3 a.m. insight

It happened again! I woke up at 3 a.m. with a HORRIBLE dream about my Grant (age 8). The dream itself didn't do more than make me frantic with anquish (he was being mocked by some older kids I didn't know and was hugely distressed, and the words I woke up with were spoken to the older kids: "your words nearly killed a boy today.") but I could NOT get back to sleep because I started thinking about some goals I made yesterday that I want to start working on. So here I am at 4:02 a.m., writing them down. You all knowing will maybe keep me on the straight and narrow till they're accomplished. About 3 years ago I went to a Relief Society thing where a couple spoke on how to strengthen marriage and family. It was amazing. I took precise notes, which are wonderful in themselves, still, after 3 years! But the thing that I loved was that this woman had made a Family Banner. She had appliqued the outline of a temple, with trees surrounding it, and around that was a kind of sunrise/rainbow thing with words on each of three layers. I changed it a little, but it was something like, "Love/Work/Achieve." To the left of that were several patches (blank ones you can get at the scout office) on which she had drawn (colored? painted?) something that represented each member of her family. At the time I thought I could, for example, draw a lego brick to represent Daniel...stuff like that. Then, across the bottom, was the family name, in fancy writing. BLACK. I am going to make one. I have no idea how to do it, quite, but I've had the materials for doing it for 3 years. Isn't that pathetic. For those of you who watched the Relief Society broadcast, do you remember Elder Uchtdorf saying, "create something that never before existed" or something like that? It really hit me, and then while I was trying to pull together a Family Home Evening lesson, that idea sprang into my mind. The lesson was on baptism, because Grant's getting baptized on Oct. 11. The attention-getter at the beginning was this: everyone's first names and everyone's last names were supposed to be cut out separately and scattered around the room. Everyone was supposed to look for their names. Then we talk about how we all have our own first name, but the last name belongs to everyone. What we do, good or bad, affects our whole family's NAME. What do we stand for? Integrity, kindness, belief in the Gospel, hard work, etc. Great start for a lesson! Except we have 2 names, Reeder/Black. That has always been a bit of a stumbling block for family unity. So I switched the idea around a bit. I put everyone's own name out, and EVERYONE got a "Black" name. We talked about how when Rob and I got married, sealed in the temple for eternity, we all became part of the BLACK FAMILY, regardless of what our last names were. Every time one of our kids is spoken of by anyone who knows us, they are referred to as, "Rob and Amy Black's son (or daughter)." Then we talked about this banner idea, and everyone came up with something to put on their patch. THEN we talked about how when we are baptized, we take Christ's name upon us. What are we doing with it? What covenants do we make? Are we honoring His name? I think it went quite well, and everyone was excited about the idea of a family banner. Wish me luck. I hope I can do it! I thought it would be really cool to bring out our FAMILY BANNER every time we have FHE, go camping, to the family reunion (anyone else want to make one??), etc. to build family unity. My kids get along remarkably well, but there's always room for improvement. Long post. I'll write more another time. Love, Amy