The Joy Sisters

In the middle of the seventh paragraph of The Family: A Proclamation to the World , it states, " Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities."  The first principle on that list is faith. Our family put that principle into action each week as we drove over one hundred miles round trip twice a week to church for Sunday worship and Wednesday evening activities. One hour each way in good weather and in Minnesota Fall, Spring and Winter too....when church wasn't canceled. We have been doing this for nearly ten years, often in vehicles that we were having faith in to make the trip there and back! When Madison went off to college at a non-church school instead of following Miranda and Danelle to BYU, one big check in the plus column for her was that the college was in a town that had a church building within walking distance of cam

Both dad and I are converts to the church. We both had upbringings that were not always in line with the principles of The Family: A Proclamation to the World. None of your grandparents were familiar with the teaching that " Parents have a sacred duty to rear their children in love and righteousness, to provide for their physical and spiritual needs, and to teach them to love and serve one another, observe the commandments of God, and be law-abiding citizens wherever they live. ". (Family Proclamation paragraph 6) When it was our turn at parenting, a lot of the personal experiences and examples that we had were more of "what not to do". It was a blessing that we had several instruction manuals along the way, one of them being The Family: A Proclamation to the World.  Dad and I joined the church in 1990, the same year that we graduated high school and met on a blind date and we married a few months later in the summer of 1991. To say that we were in need

When my grandparents Bob and Violet became empty nesters, they realigned their division of duties. During their child rearing years my Grandma stayed at home with the kids. She did the meal planning, the grocery shopping and the family had a clean up rotation. After the kids all left home within a few years of one another, they shifted these duties. My whole life growing up I remember my Grandma Raynor doing the meal planning with my Granddad.    They would discuss what was ripe and ready to harvest in the garden and plan around that. We often had sliced beefsteak tomatoes with homemade buttermilk dressing as a side to steak or chicken.  After they planned the menu together, my Granddad would go grocery shopping once or twice a week. He did the main shopping, I only remember my Grandma going to the grocery store if she was shopping for a special ingredient at an out of the way market or there was something that my Granddad hadn't found.  Other than barbecuing (what we call g

One of the hallmarks of our Hubert Family Homeschool was reading out loud. We read a lot. We read several of the Little House series including the original Little House on the Prairie Series as well as The Charlotte Years, The Caroline Years and The Rose Years. One of the things that we took note of was how the children transitioned to adulthood, sometimes almost accidentally or overnight. One week you were a student and the next week you were a teacher.  Somewhere around the middle of the last century researchers started noticing that the qualities that normally defined adulthood were being delayed or taking longer to achieve. They coined the term "emerging adulthood" (2016, p. 3) to describe this new period of time "between adolescence and adulthood". This is a time of transition where more and more young adults are delaying big girl and big boy decisions and responsibilities.  I t doesn't have to be this way. We are still receiving counsel from

So. Here is a strange thing. Blogging had all but died over the last year or two and then we had this worldwide pandemic and everyone started blogging again.  I had already planned my big comeback (haha) before all of this hit, but life got in the way and I got a little behind. I am taking FAML 100: The Family this semester. It is an online BYU-I class that focuses on aligning family values and principles in family life and society as a whole with the document The Family- A Proclamation To The World . For my semester long project I had decided to do a series of blog posts, posted here on my existing blog for my daughters and future posterity. With two jobs, school, getting sick and a global pandemic my plans got a little sidelined. While I mostly kept up on my school work and kind of wrote blog posts in my head as I went along, I didn't do such a great job posting here as the semester went along. So now I am catching up all at once and hoping to get it all done before the final d