I Like This Book

I can't remember if I've mentioned this book on my blog before, so I'm going to give it a post of it's own, just in case I haven't. A little over a year ago a friend in Texas introduced me to a great parenting book. It's called The Parenting Breakthrough: A Real-Life Plan to Teach Kids to Work, Save Money, and Be Truly Independent, by Merilee Browne Boyack. The whole premise of the book is a plan to help your kids, starting at age 3, to learn the skills they need to know to be able to leave home at age 18 or 19 and function successfully and independently--household chores, oil changes, money management, etc., etc. This book covers everything from chores to family responsibilities to hygiene to allowances to investing to Gospel teaching to service to family vacations to sports to music lessons and so on. It might sound pretty broad, but I think that's part of what I like about it. It gives some specific examples and suggestions, but the real value is in the principles of parenting that it presents. I may never figure out how to make the entire plan (part of my Plan with a capital P) work for my family, but there's lots of helpful, wise ideas there that I can pick and choose to apply according to our family's needs. I'm re-reading this book and I keep going back to it as a reference. If you have time to read one book before summer vacation starts, I highly recommend it.

Hot FHE Tip

In our family, we take turns giving the Family Home Evening lesson each week. Tonight was 4-year-old Jared's turn. Jared LOVES stick puppet Family Home Evening lessons. He goes straight for the binder that Aunt Tasha and family gave us for Christmas five years ago containing homemade Popsicle stick puppets and stories from The Friend magazine. Unfortunately, we've pretty much done all the stories Tasha gave us, more than once. So I got online trying to find some new ones. I've looked for them before by searching for flannelboard stories/figures on The Friend page of lds.org, but they aren't easy to find, and most of the puppets are black and white, which then have to be colored. Tonight I expanded my search a little, looked on theideadoor.com, and found Chocolate on My Cranium, a blog of a lady who has collected virtually all the flannel board stories from the Friend, colored them, and made them available for all of us to use. Now that is a service! We are set on flannelboard stories for months to come! Yay! My only complaint was that I couldn't get them to print out at a very high resolution, so they were a little fuzzy. Luckily, 4-year-olds don't care too much about resolution. But if you have any tips on how to get them to print out better, please pass them on.