The Best Things in Life are Free

If you think back to your childhood and all the great memories you have, don't most of them involve some kind of messy creation? Much of my childhood was spent make-believing or creating something out of whatever we could find. And none of this cost a dime. Back then, there just wasn't money to buy "stuff." So we used whatever we could find. I remember making cardboard box houses with rooms and furniture for our Fisher Price people to live in. Jenny and I would spend hours playing with that behind the rocking chair in the family room.

Just today, I found Sadie outside in the back yard (yeah for 60 degrees!) making a birds nest out of mud and grass with her friend. (Why didn't I take a picture? Shoot!) I almost reprimended her for getting her good clothes all muddy, then I had a little flash-back of making mud pies in our front yard in Durango when I was her age. Those were the good times! My sister-in-law just posted something on her blog about her kids creating little animal homes on the bank of a river while they were out on a walk. How cute is that? It's not very often that I see my kids happily playing, doing something that's free and doesn't involve electricity or batteries. So when it does happen, I try to soak it in as much as possible!
Last Monday, Jeremy called from work and said, "Let's do something different for family night, at home and free. Hmmm...that's a toughy. We're doing good most weeks to just pull out the friend magazine and read a story. I'm not very good at getting creative with the kids because #1 it takes time to plan and #2 it usually makes a mess that has to be cleaned up...and who has time, right? Anyway, I told him to think of something. So after dinner, he had the kids go around the house and gather all the blankets they could find. I don't think they missed a single one. They went down to the basement and created the fort of all forts! It took them a good half-hour to build it. The height was achieved by using a silk fica tree in the middle and tacking a blanket to the top. Some safety pins, the chairs in the basement and some weights did the rest of the job.

We had our lesson inside the fort. A neighbor had just told me about an incredible talk that President Eyring had just given at the Young Women's broadcast a few weeks ago about looking to the light. That popped into my head as being the perfect subject for our discussion. So I ran upstairs, found it on the internet and printed it off. It was awesome! He talked about the difference between light and darkness, and how to recognize things that bring you closer, or further away from the light. I don't know how much the younger kids appreciated it, but it was just what I needed that day. The kids slept in the fort the next two nights.