Moran Family Fun

Earlier this week in seminary we played a little Thanksgiving themed scripture mastery game. It was a turkey shoot! I try to devote at least part of one class period a week to working on scripture mastery because I think it's important. Of course, I want my students to learn from the Old Testament as we study this year and to really feel how much the stories and events of the Old Testament testify of Jesus Christ.  In addition to learning that truth, I think there's something special about having those twenty-five scriptures from each year ingrained in their minds and hearts. In the October 2011 General Conference Elder Richard G. Scott said, "Scriptures are like packets of light that illuminate our minds and give place to guidance and inspiration from on high . . . Learning, pondering, searching, and memorizing scriptures is like filling a filing cabinet with friends, values, and truths that can be called upon anytime, anywhere in the world."  My hope is that long a...

Emily wasn't sure she wanted a birthday party for her sixteenth birthday but we eventually wore her down and convinced her that a party would be fun. We were only successful in our persuasions because of Bethany, Emily's friend who has a birthday right around Emily's and is also turning sixteen. Bethany wanted a party and thought it would be fun to do a big joint party since they share a bunch friends and their guest lists would be almost identical. The party planning kicked in to high gear when Bethany came to stay at our house for the Halloween weekend. She and Emily turned to Pinterest for ideas and come up with a plan and a list of things I would need to buy to make it happen. They decided on a bonfire birthday party so we started handing out invitations and bought lanterns to hang in the trees, glow sticks, everything for s'mores and hot chocolate, and a giant cake.  Bethany and her parents took on the big task of setting up their backyard for the party...

I'm really trying to get caught on the November plan of a picture and post every day. At this point I'm about a week behind and there's not a picture for every day that I've missed, but we did have some fun goings on that I want to make sure we document.  Last Friday night was our ward's youth temple trip but it was also Emily's sweet sixteen party. When we picked the date for her party we'd purposefully chosen a date that wouldn't conflict with any church events. The invitations were sent and the RSVPs were rolling in when the date for the temple trip was switched (just a week before I should add) to the exact time of Emily's party.  Poor Emily had a difficult decision to make - temple or party? We're proud of her for making a good choice and changing the date of her party so she could be at the temple with the other youth in our ward and so they didn't have to choose between going to the temple and going to her party. In the end we wer...

Everyone has at least two different versions of themselves that they present to the world. For example, at home I'm a little more relaxed and definitely a more authentic version of me than I am at church, my kids' schools, or at work. The less secure I feel in a given situation, the more I worry about what people think of me and I spend more time considering what impression my words and actions might make. At home or with close friends, I don't think about that at all because I feel loved and supported so I'm comfortable letting my imperfections and idiosyncrasies show.  Some might see this as hypocritical, but I don't think behaving and presenting yourself differently in differing surroundings is a problem as long as you're still the same person at heart. Work Jared, getting it done in his tuxedo shirt! Late the other night I was with Jared at his office waiting on him to finish up responding to some emails and I was struck by the difference betwe...

At the beginning of the school year Samantha auditioned and was selected for our county's Elementary School Honors Chorus.  At the beginning of October she started practicing with the other kids from her school, then in mid-October she joined kids from the three other schools closest to ours, and finally in November they began practicing with all of the children that had been selected from our county. This week was their big performance! Samantha had so much fun learning and performing these songs. I'm not sure that we really knew how much she enjoyed singing until she had this experience so we're really grateful that she had the chance to sing with the St. Mary's County Elementary Honors Chorus. The performance was brief, just five songs, but it was good. The guest conductor, a music teacher in a different school district, did a great job with the kids and it was easy to see that the kids had caught her enthusiasm for music. It's hard to tell from this pictur...

We're making a post-Halloween pre-holidays healthy lifestyle push around here. Anything to end the year right and try to at least maintain over this next six weeks. We've got three birthdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas to get through still in 2015 and we want to start 2016 off having already established some healthy habits. Abigail has become Natalie and Samantha's personal fitness coach. Not really, but she's helping them both work on a Faith in God goal for one of her Personal Progress value projects. Abigail has a great love for both her sister and for being active so this has been a perfect project for her to share with them. Every day after school this week they've been outside running, playing soccer, hula hooping, jumping rope, or riding bikes. Even on Thursday when it was raining buckets, I came home to find them outside exercising. I'm not sure what they're going to do next week when it's supposed to finally start to feel a little more wint...

