-
15 Favorite Family-Friendly Flicks to Watch at Home With the Kids This Weekend
There are tons of great animated movies that we adults can love right alongside the littles, but this is a list of our family’s favorite real-life flicks when our kids were in elementary and middle school. Depending on your strict meter, most of these are for ages 8/10 and up, and they’re all rated G or PG. Even when I got a movie recommendation from a friend, I still jumped on a review site to double-check how appropriate it was for our kids. My favorite is pluggedin.com from Focus on the Family, but crosswalk.com, movieguide.org and kids-in-mind.com are also great. In alphabetical order, so no one gets their feelings hurt……
-
Family Dinner Questions w/a Side of Candlelight: Getting Your Kids and Teens to Talk
“So…? How was your day?” “Good.” “Anything fun or different?” “Nope.” If this riveting dialogue plagues your family too, take heart and read on. Spreading a sheet or blanket in the family room and turning dinner into a picnic sounds so quaint, doesn’t it? Photo by not brittany shh pls on Unsplash Mostly, yes. But if your brain skips over the cute family bonding part and goes straight to what could happen to your carpet, clothes, knees and back, it’s okay to stay at the table. Better yet, take your meal outside and enjoy the weather while you can. Even though the floor or patio can help breed…
-
How to Grow Up at a Christian Camp and Not Turn Out Weird
If you’ve ever experienced ropes courses, zip lines, campfires, s’mores, row boats and field games, you’ve probably been to summer camp. Throw in massive redwood trees, homemade donuts, train day and a pancake breakfast, and you’ve probably been to Mount Hermon. Located in the heart of the Northern California redwood forest and only seven miles from the beach, this camp I call home draws tens of thousands of campers annually. But I never arrived as a camper; I lived there. As in, twelve months of squirrels, trees and community. As in, everybody knows your name and you can’t get away with squat. As in, summer camp for ten weeks. Yearly. Every…
-
Easter Fail
I knew he was familiar with the Easter story, but I had never heard our seven-year-old try to re-tell it on his own. We only read the full account of Jesus’ death and resurrection once a year; I expected him to get a couple details wrong. Pride welled when he began. Then perfectionism kicked in and disappointment welled when he continued. Not disappointment in my boy—in me and my parenting skills. We use a visual aid called Resurrection Eggs and the carton contains a dozen plastic eggs, each one containing an object to help convey the meaning of Easter. For example, in the orange egg you’ll find praying hands, and the…
