Don't Judge Me, my Mother, or my Old-Fashioned Grandfather

My father had nine sisters, so the Nix side of the family is rather large. Every month, the whole family gets together for Family Home Evening--an event where one family shares a message. It's a great event and I enjoy going every month.

This month, since my parents are in town, I chose to give the lesson on not judging others. My Dad read a book that had the first part of a story on one side, but when you turned the book upside-down, it finished the story. When Dad read the book, all the children, which usually don't pay attention, were wide-eyed and the room was very quiet. It's a first for the family. The point of the book is that a person can't judge another because they don't know the whole story.

Uncle Lindsay reading a book to the children.

After the book, we had various skits done by the Nix family. The skits were fun to do, my mother was really hilarious, and everyone enjoyed seeing them. In each skit, one person unfairly judged another and the judged person gave the real reason of why they acted in a certain way--ie: a person cuts you off on the road, but it turns out they are rushing to the hospital because their mother is dying. The point of the lesson was to teach everyone that you cannot judge another because you don't know why a person is acting the way they are. We should give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

The lesson ended and I received good praise from the adults. They told me that my lessons are the only one where the children actually pay attention.

Most everyone in our family loves watching home videos from the past. When my immediate family lived in California and we used to visit Utah, someone always brought out the home video's when a large group of family members got together. We don't do that anymore, but I want to and decided to show some movies after family home evening. We watched some movies and skits that the children of the Lee family and my family used to do. Everyone burst with laughter at certain parts and everyone enjoyed it. Many people commented that we used to do this all the time and now it rarely happens. I'm going to try to make a video for every family home evening from now on. We'll see if I can stick to it.

What Heaven looks like.

Around 9pm, some family members sat in the living room and talked. I love it when this happens. We ended up taking funny pictures (which I won't post here) of ourselves. Here's a nice one I did take though.

Me, Aunt Wendy, and Russell

Sometimes...a lot of the times my mother can drive me nuts. Tonight, instead of spending time with the family, she was typing up a paper that is due in her class on Tuesday. She was typing on a laptop and she only had a floppy disk. It took about 10 minutes to explain to my mother that we had to burn what she had typed to a disk on a CD, take it to a computer with an "A" drive, and save her paper on that computer to the "A" drive. Everyone saw how frustrated I was and kept making fun of me. We ended up going to Aunt Louise and Uncle Charles' house to do this.

Tonight I said goodbye to my parents because they have an early morning flight tomorrow. I was sad to see them leave and I looked at them as it was the last time I would see them. My parents are some of the greatest people in the world and I love them alot. I hope I see them again very soon.

(Side story: We had a lunch at Grandma and Grandpa's house for anyone who wanted to come, so there were many members of the family there from 2pm--10pm. I was preparing for the FHE lesson in Grandpa's office and he walked in and sat on the sofa--I was at the desk. He asked me how things were going and said, "So, are you still staying away from the girls?"

I almost started to laugh. I smiled, told him yes, and said that girls are dangerous. He replied, "Yes, yes they are... but there are some good ones around.")