Wholesome family recreation: Building strong families. (Chapter 22)

I LOVE this topic, love love love it. Hopefully I will be able to put my excitement into words so that you guys can share some of the love that I have for family activities. Family time is a time where magic happens, you are learning pretty much all of the skills of life when you are spending wholesome time with your family, you learn team work, how to work, communication, forgiveness, how to be sensitive, how to be observant and realize that there is more going on around you, and so much more. I had moments with my family and with my husbands family where I swear I caught a glimpse into what heaven is going to look like. Time with family is priceless, there may be better activities then others and better days than others but it is always worth it and there is always a lesson to be learned when spending time as a family. One of my favorite family activities was when my family went and hikes up to a hot spring ins Salmon Idaho, called Gold Bug. It was the best and we had the best of times up

there. The pictures in this post are from that day. We laughed together, got scared by some snakes together, swam together but I think the most important part of that day was talking about how beautiful gods creations are and how blessed we were to live in the world he created.

Yep, I think that family time is the best no matter what it is that you are doing together it is always a blast. The Book Successful marriages and families talks about wholesome recreational time as well, in there they share that humans beings naturally want the comfort and peace of ease and pleasure, but we can almost never satisfy that thirst. We are always looking for the next best thing, but then here is what they say in context to family activities. "activities requiring concerted effort can be considered less pleasurable than relaxing activities, and such less-pleasurable activities are not accompanied by a separable stream of positive emotion like most pleasurable activities. Rather, these activities often consist of total engagement and loss of self-­consciousness. Research suggests that feelings arising from overcoming challenges are rated as much more meaningful than pleasurable activities, such as watching television, which pale by comparison (Seligman, 2002)." Family time may make us learn a new skill or try something that we have never done before but research has showed us that we get a more satisfying feeling from overcoming those fears than we do a simply having pleasure at our finger tips. This is a lesson that I am constantly learning with my new family, they love sports I am not the biggest fan of playing sports but they get me off of my backside and encourage me to try new sports all the time, and in the end we always have a blast. So my challenge to you this time is to find a new activity one that you are not sure about something that you have wanted to try but have been to scared, then invite your family to join you and try it. Try a New family activity to give your family memories to hold forever!