All About Team Thomas Tuesdays

...or where you can find our family from 7:30-8:30 (almost) every Tuesday night

I know far more about the LDS church than your average American.

This is not due to an interest in conversion: instead, it’s from reading bloggers who happened to be LDS for as long as I’ve known blogs existed. In the beginning, this was almost unavoidable: the “mommy blogosphere” was memorably dominated by Mormon bloggers back in the mid-aughts.

This is also how I was introduced to the idea of Family Home Evening.

From my understanding, FHE is a set-aside time (usually on Monday evenings) for LDS families to spend time together reading scripture, learning about their faith, serving, playing games, and simply enjoying time together. Parents usually present the lessons, but as kids get older, they might take turns. And it seems snacks are often involved :)

I latched on to this idea long before I had kids. It hits all the high points for me:

• It’s a radical reprioritization of how the average “concerted cultivation” family spends their time and pushes back against the societal norms of busyness and family member isolation. Specifically setting aside time to be together in the weekly rhythm of our family was and is meaningful to me.

• It’s a chance to pointedly and systematically teach our kids things we want them to know, and to nurture character traits we value.

• It communicates to our kids many things about what’s important to us and our family: them, their development, the people they’re becoming, our faith, and of course, every individual topic that we choose to elevate.

• It solidifies the role of the parents as teachers and the home as a place of learning, creating a framework and building skills to help us have more complicated conversations as our kids get older.

Love, love, love, and yes, I couldn’t love it more.