Strong of the Day

Today is Sunday, the day we celebrate the Strong of the Day. Here’s what it all entails…If you’re Strong of the Day (SOTD) you get to choose what’s for dinner, and as we eat, we all go around the table and say what we like about the SOTD – you even get to say what you like about yourself – a nice bit of confidence building. After dinner, we all gather to have a family meeting. This is when my wife and I get to bring up things we want to talk about as a family, such as chores, values, the up-coming week’s events, concerns, questions, etc. - and the kids get their turn as well. Then the SOTD brings in the SOTD Bag – a special bag we use for our version of Show and Tell. The SOTD gets to pack three things and then gives clues about them – color, something I play with, hard or soft, etc. We all try and guess what they are, and whoever guesses correctly, gets to hold that item until the end of the game. Once all the items are out, the SOTD gets to pick one of them to pass around and tell why it’s so meaningful to them. Then, we have another special golden bag that we present to the SOTD. Inside they’ll find a gift or two – 99.9% of the time it’s books – we’re a family of readers! Then the SOTD gets to pick an activity - either a family game, or to watch what we call, “The Maddie, Jillian & Bennett Show,” which means I randomly reach into a basket of our family video tapes, throw it on, and we all proceed to revel in the family memories. These sometimes leave me in tears as I have to face how fast my kids are growing up, but usually I find myself in tears because I’m laughing so hard.

We’re proud of the Strong of the Day tradition and hope it’s something our kids pass on to their own some day.

This isn’t part of SOTD, but it’s along those lines so I’ll include it here; We keep a small notebook in the kitchen, and whenever one of the kids does something noteworthy, we write it down. It can be anything from first words, to great accomplishments at school or on the soccer field, but it’s usually when one of the kids says something funny, e.g., after burping the other night, Bennett said, “ ‘Scuse me. I farted in my teeth.” We could barely get that one down because we were rolling with laughter! And I shouldn’t say we do it every time, but we’ve done pretty well. It’s gotten to the point to when one of us says something funny, someone else always blurts out, “You have to write that down!” Best part – occasionally flipping it open and reading some of the entries. The old cliché is true, you forget so easily, and without doing this so many things would have been lost.

These are both great ways that we celebrate our family, make new memories and look back on the old ones.