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10 Outdoor Activity Ideas for Families
While community playgrounds and backyard sliding boards offer hours of entertainment for our children, greater adventure awaits those who are willing to lace up their trail shoes and head to the woods. Today, we’ll explore 10 creative and inexpensive outdoor activity ideas for families. A local community park, nature conservancy, or State Park can be a great resource for instilling an appreciation for the natural world in our children. Teaching kids to connect with wildlife develops a passion that can extend into adulthood. Creative Outdoor Activity Ideas for Families Here are ten creative outdoor activity ideas for families to help your kids enjoy nature: 1. Wildflower Identification Many people are…
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6 Creative Ideas for Showing Hospitality This Spring
As the daylight gradually begins to linger later into the evenings and the late-winter blizzards become less frequent, spring is a wonderful time of year to open your heart and home to others and embrace opportunities for showing hospitality. Ideas for Showing Hospitality: Here are six ideas for opening your heart and home to others this spring. Above all else, remember that you do not need to pursue perfection to create spaces where others know they belong. Simply show up and love those around you, and you will be a blessing. 1. Embrace Maple Syrup Season Yes, maple syrup actually has its own season, and it might not be what…
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8 Powerful Scriptures to Pray Over Your Children
Do you want to be more conistent and focused as you pray over your kids? Today, we’ll explore eight powerful Scriptures to pray over your children. First, I invite you to join our family in the forest on the day I decided to be more intentional about praying for our kids. 8 Powerful Scriptures to Pray Over Your Children It’s a quiet Saturday morning on the cusp of spring when I sense that we need a change of pace. The oldest is glued to the laptop, and the youngest is watching his second movie of the day. I need to think of a better option before too much screen time…
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7 Ways to Show Hospitality This Winter
Backyard bonfire days and barefoot swimming parties are a distant memory as we prepare for the long winter months ahead in these parts. Nevertheless, I am reminded that the call to open my heart and home to others has not changed. There are plenty of ways to show hospitality, even in the coldest winter months. While it’s refreshing to invite the neighbors to the backyard for a picnic, it sometimes feels overwhelming to open the doors of our inside worlds and welcome the noise and the mess. If you’re longing for socialization but not sure you want to open wide your front door, remember that hospitality can happen anywhere. 7…
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6 Creative Ideas to Help You Show Hospitality This Fall
It’s a clear evening overlooking Granite Creek. The sun has slipped behind the canyon walls, and alpenglow paints the West Ridge salmon. I’m not thinking about how to show hospitality this evening – not in the least. The year is 2001, and I’ve just entered the identity-searching decade of my twenties. This will be the decade when I stumble blindly in the relentless search for the woman I want to become. I’ll begin my teaching career in the public high school. I have no way of knowing these things now, of course. For now, I’m content with my three-month job of washing dishes in the lodge where the teachers come…
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6 Meaningful Christmas Traditions That Put Others First
In a season saturated with commercialism and consumerism, it’s easy to lose the meaning of Christmas. Meanwhile, some of the most meaningful Christmas traditions are the ones that put others first. Meaningful Christmas Traditions One way to add a layer of richness to the Christmas season is by implementing meaningful Christmas traditions that focus on making a difference in the lives of others. This list of ideas offers practical ways to involve everyone in the family in making someone else’s holiday brighter. 1. Color a smile for a soldier. Holiday seasons tend to be bleak for those who are away from loved ones. Show a member of our military just…
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5 Family Traditions for a Christ-Centered Christmas
The world is aglow in colorful lights as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Light of the World. Sadly, it’s easy to become so engrossed in the hustle and bustle of the season that we forget why we are celebrating. Perhaps you’d like to help your family celebrate a more Christ-centered Christmas this year. Let’s look at five family traditions that can help us keep Christ at the center of our Christmas celebrations this year. 5 Family Traditions for a Christ-Centered Christmas If we want to be more attuned to the wonder of the incarnation, we begin by slowing down. We stand in awe that the God of…
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How to Choose a New Thanksgiving Tradition for Your Family
November is here with the grey branches of maple trees reaching heavenward and once-vibrant fields of wildflowers wielding frost-burned tufts in unison. We pull the Thanksgiving decorations from the basement shelves and start thinking about instituting a new and meaningful Thanksgiving tradition for our family. It seems appropriate that this month of transition is also culturally known as the month for giving thanks. We are often most desperately in need of reminders to practice gratitude when the tides are shifting in our lives. November has always felt like a changing of the tides for me. November is the time when the kids bound from the bus wearing feathers in their…
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5 Ways to Celebrate Autumn Without the Spookiness
It’s a pristine October day that feels more like early September than mid-autumn with all its color and brilliance and the scent of freshly fallen leaves blanketing the earth. We go to the woods in search of fall decorations to help us celebrate autumn and come home with plastic bags overflowing with sticky pine cones, acorns, leaves, ferns, and rocks. The pine cones find new homes in baskets throughout the house, the leaves are scattered across the dining room table while crayons make leaf imprints on construction paper, and the acorns and stones find their way to vases. We have been on a quest to celebrate autumn without embracing spookiness,…
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How to Make a Child Feel Loved: 25 Ways
Author Toni Morrison once asked the question, “When your child walks in the room, does your face light up?” I was not yet a parent when I first considered this question, but it stuck with me. And perhaps, when it comes to learning how to make a child feel loved, this is the greatest truth of all: Let your face speak what’s in your heart. How to Make a Child Feel Loved: 25 Ways What do our kids see when our eyes meet? I think of these words in the early hours of dawn, when fuzzy heads stumble from their rooms and greet me. I consider these words when I’m tired…
