Gratitude and Giving Back…#Bad Day Good Project

Today was a great day! I was so excited to be able to teach FHE today. I had been thinking all week on how to incorporate the importance of gratitude into our family of young adults, teens, and grand baby! So I came up with an idea I found online. I made a gratitude tree out of branches from an old tree in our yard. I then broke them into smaller pieces and placed them in a vase. I then used cinnamon pinecones and placed in the bottom of the vase for a nice smell and fall look. I used burlap ribbon and tied around the neck of the vase. I then used my cricket and made leaves in fall colors. So easy and so much fun!

I then made one for our house and one for my married daughters house. I told my other children they will get their own gratitude tree once they are married and have a place of their own!

Our Gratitude tree… Each day we write something else on a leaf and place it on the tree.

I also had an idea to start for my grandkid(s) this year.. 

 I found a roll of burlap that I bought at Walmart for cheap and used it as a table runner!

 I then bought stencils and acrylic paint. 

I stenciled Grandma's Little Turkeys down the center. For the border of this table runner I am going to let my grandkids dip their hand in acrylic paint and make a turkey! I will then write their names and year by their turkey. Each year as they grow they will place a new handprint on the runner and see how big they have grown each year! I am going to help Ireland do it next FHE! I will post a picture of that next week….We will see how it goes with a one year old and acrylic paint!!! haha!

My kids found it funny that I only have one grand baby and such a huge runner! But I told them it is their responsibility to make sure I have plenty of little hands to fill it up!!! haha

Lesson on Gratitude (Never thought my family would love it like they did)

My gratitude lesson seemed to be a hit with my family and I thought I would share part of it! My goal was to not only help my family realize how important it is to be humble and grateful for all we have but also I wanted to teach them how to show their gratitude by serving others.

• Attention Activity: I passed around a roll of toilet paper and told them all to take what they need. Some took a little and some took a lot. There was a lot of kidding and joking because I did not tell them what my lesson was about. After they all had their handful of toilet paper they then had to write one thing they were grateful  for on each square of toilet paper. My hubby only took one square but some kids thought they were especially funny and took a ton! 

• We then watched this video: http://www.mormonchannel.org/give-back. This video was to really helped us appreciate just how lucky we are for everything we have and the country we live in!

• After the video we talked about the things the family in this movie were grateful for. We compared it to what we take for granted every day! I had some quotes I shared with my family. 

• "What if we woke up tomorrow with what we thanked God for today."
• "We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude."
• "In the blink of an eye, your life can change due to disease. Your goal, dreams. and priorities are force to take  different turns. You are grateful for the little things. and worry less about the big things. You leave behind the history of yesterday and determine how you will use today's energy . This is your life and there is not time for drama!"
• "I've learned….that is not what I have in my life but who I have in my life that counts."

• After our discussion on gratitude and realizing how grateful we are for everything in our lives. We then discussed different ways to show our gratitude to both our Father in Heaven as well as others in our lives.
• I wanted my family to see that by giving back to others we truly show are appreciation for everything we have. We then watched this music video. I had no idea  that this would have such an impact on my family and get them to do more than I had ever even hoped!  
• Bad Day Good by O'Shea http://youtu.be/ZkIXjI7k_hg

#Bad Day Good

After watching this video I proposed to my family that we do these types of random acts of kindness for our service in December. Little did I think that they would all get so excited about, and since we have 7 weeks till Christmas, they wanted to do our "Make A Bad Day Good" project starting next week. They all started sharing ideas of what they wanted to do. We then decided since we have 7 teens/adults that each person would take a week and pick the random acts of kindness that we would do for that week.

 Everyone was so super excited about this #Bad Day Good Project.  I was so touched by this and realized that we were missing this key component in our family lately. Since becoming sick I think the focus became on inside our home and not so much outside our home like we had down in years past. I realized just how much they love serving others and I am really excited and GRATEFUL they all wanted to be a part of this awesome project over the next two months!