whole family to enjoy.  All of these types of activities are part of the spirit of Elijah and the "turning the hearts of the children to the fathers and the fathers to their children." 

What are you doing to share your family stories with your family now and in the future?