Family Night at Culver's

Perhaps I've mentioned Culver's in the past.  Frozen custard.  Concretes.  Oh, and I think they have hamburgers and fish, but I never bother with that kind of thing.

Last night they sponsored a "decorate your own ornament" event in the restaurant.  In addition to the ornament, the children also received a token to trade for a scoop of frozen custard.

My girls really loved all the glitter and glue they had for the kids to use.  I'm scared of the stuff myself (glitter, that is), so I'm always glad when they can use it to their hearts' content somewhere ELSE!

We also ran into a couple of families we knew.  That's always fun.

This week's Family Home Evening

Monday was my turn to be in charge of Family Home Evening.  For some reason three pillows had been placed on the floor, each with a large-size hymn book on it, and that gave me the idea to have a musical Family Home Evening.

We started off with each person looking up a scripture extolling the virtues of music and song.  We found scriptures in both the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

Then each person told what his or her favorite hymn or children's song was, I played it on the piano, and we all sang each one.  Most of the family also told why it was his or her favorite.

That's it.  It was a good Family Home Evening and was followed by chocolate pudding cake.  Perfect.

FHE treats

I had a Family Home Evening lesson activity in mind when Bill said, "It's Fall now, how about we let the girls swim tonight since we don't know how much longer it will be warm enough?"  What could I say to that?  So two of the girls went swimming while a third finished her homework.

I baked the cookies.

Yesterday I asked one of my Facebook friends to bring me some of her fresh pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, but she refused.  She lives in Tennessee and I don't know why she wouldn't just hop on over with a steaming plate of them. ;-)  Oh, that's about 2,000 miles from here.

I figured I'd have better luck making my own, so I made the dough from this recipe last night and put it in the fridge for today.  All it took tonight was a little scooping and baking and--oh my!--the house smells like a wonderful spicy Fall evening!

Family Home Evening and judging others

We started off with hymn 220, Lord, I Would Follow Thee, and sang about loving others despite their unseen problems (see the words to the song!).

Then we watched the video above.  It's cute, but tells a serious story.

 

Next we talked about some of the children our girls know at school whose behavior is difficult.  Then we talked about why they might have that kind of behavior.  We talked about obvious disabilities and hidden disabilities.

 

Last, we ate vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting and drank glasses of cold milk.

Lemonade Cheesecake

Did you see my recipe link on the weekly menu post?  I made lemonade cheesecake pie this morning and it was almost perfect.  The "almost" is that one of the recipe reviewers suggested doubling the lemonade powder and I wish I hadn't.  It was nearly too sour, although the flavor was good.

The "perfect" part was that the filling was smoooooooth and that's hard to do with the fat free cream cheese called for in the recipe.  You couldn't tell it wasn't the full-fat version.  Chalk that up to a hot kitchen and really leaving it until it was room temperature.

I intended to suck it up and buy a premade graham cracker pie crust, but when I got to the store and saw even the cheap ones were $2.50, I just couldn't.  Instead I bought a box of the cheapest graham crackers they had, ran about a quarter of the package through my salad shooter, mixed in a little sugar and melted butter, pressed it into a pan, and baked it in my little toaster oven for 10 minutes, then froze it.  It took about 8 minutes of prep plus the baking and cooling time and cost about 50 cents and I didn't waste an aluminum pan or plastic lid that would have come with the store-bought one.

Here is what was left after everyone had a slice after Family Home Evening.  Delicious!