I'm running a few days behind on the whole picture a day thing, but that typically happens to me mid-November. Like many new habits, I start strong and then lose my motivation and need to refocus. Here's our picture from Sunday - Madison and Emily at a scenic view off of the interstate somewhere in Virginia.  Beautiful scenery and beautiful girls The route we took to get to Southern Virginia University was definitely the scenic one. For the majority of the drive we were on back roads; we only jumped on the interstate for the last little bit of the trip. We drove over and along rivers, through forests and small towns, by horse farms with their endless white fences, and past lovely spots like this one with amazing views of sprawling valleys. The beautiful surroundings of Virginia's Blue Ridge Parkway made for the ultimate Sunday afternoon drive.

This weekend we ventured out for another college visit for Madison and headed about four hours away to Southern Virginia University. SVU is a private liberal arts university where 92% of the students are LDS. Their current enrollment sits at 777 students so there are less students at this university than at the girl's high school. It's also the only predominately LDS college on the east coast and even though it isn't high on Madison's list of places to attend, we figured it was at least worth checking out. I don't think Madison will end up becoming a Southern Virginia Knight, but I still think it was good for her to visit and get a feel for what this school is like. Seeing what won't work for her is making it easier for her to decide what will.  As usual, Emily came along for the visit. Maybe if she does enough of these visit with Madison we might be able to skip this step when it's her turn to decide where to go for school? We woke up super early in th...

Somebody sweet had a birthday! According to Emily, November is the best month of the year because the first half of the month everyone has Halloween candy, then it's her BIRTHDAY, and finally Thanksgiving a holiday about food and gratitude.  I kind of have to agree with her as I love November. December gets a little crazy and if I'm not careful the long list of things I have to do for Christmas take the joy out of the season for me. November is much more low-key and that makes everyone happy!  Back to the birthday girl and her celebration. She'll be having a big joint party with Bethany later this week, but we didn't want to let the actual day pass unnoticed. The celebration started early, with donuts in seminary. Sadly, she had to come home to an empty house after school that day. I tried to make it a little less sad by having a bunch of helium balloons waiting for her. We had a Cafe Rio dinner (hello sweet pork!) and once Jared came home from work it was time for...

It's been our annual Halloween tradition to carve pumpkins on the Monday before Halloween for Family Home Evening. Well, it's been our tradition for the last five years or so anyway. I'm not entirely sure how long you have to have been doing something for it to be considered a tradition?  Whether we call it a tradition, habit, or annual activity, it's something we all enjoy doing. This year the annual carving of the pumpkins didn't happen until Thursday night, just two days before Halloween but at least it happened! As a way to make things easier at carving time,  I prescoop all the pumpkins. It's a slimy job, but it makes life much easier when family night rolls around. This year we have five pumpkins ready to be carved into jack-o-lanterns and for the first time ever, each of the girls did their pumpkin without any real help from the adults! From designing to cutting the process was done with supervision and without any intervention. It was an entirely diffe...

Madison has received her first official college acceptance! It was a pretty exciting morning for Maddy and for our entire family. Her happy scream of "I just got into UW!!!" could be heard through the entire house. She was so loud that she actually woke up the two youngest girls who weren't up for school yet. She's been accepted to the University of Wyoming as a freshman for the fall of 2016. Of the schools we have visited and that she's applied to, UW is definitely her favorite so it really was such great news.   Honestly it's a little bit crazy to think that we have less than a year left with Madison at home. I think that when she does finally leave that it's going to be a shock for the entire family. Of course we've known it's coming and we want her to head out and start her own life so perhaps the feelings I'm having can best be described as bittersweet. We're all looking forward to seeing what the next nine months brings her w...

Two lovely Mondays in a row? It's got to be some sort of world record!  I think from now on I'm going to happily greet Mondays and say hello to each shiny new week. I knew this week was off to a good start when my big sister and her sweet kids arrived for a quick visit Sunday evening.  My girls were very excited to hear that the Bishops would be coming for an overnight stay. Her four kids are fun to be around and line up really well in both age and personality with our girls.   Charissa and I shared a room most of my growing up years and it's safe to say she was my first best friend.   We didn't do anything special while they were here, in fact most of what we did was pretty mundane. Charissa even helped me take our trash to the dump! I was a nice mom for the day and let our kids skip school on Monday morning so they could spend more time with their cousins before they headed back to their home in western Maryland. The kids spent their time together doing what...

Last month I was lucky enough to attend Time Out for Women in Richmond, Virginia. Time Out is an weekend event that invites women to take a step back from their daily lives and make some room for themselves and their spiritual lives. It's an event filled with inspirational speakers, musicians, laughter, and sisterhood. Because of geography, I'd never attended TOFW before even though I've wanted to, they were always just too far away. So I was excited when the opportunity came up for me to attend the Richmond event this fall as a volunteer staff member. To make the weekend even better, my mother in law came with me and there was a Time Out for Girls being held simultaneously so I was able to bring Madison and Abigail along with us and we made a girls weekend out of it! Out for a late night dinner at IHOP on Friday night after the first day's events were finished.  Nothing like pancakes and waffles at 10:30 pm to finish up our day. Having a little fun at the ...

