The day Nate asked me to please not clean anything!

(A family home evening lesson.)

Before he left for work, Nate asked me to not clean a single thing in the house today.  Oooo-kay?  So instead I made some Bisquick and worked on fun things, like furniture!  But I did wonder why he made that request but luckily he had a plan for FHE and wanted the house to be ready for it.

This is how it looked.  Dun. Dun. Dun!

When we were all home, after supper, we started our Family Home Evening lesson with a song and a prayer.

Dad helping Mr. Max keep time and learn to lead music.

We started out talking temples.  He asked the kids what they think of when they think of temples.  We got great answers like: eternal families, peaceful, etc.  And some crazy ones, which of course at the moment I can't remember. 

Then Nate and I talked about how temples are peaceful partially because they are clean and neat and everything has a place. 
We took a tour of our own home, quietly, no-one was to speak as we went to each and every room.  Then we ended back in the living room again. 

(All the pictures are blurry because everyone was moving fast to get done in a short amount of time.)

Nate asked the kids how did our house look?  Dirty, messy, cluttered.  Was it peaceful?  Hmmm, not really. 

So, we made a goal to, together, clean it for five minutes each night.  For the first many days, we took about five minutes in each room.  Now, as I'm writing this (the 9th of April) we've been doing this every night since March 30th - tonight was the first night that took us just five minutes!  It was a great accomplishment.  Each of our bedrooms still need some work because we have all those little nooks and crannies to stuff things, but it was one of the best lessons ever!  It wasn't done in a way to make anyone feel bad, it was fun to work as a family, and it was rewarding to not have as much constant cleaning to do.