Thankful: Family Time

Growing up, Sundays were for church. I don’t really remember anything later on Sundays except that, if we had the chance, we’d go out to lunch. There was a local Mexican restaurant that we loved (it’s pretty gross now) and a family restaurant that had the best chicken fried steak. These are my memories of Sundays.

Now that Math Man and I are growing up our own flock of kids, we’re negotiating the Sunday routine.

Before Baby Diva, we got into a pretty decent routine of at least making it to the church service. We had just joined a new — and fab-u-lous — church, so we were enjoying the Sunday School fellowship and friendships we were developing.

Then, the boys got really sick. They stayed sick last year from October until what seemed like April or May. We kept ourselves home on most Sundays to protect our kids from getting even more ill considering their immune systems were down as well as to protect the innocent kids in the nursery who certainly didn’t deserve what our boys had!

This created a routine we didn’t intend: slow Sunday mornings that didn’t include attending church.

Luckily, our church offers multiple programs, so we’re able to attend in other avenues. Our VBS was awesome, and our Sunday School class had an amazingly successful chicken dinner sale. We’re blessed to be part of this church family.

But Sunday has kind of accidentally become our family time.

Baby Diva takes a morning nap, Math Man and I work on cleaning up, the older kids play.

Today, for instance, we worked on getting out the Thanksgiving decorations and putting away the Halloween decorations. The boys were excited to find the pumpkins, scarecrows, and “gooooorrrds!” We were slow and easy with breakfast. There was no hurry hurry hurry.

Sometimes, I think it’s just as important to just be as a family instead of worrying about getting out of the house to a particular location or event at a determined time. I recognize the importance of Sunday School and church and fellowship, but we are working to bring our children up knowing God’s love. They’ll get to Sunday School eventually, and we’ll get back to our own class.

But for now, we’re fellowship-ing as a family in our living room making the most of these precious early years as we can.

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