Emily has had her permit for a couple of months now and today she did something pretty exciting - she drove the entire family to church and we all survived! Not only that, but after church while Jared and Madison were in a meeting she and I worked on parking. Specifically backing into a parking space which is a required skill for the driving exam.  The only problem is that her instructor (me) doesn't really know how to consistently back into a parking space. So to prepare for teaching her I've been watching videos about parking on YouTube and even practicing this skill myself.  We headed out to the church parking lot and tried to ignore the people who were watching us as we struggled through the process. Which way do we turn the wheel? How far past the space should we go before we start trying to back in? How should I know? I'll park all the way at the end of a lot to avoid having to back in to a space. It was definitely a trial and error process. In the end we had abo...

Our Abigail is beautiful inside and out. As the oft-forgotten middle child in our family she sometimes gets the short end of the stick. In addition to being beautiful she's also a little bit of a button pusher - probably because she wants some attention - so she gets more than her fair share of us being annoyed with her and honestly, not always being very kind to her. She's definitely our family scapegoat and has been for quite some time. I don't want Abigail to feel as if her family doesn't love having her around because the thing is, Abigail is a really fantastic girl and even when she's being a little annoying she's still a sweetheart.  So I've been trying lately to remember that our cute little button pusher is nothing short of amazing and that I need to treat her as such. So when I'm tempted to be unkind, impatient, or just plain mean I remind myself of the wonder that is Abigail and try to figure out why she might be acting out.  Then it's...

My happiest days are the ones that are filled with my family. The days when we are all running in different directions leave me tired and a little sad, but the days when we are all together and running the same direction bring me so much joy. Last month we had an almost perfect twenty-four hours that was filled with time to be together. It started in nature and ended at the temple - two places filled with beauty. The girls had a random Friday off from school so when the got home on Thursday afternoon we packed up our gear and headed off to go camping. We like to think of ourselves as an outdoorsy family and people who like to camp, but we haven't actually gone camping as a family since 2007. Eight years people! Thanks to some prodding from Natalie, who kept mentioning that she had never been camping, we set out to remedy the situation. By the time we actually arrived at the campground it was dark so we had to set up our tents with only the light from the headlights on the ...

In early March Jared was notified that he was one of the 1,257 airmen selected for promotion to Senior Master Sergeant. It was definitely exciting news for Jared and for our family, but it wasn't until the very last day of September that he officially became a Senior Master Sergeant. Until that point he was just a Senior Select which means that he had the work and responsibilities of a Senior Master Sergeant but the rank and pay of a Master Sergeant.  At the end of each month the base puts on a big promotion ceremony for everyone who is eligible to be promoted in the coming month. It's actually a pretty fun event. There are people in the audience representing each group on the base (think firemen, medical personnel, etc) and each group has their own special cheer that they do when one of their own is presented for promotion. It's loud, it's crazy, and there's nothing else quite like it. Our girls weren't there when Jared was promoted to Master Sergeant and ...

"Autumn, the season that teaches us that change can be beautiful." --Heather A. Stillufsen Every autumn I find myself almost anxiously looking forward to the changing of the leaves and once it finally begins I once again fall in love with autumn.  It's a little dangerous for me to be driving around because I'm so entranced by the beauty of the world in autumn that I sometimes forget to keep my eyes on the road. This morning as I was cleaning in the kitchen I looked up and was struck by the beauty of the sunlight shining through the trees. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the things I need to do, like the breakfast dishes, that I fail to look up and see the beauty all around me.   It's a great reminder that I need to stop and smell the roses - or enjoy the fall colors!  Natalie was home with me today and she was kind enough to grab the camera and capture this moment forever.   Natalie was home because she has a cough that has been lingering for a...

Jared and I have an informal competition going to see who has been to the most states in the United States. I think  we're tied or pretty close to tied, but it's always fun to add another state the list of places I've been. At the end of September we met the Kennedy family (minus Johannah) in their favorite state, Michigan. We were excited to go to Michigan for a few reasons - we could hang with our friends, there was a Michigan vs BYU game to attend, and we could both add another state to our lists. It was a whirlwind trip but we managed to visit three Ann Arbor institutions in one weekend - who knew there were so many cool places in one town! We arrived Friday evening just in time to see Mark's concert at the Hill Auditorium. It was a beautiful space,  there was beautiful music, just the perfect start to the evening. The music was all from Czech composers and was glorious. Even though we were sitting in the balcony it was easy to spot Mark on stage because he is ...