Noisy new year - 2020!

Make some noise - it's 2020!  Recently, one of Emma's friends was over and she asked "is it always this noisy here?"  Yes, why yes it is.  Haha, and New Years Eve was no exception. 

After cleaning up and straightening up, we went to the Zoo in the mid-day for the Zoo Year event.  We got there to count down and see the disco ball be dropped.  They had some fun crafts for the kids and some ginger ale. There were lots of people, but shortly after that almost everyone left and we had the place to ourselves!  It was pretty nice!  Besides a little wind, we got to see all of the animals, it was pretty warm and the kids had fun.  We ate lunch at Wendys, laughed hard at lunch, ran a few errands and went home.  We had a Chinese meal, Americanized of course, which is something we did quite a bit on new years growing up.  We had Beijing beef, orange chicken, rice, egg rolls, Chinese salad and spring rolls.  Yum!  Lucy made some coconut snowball cupcakes with her new recipe book and tools.  The kids made up some little dances and songs for the new year.  We played some games like Tenzi and some of the other games we got for Christmas.  We watched some of the New Years Eve events on TV.  Then we rang in the new year at 10 with party poppers and blowers and then put the younger kids to bed and the rest of us stayed up and enjoyed chilling until midnight.  

With the new year, we are excited to start on some new goals, especially our new children and youth program.  I put together an area by our calendar where we can keep track of our goals and have them visually as a reminder of what we are working on. The new program is based on Luke 2:52 "And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man."  We have 4 areas we make goals in - intellectual, physical, spiritual and social.  It will be great to do these things together as a family and individually and a great way to get our goals into gear! 

We are also jazzed to study the Book of Mormon together.  I was thinking of ideas to bring the Book of Mormon to life for our kids.  I got the inspiration to make cards with different ideas of things to do each day to bring our scripture study alive. I am going to put it in a Book of Mormon bag. I will also put paper, drawing utensils, playdough, sticky notes, etc. Every day we will pick a different way to learn out of the bag: sing a related song, pull out one word that stood out to you, draw a picture of your favorite character/setting/scene, memorize a favorite line, ask a question and answer, take a minute to ponder together after reading, act out the scene, role play a modern similar situation, write a goal based on what we learned on a sticky note and work on it this week, shape something out of playdough these verses remind you of, mark your favorite verse, play charades with key words and happenings, etc. We put these in a little Book of Mormon bag I put together.  I am thankful for the Spirit which gave me this idea as I was pondering over what to do to help my children learn to love the BofM as much as I do!  We had our kick off lesson and put the Book of Mormon in a treasure box and I talked about how much of a treasure it is for me, sang some sons, then we played Book of Mormon bingo and had some brookies with little BofM characters cupcake picks in them.  

It is wonderful to welcome another noisy year with this crew.  It is good noise.  2020, I see you!