Above The Line

A few weeks ago in a Sunday School zoom breakout session, a ward member shared that his wife's parent's family had this thing on their fridge called "Above the Line" and how you want to keep your feelings and emotions above the line. I finally got around to texting him today to see if they have a picture of it that they could text to me. But in the mean time, I googled around and made my own version (bottom left) and also found this cool behavioral thing that I liked (bottom right) and so I put them on our fridge. 

Above the line are the Christ-like and Godly characteristics and attributes that we all want to develop. I put them on the fridge in hopes of helping ease the sibling rivalry and pecking order around here. But then it turned out helping me this past week (pms) when I was being very critical of myself and blaming myself for things. I want to learn to get my thinking right (belief box) and I want to stay above the line. So this is a good visual for us. I'm hoping to learn more of how to put it into practice. As Pres Nelson imagined us saying in Oct 2019 "This sounds wonderful, but how do I do it?" Hopefully I can learn a little bit of the how soon.

Today I dropped off Hyrum at frontrunner. He's almost all grown up *sniff* and off and doing independent stuff!  

He stayed home from school today to pack and then caught the 2:30 train to Provo where he was meeting up with Joseph and other Moxie fellas and they were going to Southern Utah for a pre-selling season retreat. They also had a retreat at Bear Lake and went skiing a few months ago - all paid for by Moxie (hmmm, something tells me that we might are overpaying for our pest control...) But the Elm Seed bugs seem to be gone, and Joseph and Hyrum are set up with a promising summer of selling, so I guess it was good that we signed up so that Joseph could network with Daniel. He was a nice guy. 

Natalie has a few playdates set up this week (I usually always feel a little weird texting and asking for my kids to play... the concept of playdates is a bit weird to me as an 80s kid) - Her friend Emma came over today - They got all make-up'd and dressed up for a tea party.

Tomorrow a friend August is coming over, and then on Saturday she has a birthday party. With all the fun Natalie has been having, she has been avoiding practicing her violin, so these will be her last playdates for a while. It's Thursday and she has not practiced yet. Corey started paying Abi $1 for every 30 minutes of practice, and is also giving her $5 if her teacher is amazed and gives her an A+ for her lesson grade. Sophi and Natalie are practicing for cash now too, and Sophia is very motivated and she's doing great, getting all A's from her teacher and from me for her practice sessions. Natalie doesn't care about money, so we're also going to start to impose a $1 if you don't practice at all fine for the girls. With that and a threat of no playdates, I think that it should help Natalie have a better practice week next week. Last night she and her brothers were doing the sundown runaround - running everywhere. 

Then they changed their attire to dark clothing and started playing spies. Natalie made a computer lap top out of paper, and they were making their spy mission plan. It is fun to see them be creative and play.

Yesterday was also parent teacher zoom conferences for the elementary kids over zoom. I like online conferences much better than in person. Logistically it's just a lot easier and less stressful. They are all doing well and I hope to help them do better and be prepared to know how to do homework and stay on top of life when they get to Jr. high and high school and their workloads get heavier. Also last night, Lily went outside for something and then started yelling at all of us to come out at see the moon - It was pretty cool and I think it could be a moment of awe that gets etched in their childhood memories, so this was the night that happened, Lil, that it looked so cool behind the clouds and it seemed like we could see it moving!

I remember watching lightening storms from our front room window when I was a kid and loving the sound of thunder. Also having my dad show us things with his telescope was fun. It's good  to pause and enjoy nature when we can.