We Did IT!!

Besides the not so simple miracle of our family reading the whole Book of Mormon, I was finally able to upload a picture to my blog!! Double hooray!!!

Wish I knew when we started this quest (of reading the whole Book of Mormon), but I cannot remember. It has to be at least a year, since we would read a chapter, forfeit a night due to unruly boys, read half a chapter since it was a long one, or just not get to it for one reason or another.

Let me tell you, according to what Michael and I have been hearing from our leaders during Conference, our family is right on, picture perfect as to what is supposed to take place during Family Home Evenings, prayer time, Scripture reading etc...We are right on the money! Meaning, we have siblings who won't leave each other alone accusing the other of "he won't stop breathing my air" type of stuff... Also included in these spiritual feasts is the occasional melt down of the parents....

We wondered many a times why we were doing this since the kids apparently hated it so much, but they would not let us turn out the light til we read the scriptures. At least the habit was formed, they just couldn't sit through it. We tried not to read for long, or we would talk about what we read. We even made good on our Living Scriptures investment and if we read a story the night before that we had the movie of, we watched it soon after reading that chapter. I think that really helped reinforce what we read, and brought the scriptures to life for the kids. Cause I knew some nights they weren't really paying attention, so the movies helped!! Glad we have them!

So for the final chapter we waited until everyone was home for it, since we would read whether or not everyone was home at night, just to keep up the habit. The missionaries came over and taught our family a lesson on faith and read verses from Moroni 10. Perfect! Really brought the Spirit and plus helped us teach our family the importance of faith. After they left, we read the last chapter. Talked about the gifts we have, what is Charity, and we shared our testimonies of the Book of Mormon and how we obtained that testimony. It was a great accomplishment for our family and for a moment I felt the Spirit confirming to me what we are doing is good and acceptable.

I remember a year ago or so I thought, "We really need to read the Book of Mormon as a family, especially for Damien, since who knows when he will ever read it, at least he will have done it once with our family." So we started out on our quest. This year has been full of ups and downs. Damien was barely there for the readings towards the end, missed every other week when he was at his Dad's. But we kept going. The last night I brought out the scriptures, and he did not leave, like he has been doing. Sometimes we would read loud enough so he would hear us in the other room (which we know he can) just so he could hear what was being read, even if he wasn't in the room with us.

We got a new book called "The Book of Mormon for Latter-Day Saint Families" which has pictures and explanations that we are going to use our next go around to really bring it home for our family. Like Jesse says, "I have a computer in my head, it helps me remember things." Well we are going to try to fill that computer up with good things.

I must explain our above picture. For this adventure, I went online to find a way to track our progress (kids like that kind of stuff, right) so I found one and the kids really liked to color in what we just read. As you can tell, it has been around for a while. Dad changed the I to We.

We've grown a lot as a family. The challenges were there, and will still be there. We must not let Satan bring us down, so we will press forward and do what is asked of us, despite our imperfections.